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Washington Post: First migrant facility for children opens under Biden
- Thread starter Samiya
- Start date
As a foster-to-adopt parent, I can confirm it's not a fast process to get custody of any child even when there is a family relationship. We were there to see our son as soon as he was out of the hospital, but we did not get custody for three months and could not adopt for a year and a half.
I agree with you about what these facilities should look like but the bolded is fantasyland when we can't even get free college for our own citizenry. Unless you're advocating that immigrants get free college while the rest of the nation doesn't, which even I would oppose, and I'm very much pro-immigration.
Comments in here making me truly feel like the Overton Window has shifted significantly to the right at this point, or maybe people are just showing their faces, I don't know. The fact there is any defense, or even "well what would YOU do about it" rhetoric is both sad and disgusting. The US is one of the richest countries in the world - even if there are temporary places these kids need to live until they are reunited with their parents or helped in some way, maybe they shouldn't be in a facility that looks like fucking Gitmo?
It really is insane we are at this point and it feels so disheartening. I honestly don't know what to do to help.
It really is insane we are at this point and it feels so disheartening. I honestly don't know what to do to help.
That's an impressive reach. FYI, that's a legal aid office not housing
Yeah, that one slipped my mind. I'm not trusting of ICE/CBP either.
I'd be more angry about the "richest nation in the world" thing in this case if we spent lots of money on ourselves everywhere, but American infrastructure is just set up to give everyone the crappiest version of everything
The goalposts keep shifting. Try my post at the top of the page, or maybe just admit that this is immoral. Either one.
Your post at the top of the page looks like crappy dormitory housing. See the photo I posted on the last page of people literally sleeping on the floor behind wire fences. I'm going to say that "Crappy dormitory housing for a month while relatives are contacted" is better than "Sleeping on the floor indefinitely because ICE chucked your parents back over the border".
Yes, it should be better. All of this should be better. It has also been 35 days in the middle of a pandemic. I want to see long term changes to every part of this system, but right now "Kids now sleep on bunk beds for a few weeks" seems like a stressed system trying to figure things out.
EDIT: Seriously am I the only person who's ACTUAL college dorm room's looked like this?
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I mean, you're shifting the goalposts right now. First it was "there's gotta be a middle ground between cages and foster care", then you moved to "actually these trailers are practically cages" when they're not even where the children are housed, now you've moved to the fact that the dorms as they were in pictures under Trump are/were shitty. I mean, yeah, that absolutely needs to be improved, in the meantime you've got children without parents that you need to put somewhere while you find them a more permanent accommodation and that's certainly a better somewhere than:
Okay let's be very clear, when people got upset over "kids in cages". it was because there were hundreds of photos like this:
This is what the Trump administration was doing. Literal human cattle.
With that said, those trailers look shitty. I hope that either accomodations can be improved or, more likely, this facility will be extremely temporary
Given a bottle a water, a bag of chips and sent on their merry way. If they day out there, at least they died free.
I guess?
It is immoral, but you also cannot build a 5-star hotel in a month, especially not when the government is involved because it's a very slow process on purpose. Hell, there'd have to be committees and debate over just switching to paying for them to stay at an ACTUAL hotel.
Let's be real, I grew up middle-class white and I've stayed in places that looked like the pictures you posted up top. It's pretty typical camp-style fare in my opinion and is pretty good for a temporary stay until they can get them moved out with either family stateside or with a foster family (which the foster system is fucked as well, so that may actually be a downgrade compared to this BTW).
Bars or no bars, I think the question should be "can they leave the facility"? Because if they can't, then they are being imprisoned and if the argument is that they're being imprisoned for their own good then I think we should get on the same page about why we believe it's justified. I've seen comparisons to halfways houses and dorms, but even during lockdown people don't live in those places 24/7.
If the long term goal is to create more humane facilities I would hope that we would be hearing about what the plans are for them now since construction takes time. Especially because it's clear that we're going to be dealing with COVID for a while.
Yeah but all nuance in this discussion has been lost. I've seen foster care facilities that looked markedly worse than those photos and that's dealing with children who are actual citizens. This isn't a perfect solution - far from it - but it is also leagues better than what Trump or even Obama allowed. Given that we are in the middle of a pandemic and Biden is still in the process of cleaning up some pretty big messes, this seems like a reasonable compromise until we can get some better facilities built.
I'm kinda thinking that letting a kid without parents just go out into the world without any money, citizenship or otherwise would be a lot worse than this.
Well to be clear these kids have been detained. The government can't just release them into society (we don't do that with our own kids who don't have parents or guardians) and I'm assuming dropping them off on their side of the border without ensuring they have people to take care of them isn't an option either, nor should it be.
Are these actually pictures from this place?
I think this facility looks pretty terrible.
This isn't particularly different than hospitals and mental health facilities determining that patients can't be responsibly released on their own unless you also think those are examples of imprisonment.
Does everyone understand these children are not being separated from their parents forcefully like the Trump administration was doing?
These facilities are far from perfect, but they are for unaccompanied minors. Obviously they should be very transparent and if they aren't, they should be appropriately criticized. But without passage of the immigration bill, theres not much money for building new facilities.
from when it opened under Trump, yes
New holding center for migrant children opens in Texas (apnews.com)
I don't want to blindly trust that this facility isn't mistreating kids or that it's not actually terrible but the purpose of this facility, at least on paper, does not seem malicious or cruel, so I'm not going to immediately bring out the pitchforks either.
Keep them accountable and transparent.
The framing of this article seems poor.
Keep them accountable and transparent.
The framing of this article seems poor.
Basically. The key is going to be transparency and accountability here, and hopefully that's a thing with this admin.
Aside from most colleges going away from the traditional 1 big shared room, everything else is typical from the plain walls and floor to the furniture.Your post at the top of the page looks like crappy dormitory housing. See the photo I posted on the last page of people literally sleeping on the floor behind wire fences. I'm going to say that "Crappy dormitory housing for a month while relatives are contacted" is better than "Sleeping on the floor indefinitely because ICE chucked your parents back over the border".
Yes, it should be better. All of this should be better. It has also been 35 days in the middle of a pandemic. I want to see long term changes to every part of this system, but right now "Kids now sleep on bunk beds for a few weeks" seems like a stressed system trying to figure things out.
EDIT: Seriously am I the only person who's ACTUAL college dorm room's looked like this?
Nah, that's dragging it.
Again, I'm not in here to defend any bad stuff that's happening, and I already said that I agree that the US should do whatever's realistically possible to make things as good/comfortable for these unaccompanied minors.
But those trailers based on the photo here look just like the kind of trailers that kids in public school districts go to school in right down to the bars (source: I'm a kid that went to public school, and even took college classes, in overflow/annex trailers retrofitted as classroom space like this in NYC).
Push to Rid City of Classrooms That Are Anything but Temporary (Published 2014)
Over 7,000 city students are learning in trailers, which were intended to be a temporary solution to crowded schools but are a testament to the struggle to keep up with teeming neighborhoods.
Mind you, that isn't to say that being in a trailer as opposed to a state-of-the-art modern classroom (or nicely laid-out dormitory or hotel room) is good, but...I dunno. Just like when some permutation of this was happening under previous presidents, hopefully this happens less/doesn't happen at all, and unlike previous presidents hopefully what's happening now remains strictly temporary and about unaccompanied minors getting reunited or fostered (rather than kids getting forcibly separated from their parents while the parents get sent away/deported).
Really, the main takeaway given even citizen school children go to class in cages even now should be that the US is third world, lol.
[EDIT: I want to make sure it's understood I'm only, strictly referring to the look of the trailers. I don't want this to go into some weirdo discussion where we end up doing what red hats do and say "actually it's a great situation, look how big those dorms are, some people don't even have it as good as these migrants" on some 4d galaxy brain shit. One more time - conditions for these kids should be as good as reasonably possible, and any separation should be as temporary as possible.]
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so if i understand this correctly, this facility was just opened so that kids could be socially distanced because we're still in a pandemic?
and the kids arrived without parents and weren't separated and taken from their parents?
and the building offers actual beds and climate control etc?
what would you like to do with them then? send them on their way in the desert without food or water? Cause that seems way more immoral to me.
and the kids arrived without parents and weren't separated and taken from their parents?
and the building offers actual beds and climate control etc?
its immoral to put them into a facility while people can figure out their family and contact them?
what would you like to do with them then? send them on their way in the desert without food or water? Cause that seems way more immoral to me.
thats double the size of my dorm.Your post at the top of the page looks like crappy dormitory housing. See the photo I posted on the last page of people literally sleeping on the floor behind wire fences. I'm going to say that "Crappy dormitory housing for a month while relatives are contacted" is better than "Sleeping on the floor indefinitely because ICE chucked your parents back over the border".
Yes, it should be better. All of this should be better. It has also been 35 days in the middle of a pandemic. I want to see long term changes to every part of this system, but right now "Kids now sleep on bunk beds for a few weeks" seems like a stressed system trying to figure things out.
EDIT: Seriously am I the only person who's ACTUAL college dorm room's looked like this?
Sort of reminds me of the 'outrage' when a company wanted to give beds so kids did not have to sleep on the floor at those facilities under the previous administration.
Ha, I was thinking the same thing. My dorm was half the size and we had bunk beds and no desks.
That is not what I'm suggesting. The choices being presented seem to be "homeless" vs "locked up in the middle of nowhere" instead of somewhere that's not completely cut off from the rest of the society.
My point is that people keep comparing this situation to dorms without really acknowledging that you can walk out of a dorm and see the world when you're not sleeping or in school. It kind of reminds me of when Americans look at Swedish prisons and get upset that Anders Breivik has a PS2 and decent furniture. I mean yeah, but he's still in prison.
They absolutely are, which is why there are whole legal processes around confining mentally ill people without a trial.
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That actually looks eerily like the furniture we had and how our room was laid out. Kinda creepy in how similar it was actuallyEDIT: Seriously am I the only person who's ACTUAL college dorm room's looked like this?
Outrage was mainly for family separation. They CAN and should do better in regards to temporary homing of unaccompanied minors while relatives are found but this is not "outrageous" unless abuse is found.
I think most of us can agree this is an imperfect solution. My hope - and this is coming from somebody who has spent serious time teaching illegal immigrants and consider them the embodiment of the American Dream - is that we can build facilities that are not isolated and that offer genuine comfort and maybe even give these kids the chance to interact in and around the society they are looking to enter.
But in the interim this looks to be a pretty big step up from the last four years, (probably even the last twelve) especially in the middle of a pandemic.
But going forward I agree we need to do much, much better.
The primary difference between these facilities and Trump's shelters is in Trump intentionally splitting children from families and detaining indefinitely, while these are temporary spots for unaccompanied minors. The conditions seem relatively normal and (so far) there doesn't seem to be any indication of human rights abuses or anything, so I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt and see how things play out.
I think all college furniture and mattresses are identical, lol.
Why is asking what the alternatives are a bad thing? Surely if there's huge opposition to this method, there's also proposals from experts on the opposite side of what we should be doing instead. Why is wanting to know what those proposals are a bad thing? Calling people who actually want to know the bigger picture "disgusting" is such a shitty way of shutting down a conversation you don't want to be had.
Right off top, I think there are so many questions that a lot of people are sweeping under the rug.
Have the children been screened for COVID?
Do they need to be quarantined?
Are they suffering from any other medical conditions for which they need immediate care? A lot of these children just walked through the desert, alone.
Do they have families, in the US and/or back home? Are there families already looking for them?
Do we have a vetted foster home ready? And seriously, I can't emphasize this one enough. The US foster care system has been rife with abuse for decades. If you care about these kids, then you should care that you're not sending them from one bad situation to another (and don't think those don't exist in the US).
And that's just off the top of my head.
I get that the gut response, the thing that feels right, is to say "just shut them down." But if the ultimate well-being of the children is what we care about, then you have to have answers for these questions, and you have to have a safe place for these children to be while you answer them. And the Biden administration has had 30 some-odd days to respond to what was absolutely a crises of our own making. And that's not to excuse him, and a magnifying glass definitely needs to be put on these facilities and who's running them (but also done in a way that doesn't unintentionally exploit these kids further); but sometimes this conversation can be frustrating, because it feels like people pick their sides and forget that, ultimately, we are talking about the well-being of kids.
Nobody should be profiting from this, that immediately jumps out as a problem to me and I want to know more about that. And adequate care and comfort should be fully provided to the children at these facilities, and oversight for the people who work them (and, admittedly, the US is a little shaky here).
Have the children been screened for COVID?
Do they need to be quarantined?
Are they suffering from any other medical conditions for which they need immediate care? A lot of these children just walked through the desert, alone.
Do they have families, in the US and/or back home? Are there families already looking for them?
Do we have a vetted foster home ready? And seriously, I can't emphasize this one enough. The US foster care system has been rife with abuse for decades. If you care about these kids, then you should care that you're not sending them from one bad situation to another (and don't think those don't exist in the US).
And that's just off the top of my head.
I get that the gut response, the thing that feels right, is to say "just shut them down." But if the ultimate well-being of the children is what we care about, then you have to have answers for these questions, and you have to have a safe place for these children to be while you answer them. And the Biden administration has had 30 some-odd days to respond to what was absolutely a crises of our own making. And that's not to excuse him, and a magnifying glass definitely needs to be put on these facilities and who's running them (but also done in a way that doesn't unintentionally exploit these kids further); but sometimes this conversation can be frustrating, because it feels like people pick their sides and forget that, ultimately, we are talking about the well-being of kids.
Nobody should be profiting from this, that immediately jumps out as a problem to me and I want to know more about that. And adequate care and comfort should be fully provided to the children at these facilities, and oversight for the people who work them (and, admittedly, the US is a little shaky here).
Fundamentally, citizenship is the very right to live within national borders in a place you choose. By factor of non-citizenship, they cannot be allowed unlimited domain within U.S. borders, and giving them access to unrestricted movement, as others have stated, will not grant them citizenship (or citizen like powers, or benefits, etc). Paradoxically, they are able to receive citizenlike treatment only because they are in the special domain set aside for them. They wouldn't have access to medicare etc anywhere else in america under our current system. Logistically, having such places in a city does not make sense. What does it afford them?
I think there's a lot of jumping to conclusions here, and the article does nothing to really stop that.
You do need to hold children for some period of time before allowing them to be with relatives, go through the whole immigration process. I am not sure what people think the alternative should be. If the conditions are humane, the process fair, and they are treated with the respect and care you expect children to be treated with, I would count this as a good thing.
It's literally been a month, I am not sure what people can expect other than treat them humanely while the system is revised and overhauled. The process needs to be transparent, and we will see what reports come out of these.
Also opening a new facility just for children, in a pandemic. Would people rather them just be stuffed in a crowded place with other adults? This seems like a much better short term option to keep kids safe and people spaced out.
You do need to hold children for some period of time before allowing them to be with relatives, go through the whole immigration process. I am not sure what people think the alternative should be. If the conditions are humane, the process fair, and they are treated with the respect and care you expect children to be treated with, I would count this as a good thing.
It's literally been a month, I am not sure what people can expect other than treat them humanely while the system is revised and overhauled. The process needs to be transparent, and we will see what reports come out of these.
Also opening a new facility just for children, in a pandemic. Would people rather them just be stuffed in a crowded place with other adults? This seems like a much better short term option to keep kids safe and people spaced out.
lmao it's *always* on cue how whenever an american administration swaps sides, you see many americans brushing off issues that would have an otherwise different tone attached to it.
this isn't acceptable. plenty of countries, germany, sweden, etc, who have been taking in most migrants in the west for years, doesn't do this.
1. they are taken to a welfare facility in cities for children and appointed a caretaker
2. find any related family in country
3. volunteer programmes for families to look after children, start getting them integrated, going to school, making friends, etc, whom gain guardianship over the minor.
what you're doing is sending minors straight into fucking facilities in the middle of nowhere out of the public's eye
it's disgusting and this strategy shouldn't be defended. it's a jail, not a welfare facility. you're putting them somewhere so you don't have to deal with the difficulties of integrating them.
this isn't acceptable. plenty of countries, germany, sweden, etc, who have been taking in most migrants in the west for years, doesn't do this.
1. they are taken to a welfare facility in cities for children and appointed a caretaker
2. find any related family in country
3. volunteer programmes for families to look after children, start getting them integrated, going to school, making friends, etc, whom gain guardianship over the minor.
what you're doing is sending minors straight into fucking facilities in the middle of nowhere out of the public's eye
it's disgusting and this strategy shouldn't be defended. it's a jail, not a welfare facility. you're putting them somewhere so you don't have to deal with the difficulties of integrating them.
User Banned (1 Week): Antagonizing Fellow Member; Prior Bans for Hostility
Thanks, Dinesh.
What do you expect to happen with these kids when they were separated from their families? This is a serious question? Just cut them loose? See ya later?
Until. A proper solution is can be made which will take time, there isn't really a better option.
Until. A proper solution is can be made which will take time, there isn't really a better option.
If my city council (Austin TX) can vote to buy hotels to house some of our homeless population, why can't the Biden admin arrange for a way to provide the same?
It does look terrible. Not great even. But at least they have beds this time.
I think this facility looks pretty terrible.
I hope so too, but I can't say that I have much faith that things will get better long term given how the US government tends to treat people.