HOMESTEAD, Fla. — U.S. officials provided a glimpse Friday into a South Florida facility housing more than 1,000 teenage migrants, seeking to dispel any suggestions that children are being mistreated.
Private contractors who run the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children, about 25 miles southwest of Miami, showed journalists around the campus-like complex for about an hour.
Journalists were not permitted to interview the children, and no cameras or recorders of any kind were allowed inside.
The tour included dorm-style buildings where children sleep up to 12 per room in steel-framed bunk beds, and warehouse-sized, air-conditioned white tents where minors attend classes and watch movies.
Boys and girls, mostly kept separate, could be seen walking in line to the dining hall and classes, wearing government-issued cotton T-shirts and gym shorts. One group played basketball in the hot sun on a concrete court. Another group played soccer, shouting and laughing in a grass courtyard between dormitories. Others watched cartoons in the waiting area of a medical clinic. Girls walking in a line to class in pink T-shirts smiled shyly at a journalist, and said “buenos dias.”
Program director Leslie Wood said 792 males and 387 females aged 13 to 17 were being held there, with more expected in coming days. They are all classified as unaccompanied minors, including fewer than 70 who were separated from adult relatives at the border; the vast majority are from Central America and arrived in the U.S. without relatives, she said.
“We provide all of them with the services that are required and we treat them with care,” she said.
Democratic lawmakers were refused entry Tuesday to the facility, which is run by Comprehensive Health Services for the Department of Health and Human Services on the grounds of a former Job Corps center. Protesters have gathered outside, accusing the Trump administration of trying to cover up mistreatment amid an outcry over images recorded elsewhere of crying children and minors locked up in what appear to be cage-like cells.
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, visited the complex Friday afternoon. He said he did not speak to the children because of privacy regulations, and he did not describe what he saw inside.
Rubio said splitting up families at the border was “a terrible situation” but the U.S. doesn’t have the money or the capacity to hold families together when they are detained by immigration authorities.
He said Congress would need to create those kinds of facilities.
“If that’s in fact the policy that we want to pursue, then that capacity needs to be created,” Rubio said. “It’s not just housing together. It’s housing people in conditions that are safe and nurturing, and that’s what we need to do because we’re the United States of America.”
