Inside Trump’s child detention centers: TOM LEONARD travels to the McAllen facility where scores of children are living separated from their parents
By TOM LEONARD
DAILYMAIL.COM
23 June 2018
Hidden inside a former fruit and vegetable warehouse on an industrial estate in the Texas border town of McAllen is a highly controversial experiment in dealing with the problem of illegal immigration.
One wing of the dark, 77,000 sq ft refrigerated building is home to hundreds of children who live in a collection of cages made from chain link fencing.
Up to 20 youngsters — aged up to 17 — are in each cage, and scattered around the concrete floor are water bottles, giant bags of crisps and large foil sheets instead of blankets on the thin green mats laid out to sleep on.
Overhead, the lighting stays on continually. There are no toys, games or books.
The cages, about 30ft by 30ft, open into a common area where there are portable lavatories, but the children cannot get into the other wings which hold single adult detainees and parents with children aged under five, who are generally left intact as a family.
One teenage girl said she had been caring for a four-year-old child separated from her aunt at the border, and that she’d had to explain to other youngsters in the cage how to change the child’s nappy. Many of the ‘inmates’ are illiterate, and some speak only obscure national dialects. Visitors have said they were shocked such conditions exist outside prisons.
In all, around 1,100 people — including some 200 unaccompanied children and 500 younger ones with their parents — are being held here at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency’s biggest immigration processing and detention centre.
It is known as Ursula — although inmates call it La Perrera, Spanish for ‘dog kennel’ — and is the central processing facility for immigrants captured in the Rio Grande Valley in the southeastern tip of Texas, the busiest area for America’s border police.
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