The Trump administration is proposing a sprawling shelter facility that can detain up to 3,000 unaccompanied migrant children who arrived in the U.S. without a parent or guardian.
Officials have started to outline plans for the project as federal agencies escalate efforts to detain and remove tens of thousands of people from the country, including children, while effectively closing off the U.S.-Mexico border to people seeking asylum.
Unaccompanied immigrant children — currently housed in more than 150 shelter facilities across the country — could be held inside “emergency influx facility” campuses staffed with physicians, teachers and other “humanitarian care” providers as the administration responds to “surges” at the southern border, according to a market research call with prospective service providers on Tuesday.
Officials have not yet determined a location for the project but appear ready to move quickly once contracts are awarded by the end of this year. A spokesperson for the the Department of Health and Human Services stressed in a statement to The Independent that “there are currently no immediate plans to establish such a facility.”
A virtual roundtable with industry members “is standard procedure” for market research to articulate the agency’s requirements for its facility, the spokesperson added.
“Characterizing this virtual roundtable as anything other than a standard procedure is journalistic malpractice and is a complete misrepresentation of the truth,” the person said.
Tuesday’s roundtable outlined draft requirements that the Office of Refugee Resettlement “may request in order to fulfill its statutory responsibility” to care for unaccompanied minors referred to the agency by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Health Department.
“ORR solicited feedback and questions from industry leaders as part of a standard method to improve requirements before facility plans are finalized,” the spokesperson added.
The agency “must remain prepared at all times to standup a temporary housing facility” for unaccompanied minors, “should an influx occur,” the person said.
“ORR will not wait for an influx to occur before seeking out a contractor who can meet the statutory requirements of an ORR facility,” the person added. “ORR is committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of the unaccompanied children placed in its care, and that means being prepared for any possible scenarios at all times.”
The proposed facilities could hold up to eight children per room, and up to eight children would share one toilet, shower and sink, according to the call. A spokesperson told The Independent that those parameters are “completely untrue.”
The facilities also would need to be surrounded by an eight-foot perimeter fence.
Facilities would also need to be within 30 miles of a hospital, and officials also are pushing for locations within 60 miles to an airport and 30 miles to a pediatric care facility, behavior health providers, dentists and diagnostic imaging and laboratory services.
Quarantine areas in each facility would need a minimum of 40 beds in a 400-bed facility, 100 beds in a 1,000-bed facility, and 300 beds in 3,000-bed facility.
Recreation areas would not necessarily need to be outside. The government typically requires at least one acre of recreation facilities per 100 children, but that “does not need to be a single continuous plot,” according to the administration. “It can be a combination of indoor and outdoor,” officials said Tuesday.
“Task orders” under the contract may increase to requests for as many as 3,000 beds “depending on the government’s need,” a spokesperson for the agency told The Independent.
“During performance, within the maximum, the government can adjust the actual number of beds ordered up or down as needed in 50-bed increments,” the person added.
The proposal comes as the Trump administration faces growing scrutiny over its care of immigrant children in a mass deportation campaign that is increasingly targeting families with children far beyond the southern border.
Since Trump returned to the White House, immigration judges have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary deportation orders for immigrant minors each month, an explosive surge that has vastly outnumbered orders from even Trump’s first term, according to ProPublica.
Last year, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement dismissed widespread reports among immigration lawyers and advocates that it was launching a wider effort to deport migrant children, lawyers and shelter workers scrambled to prevent what they feared are imminent attempts to deport them.
Attorneys for unaccompanied migrant children successfully blocked a middle-of-the-night operation to deport Guatemalan minors in government custody after a series of harrowing affidavits described their fears of abruptly returning to their home country.
Lawyers for the children, who are now in government-supported foster programs and long-term shelters, subsequently accused the Trump administration of trying to get them to self-deport through “misinformation, coercion, threats and fear.”
Unaccompanied immigrant children are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement through the Health Department’s Administration for Children and Families.
The federal government is legally required to facilitate their legal counsel. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act requires the government to “ensure, to the greatest extent practicable,” that all unaccompanied minors receive legal counsel “to represent them in legal proceedings” and to “protect them from mistreatment, exploitation and trafficking.”
Roughly 20,000 immigrant children effectively lost that representation overnight when a long-standing contract with the Acacia Center for Justice ended last month.
Texas-based Burke Law Group, which does not appear to have any experience representing unaccompanied children, recently withdrew from consideration for a government contract after the Department of Health and Human Services announced plans to award the firm $150 million.
Several Democratic senators are now pressing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to explain how the firm was even on the agency’s radar.
The firm’s founder and managing partner Marcella Burke previously worked as deputy solicitor and senior counsel at the Department of the Interior and as deputy general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency during the first Trump administration.
The firm later claimed that it was “only considering applying for a small portion of that amount under a grant to help address the humanitarian crisis.”
“We have decided not to apply for a grant or a contract and we withdrew from consideration,” the firm said in a statement last week.
The administration ultimately awarded a no-bid contract worth at least $158 million to an anti-trafficking group whose founder resigned amid allegations of sexual abuse, forced labor and trafficking.
Our Rescue, formerly Operation Underground Railroad, could receive more than $244 million under the contract, according to federal filings.
“Our Rescue is steadfast on our mission to help vulnerable children across the U.S. and around the world,” CEO Derek Benner said in a statement shared with The Independent last week. “These are among the most vulnerable children in the world, and they deserve nothing less than the full weight of our experience. We welcome this responsibility and are working on their behalf.”
This story has been updated with statements from the Department of Health and Human Services
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