Inside the Former Walmart That Is Now a Shelter for Almost 1,500 Migrant Children
By Manny Fernandez June 14, 2018
BROWNSVILLE, Tex. — In the loading docks, children sat in a darkened auditorium watching the animated movie “Moana.”
Where there were once racks of clothes and aisles of appliances, there were now spotless dorm-style bedrooms with neatly made beds and Pokemon posters on the walls. The back parking lots were now makeshift soccer fields and volleyball courts. The McDonald’s was now the cafeteria. All this made it difficult to visualize what the sprawling facility used to be — a former Walmart Supercenter.
The converted retail store at the southern tip of Texas has become the largest licensed migrant children’s shelter in the country — a warehouse for nearly 1,500 boys aged 10 to 17 who were caught illegally crossing the border.
The teeming, 250,000-square-foot facility is a model of border life in Trump-era America, part of a growing industry of detention centers and shelters as federal authorities scramble to comply with the president’s order to end “catch and release” of migrants illegally entering the country. Now that children are often being separated from their parents, this facility has had to obtain a waiver from the state to expand its capacity.
Cots are being added to sleeping areas. The staff is expanding. But even that is not enough. Federal authorities are considering establishing tent cities on Army and Air Force bases, and have already transferred hundreds of immigrant detainees to temporary housing at federal prisons.
On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that temporary tent housing would be set up near the border station in Tornillo, Tex., to house up to 360 youths. That prompted an angry response from a Democratic state senator, José Rodríguez, who noted that temperatures could be expected to exceed 100 degrees at the site. “This is what totalitarians in the Middle East and elsewhere do,” he said in a statement.
Full Article Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/us/family-separation-migrant-children-detention.html