Folllow the Flores Settlement!
On Sunday, At Church, I Heard A Talk About A Detention Facility In Homestead, Florida.
On Tuesday I drove by the facility.The following is from NPR.
"The Trump administration continues to detain unaccompanied minors for indefinite periods in unlicensed and military-style facilities in violation of a decades-old legal settlement governing the treatment of immigrant children, according to court documents filed Friday in California.
The allegations come in a motion filed in federal court in Los Angeles by attorneys for the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law and other groups. They say that the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement is detaining as many as 2,350 unaccompanied minors in a secure facility in Homestead, Florida, and routinely failing to transfer the minors to a licensed facility or release them to adult sponsors as required.
Under the settlement known as Flores, reached in 1997, unaccompanied minors can be detained for no more than 20 days. Earlier this year, HHS reported that the average length of detention at Homestead was 67 days, and sometimes even longer.
That facility is also "secure," or closed, meaning the minors may not leave. The Flores settlement requires minors to be placed in non-secure facilities."
ORR needs to do a better job of resettling these youths. There are licensed facilities and sponsors better able to do the job. The youth were not even able to receive notes from Miami Dade school children and you have to go up on a ladder to see what was going on the other side of the fence which were covered with a green mesh like a construction site.
I've been to Metro West, TJK, and a federal correction center in Richmond Heights. These folks were convicted of crimes. This is not the case for these unaccompanied minors. Unless you had prior knowledge of the place you would wonder what was going on there. This seems like another Area 51 where our broken immigration policies are hidden away.
"Private prisons are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, meaning they are subject to less public scrutiny than state or federally run prisons. But a Justice Department report issued in 2016 found that private prisons are less safe than comparable public facilities. According to the report, inmates suffered more assaults, were subject to more disciplinary force, had greater access to drugs and were more likely to be placed in solitary confinement than in comparable public prisons. It went on to recommend that the government do a better job of monitoring medical services and guard staffing levels." (from Miami Herald, Business Monday 4/22/2019).
Even South Florida's elected officials have not been able to visit.
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