Immigrant children who were sheltered at a Texas military base faced long waits, which caused them anguish and panic attacks.
This was revealed this Tuesday by an internal investigation by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The cases of the children were not processed in a timely manner, in addition to the lack of experience and training of the employees and contractors assigned to the temporary children’s shelter at the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas.
“According to the center’s staff, it caused many children to experience anguish, anxiety and, in some cases, panic attacks”, says the report of 58 pages.
Adds that the operational challenges encountered by the Government caused some minors to have to wait weeks while their case managers updated the processes.
The shelter at Fort Bl iss, which had the capacity to serve up to 10,000 children who crossed the border alone, opened its doors in March 2021 to attend to the avalanche of minors that saturated the shelters.
However, large caseloads, a shortage of trained staff, and high employee turnover rates impacted the processing of cases. The investigation found that there were children who went up to two months without seeing the person assigned to manage their cases.
A Fort Bliss worker told investigators the case of a migrant girl who self-harmed after learning that they had not spoken to her mother about when she would be released. The minor was taken to a psychiatric facility.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the HHS agency responsible for the children, tried to reduce delays and issued guidance to expedite the release of the minors, but this “may have increased the risk that the children were delivered to unsafe sponsors,” the report warned.
Also found that staff felt discouraged, for fear of retaliation, from raising case management and child safety concerns with supervisors .
Last April, the Government Accountability Project organization asked Congress and federal oversight agencies to investigate and assess the conditions at ORR’s shelters for migrant children.
The petition included a summary of the complaints of mismanagement and abandonment conditions in the Emergency Intake Centers (EIS) established by the Gobi ern of President Joe Biden in the face of the massive arrival of unaccompanied minors recorded last year.
The complaints from the shelter were highlighted of Fort Bliss, which closed its doors in July 2021.
In fiscal year 2021 HHS had in its custody more than 122,000 children who entered the country alone.
With information from EFE
You may be interested in:
– The bleak scenario for immigrant children detained by the Border Patrol (podcast)
– “Where is Daddy?”, a book that exposes the suffering and confusion of migrant children separated from their parents