MIAMI _ Already a lightning rod in the national fight over immigration policy and family border separations, a detention center for migrant children in Homestead is once again expanding to accommodate the growing number of teenagers in federal custody.
The government announced this week that an old job corps headquarters reopened last year as a youth detention center will grow again in April to more than double the capacity that existed at the beginning of the year. By the end of the month, the Office of Refugee Resettlement intends to house as many as 3,200 children at the "temporary" center _ creating a compound larger than Homestead Senior High.
The 850-bed expansion _ the second one in 2019 _ comes amid heightened immigration rhetoric from President Donald Trump and as the Department of Homeland Security braces for what they're calling an unprecedented number of children crossing the border without parents. In announcing the move, Health and Human Services, which oversees refugee resettlement, explained that it doesn't expect the growth to be short-lived.
"Based on the anticipated growth pattern in referrals," the agency stated, "HHS is preparing for the need for high-bed capacity to continue."
Health and Human Services stresses that none of the roughly 2,000 children housed today in Homestead nor any of the children expected to occupy the new beds were separated from their families under a hardline immigration policy that began and ended last year. The agency also said it is not expanding the Homestead facility to accommodate children who were previously sheltered at the now-closed child detention center in Tornillo, Texas _ the only other "temporary" child migrant shelter in the country.
But the continued expansion of the center in Homestead all but guarantees that the complex will remain a national symbol of the fight over Trump's hardline immigration stance well into 2019 and likely the 2020 campaign. If anything, it will be a bigger flashpoint.
"Instead of expanding Homestead, we need to swiftly adopt policies that speed up release and reunifications, promote sponsors to come forward without fear of legal repercussions, and ensure adequate staffing and resources for young people," Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. "The longer solution is passing sensible immigration reform."
First opened as a migrant child shelter and then shuttered under Barack Obama, the center has housed a total of around 8,300 children since Trump reopened it a year ago to help alleviate the stress on federal resources caused by a short-lived policy to remove children from their parents' custody at the southern border, according to HHS. The Office of Refugee Resettlement says there were about 2,000 children between the ages of 13 and 17 at the shelter by April 1, about three-quarters of them boys.
Many teenagers end up in the center after fleeing gangs and poverty in Central America, and spend a little less than two months at the facility. The Office of Refugee Resettlement says about 32,000 children were transferred into its custody during the first three months of the year, an increase of 50 percent over the same period in 2018.
Younger migrant children in federal custody who are sent to Miami are sent to smaller, nonprofit shelters.
The Homestead center has already been the site of repeated visits from senators and House members, and was recently a backdrop for immigration protests. Last month, protesters who pressured the federal government to shut down its tent city in Tornillo turned their focus on the Homestead center, which is run by a for-profit company and exempt from local and state oversight due to its location on federal land and its "temporary" status.
