Biden Admits Border Situation Is a Crisis , Houston Facility for Migrant Teen Girls Closed for Appalling Conditions
04-19-2021
Teenage migrant girls are loaded into vans to be transported out of the National Association of Christian Churches facility, on Saturday, April 17, 2021, in Houston. (Godofredo A. Vásquez/Houston Chronicle via AP)
President Joe Biden finally called the situation on America s southern border a crisis for the first time on Saturday, making that comment during an impromptu conversation with reporters in Delaware.
He made the admission while he was defending his administration s new decision to let more refugees into the country. To clarify, the refugee program is about people who come from around the globe, not just the southern border, and many are fleeing religious or political persecution.
Joe Biden s administration shut down a Houston warehouse serving as a facility for unaccompanied migrant children amid allegations that nonprofit organizations running the site failed to provide adequate living conditions for the hundreds of girls being housed there.
ABC News reports the warehouse was opened by the Department of Health and Human Services earlier this month in response to the surge of unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the southern border, but closed over the weekend due to poor living conditions, sources confirmed.
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ABC News showed buses removing more than 100 girls from the facility on Saturday (April 17), which had been run by a Houston-based nonprofit, the National Association of Christian Churches (NACC), that had no previous experience housing unaccompanied migrant children prior to the facility s opening.
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The Biden administration abruptly closed a Houston-based warehouse where government contractors were reportedly holding nearly 500 unaccompanied children in conditions described as abhorrent.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced over the weekend that it was shuttering one of a dozen emergency facilities where its Administration for Children and Families s Office of Refugee Resettlement had contracted the National Association of Christian Churches nonprofit organization to hold nearly 20,000 boys and girls who came across the southern border without a parent.
The teenage girls held inside were at times forced to use plastic bags as toilets because there were not enough adults to walk them to a bathroom, according to ABC News. Girls spent most of the days on makeshift cots and rarely got outside. Stacks of boxes were used to create rooms inside, where the girls were packed into tight spaces, risking their safety, given the coronavirus pandemic.
Facility for teen immigrant girls in Houston closes, hundreds of unaccompanied minors moved
Greg Nash/AP
Xavier Becerra testifies during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on his nomination to be secretary of Health and Human Services on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. (Greg Nash/Pool via AP)
By: Scripps National , The Associated Press
Posted at 12:17 PM, Apr 19, 2021
and last updated 2021-04-19 15:17:08-04
HOUSTON â The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services removed about 450 immigrant girls from a facility in Houston over the weekend, closing the site.
HHS said the girls were removed from the Emergency Intake Site for Unaccompanied Children operated by the National Association of Christian Churches where they were housed since April 1.