Caring for Illegal Immigrant Children

Crossing the border is dangerous for full grown adults, let alone small children and teenagers. The Department of Homeland security has found that many teenagers, mostly boys, flee their home country because they are separated from their family, or their family is neglecting them, or worse. Many of these teens underestimate how difficult crossing the border is and are caught by border patrol and then kept in a cell waiting to be deported. The cycle will then often be repeated until the teenager makes it into the United States or is killed. This is clearly something that needs to be stopped and a federal child-welfare agency is paying the Department of Defense for using the dormitory, including electricity and maintenance costs, though officials said they did not have an exact dollar amount, to do something completely radical.

               Federal officials began housing more than 200 children that have attempted to cross the border and failed at Lackland Air Force Base, turning a vacant dormitory that was once the living quarters of basic training recruits into an emergency shelter for young illegal immigrants. Lackland Air Force Base is located in southern Texas close to San Antonio and offers food, housing, clothes, and proper hygiene to these displaced illegal immigrant children. This is a heartfelt and caring action but several lawyers who represent unaccompanied children questioned whether using Lackland as an emergency shelter violated a settlement agreement from a class-action lawsuit that establishes how the federal government can treat these children while they are in custody. In that agreement, reached in 1997 and known as the Flores settlement, federal authorities agreed to seek state licensing of the facilities to house these children, in response to accusations of substandard conditions. The Lackland dormitory has not been licensed by Texas as a child care facility, and state child welfare officials said the building was not subject to state regulation because it is on federal property. The Flores settlement makes an exception to the licensed facility requirement when there is an emergency or an influx of minors, but requires that those minors be placed in licensed programs “as expeditiously as possible.”

               Caring for the homeless children and teenagers that cross the border is something that the United States of America should consider however, after the children grow up, should we give then citizenship? Questions like this are sure to arise if this course of action becomes acceptable.