A migrant facility in Texas was at 729% pandemic-era capacity at the beginning of March, as an influx of unaccompanied minors continues along the southern border.
“Some of the boys said that conditions were so overcrowded that they had to take turns sleeping on the floor,” Neha Desai, a lawyer representing migrant youth in U.S. government custody, told CBS News.
The Customs and Border Protection holding facility in Donna, Texas, is designed for 250 migrants for pandemic-era capacity but was holding more than 1,800 people on March 2.
Most of the minors Desai spoke to at the facility had reportedly only showered once, even though they had been in CBP care for days.
NUMBER OF UNACCOMPANIED MIGRANT CHILDREN IN CBP CARE TRIPLES IN LAST TWO WEEKS
“They all said they wanted to shower more and were told they couldn’t,” she added. “One of them shared that he could only see the sun when he showered, because you can see the sun through the window.”
A senior director and lawyer at the National Center for Youth Law, Leecia Welch, added that the facility is “becoming a humanitarian crisis” due to the overcrowding.
“Donna is quickly becoming a humanitarian crisis,” Welch told CNN. “We understand the administration inherited this disaster, but I cannot stress enough how urgent the situation is with the growing number of young unaccompanied children. We spoke to numerous distraught children who don’t understand why they can’t talk to their parents, see their siblings at Donna, or get some fresh air.”
The Biden administration has said that the influx of migrants coming across the border is “overwhelming” but has not called it a “crisis.” More than 100,000 migrants were encountered at the border in February, and agents in the Rio Grande Valley sector in Texas are encountering 1,500 migrants a day.
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Despite the White House not labeling it a “crisis,” local leaders in border states have repeatedly decried it as such, and Gov. Greg Abbott has deployed the National Guard to combat the “smuggling of people and drugs into Texas.”
“The crisis at our southern border continues to escalate because of Biden administration policies that refuse to secure the border and invite illegal immigration,” said Abbott. “Texas supports legal immigration but will not be an accomplice to the open border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans. We will surge the resources and law enforcement personnel needed to confront this crisis.”
