On Tuesday (September 11th, 2018) the government announced that the space for immigrant kids traveling without an adult guardian at the immigration detention camp in Tornillo will be tripled to house up to as many as 3,800 immigrant minors.
The increase marks a 20% rise in the number of beds for immigrant minors, which currently stands at 12,800, within the network overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that includes over 100 shelters. The length of time that unaccompanied immigrant minors have to spend in the shelters has also increased to 59 days on average; almost twice as long as was the case in 2014.
The expansion of the Tornillo facility comes after much controversy over young undocumented immigrants being held in detention, as well as claims of abuse at such facilities. The detention program has been under further scrutiny as a result of the zero-tolerance policy that resulted in over 2,600 immigrant minors being separated from their parents, a policy since rescinded. HHS spokesman, Kenneth Wolfe, says that the need for expansion is not the result of the zero-tolerance policy but because of the number of newcomers to the shelter program operated by his organization’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Wolfe says that the current site is a temporary one that will last until the end of 2018. Border Patrol’s apprehensions of unaccompanied immigrant minors have been on the increase, already surpassing the total from the 2015 and 2017 fiscal years.