US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rounded up and imprisoned pregnant unaccompanied minors in Benito, Texas, but no one at ICE will tell Congress where all the girls and their babies are, reports Border Report Live and The Guardian:
Rep. Maxine Dexter (pictured above), a Democratic congresswoman from Oregon and a former critical care physician – one of the few doctors now serving in Congress – detailed these questions in an 8 May letter to refugee and health officials after visiting the San Benito facility and, she said, being blocked from speaking with any of the children. She still hasn’t gotten answers…
For the unaccompanied children at the San Benito facility, there is the added stress and confusion of being pregnant and alone. The facility has housed pregnant children as young as 13; about half of the pregnancies are the result of rape.
Following reporting from the Guardian and others, Dexter notified the facility in San Benito that she would visit in late April.
When she arrived, she was blocked from speaking with or even seeing any children throughout her entire visit, she said.
Local immigration attorneys arranged interviews with two girls being held at the facility, but on the morning Dexter was set to visit, “apparently those girls were spoken to harshly by ORR staff, and they were scared to talk to me after that,” she said.
There are also questions about how many children are being held at the facility. One of the attorneys receiving a daily census said there were 11 children that day, but officials told Dexter there were only seven children.
When Joaquin Castro, a Democratic Texas congressman, visited a few weeks before, there were 17.
“Where have all of these kids gone? Because there used to be many, many more,” Dexter asked.
The staff responded “it’s case by case” and offered no other details, Dexter said, adding: “Whether they’re in foster care, or in other facilities, or they’ve been returned to other countries, we don’t know.”
Dexter says she kept asking, trying new ways to find answers. A representative from [Office of Refugee Resettlement’s] Washington office was there, but she didn’t answer the questions, Dexter said. “Our experience has been, we’ll keep asking, and no one answers … They had a lot of girls in custody. Where did they all go?”
The [Office of Refugee Resettlement] case management system can “definitively answer” where each of the unaccompanied children at the San Benito site went, said Jonathan White, a former top official working with children’s programs in the ORR under the Obama and Trump administrations.
(Sources: The Guardian, Border Report Live)