© Joe Raedle/Getty Images,Children and workers are seen at a tent encampment near the Tornillo Port of Entry on June 19, 2018 in Tornillo, Texas.
The federal government will turn an apartment complex once used by oil field workers in south Texas into an emergency shelter for
1,600 migrant kids who arrive at the border without their parents. It is also looking at several military bases to house another 1,400 kids in coming weeks, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
The new emergency shelters come amid record-high levels of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, including thousands of kids arriving each month in the hopes of meeting up with parents and other relatives already inside the U.S. The kids often spend several weeks or even months in temporary shelter before they can be placed with a sponsor.
Mark Weber, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement, said Friday the new emergency facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, called "The Studios" will open soon. Weber said other several other military bases remain under consideration, including Fort Sill in Oklahoma, as a way of expanding capacity by 3,000 among all the sites. There are currently some 13,000 migrant minors in HHS custody.
Democrats have criticized the facilities, which are often not subject to state child welfare licensing requirements because they are temporary emergency shelters. One such shelter,
tent-like facilities in Tornillo, Texas, shuttered amid political pressure and protests and many of those kids were shuttled to Homestead in Florida.
Comment: It's at least plausible that some ISIS members discussed exploiting the U.S.-Mexican border, but it looks like that's as far as it went - if Canadi being truthful. Despite hyped reports over the past few years, actual cases are hard to come by, as Speckhard points out above. There are reasons why ISIS attacks are so rare in the U.S. - and nonexistent in Israel, for example... And it's not entirely due to their 'intelligence-gathering capabilities'.