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Inside America's biggest facility for migrant teens
Source: The Guardian
Inside America's biggest facility for migrant teens
Managers of the Homestead camp in Florida call it a shelter, but activists have decried its ‘prison-like feel’
Richard Luscombe in Homestead, Florida
Thu 7 Mar 2019 06.00 GMT
Not even the ear-splitting scream from an F-16 fighter jet tearing low through the sky at the adjacent Homestead air reserve base is enough to distract the teenagers from their soccer game.
These are the final precious moments of outdoor recreation time before they must line up in single file and silently make their way, under escort and past uniformed security guards, back inside the giant tents in southern Florida that house their cramped classrooms.
As the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, testified in Washington on Wednesday about hardline immigration policies and a surge of migrants entering the US, these children were stuck in limbo as guests of the US government. The migrants were ages 13 to 17, from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and had made dangerous journeys from their homelands, in many cases alone, across hostile territory to reach the southern US border.
On arrival in the US, they are arrested by border protection agents and transferred to what is described as a temporary shelter on 50 acres of remote federal land in Homestead, 30 miles south-west of downtown Miami, to await reunification with relatives or sponsors already in the United States. Or, more rarely, to be sent home again if none can be found.
The presence of the camp, the largest of its kind in the US, is controversial, with activists and some politicians denouncing the 1,700-bed facility and its military-style regime for a “prison-like feel” that epitomises Donald Trump’s hardline approach to immigration policy for minors.
-snip-
Managers of the Homestead camp in Florida call it a shelter, but activists have decried its ‘prison-like feel’
Richard Luscombe in Homestead, Florida
Thu 7 Mar 2019 06.00 GMT
Not even the ear-splitting scream from an F-16 fighter jet tearing low through the sky at the adjacent Homestead air reserve base is enough to distract the teenagers from their soccer game.
These are the final precious moments of outdoor recreation time before they must line up in single file and silently make their way, under escort and past uniformed security guards, back inside the giant tents in southern Florida that house their cramped classrooms.
As the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, testified in Washington on Wednesday about hardline immigration policies and a surge of migrants entering the US, these children were stuck in limbo as guests of the US government. The migrants were ages 13 to 17, from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and had made dangerous journeys from their homelands, in many cases alone, across hostile territory to reach the southern US border.
On arrival in the US, they are arrested by border protection agents and transferred to what is described as a temporary shelter on 50 acres of remote federal land in Homestead, 30 miles south-west of downtown Miami, to await reunification with relatives or sponsors already in the United States. Or, more rarely, to be sent home again if none can be found.
The presence of the camp, the largest of its kind in the US, is controversial, with activists and some politicians denouncing the 1,700-bed facility and its military-style regime for a “prison-like feel” that epitomises Donald Trump’s hardline approach to immigration policy for minors.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/06/immigration-migrant-children-homestead-florida
1 replies
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