La Linea

A well-known citizen journalist who used the Twitter handle @Miut3 was reportedly kidnapped and killed Wednesday in the border city of Reynosa.

Early Thursday morning, a string of threats were tweeted on the #reynosafollow hashtag from the @Miut3 account, along with what appeared to be pictures of her before and after her murder.

“Friends and family, my real name is Maria Del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, I’m a doctor and today, my life has come to an end.”

Another tweet read:

“I can only tell you to not make the same mistake I did, it doesn’t benefit you, quite the opposite as I realize today.”

Mexico has become one of the deadliest countries for journalists in recent years. The state of Tamaulipas is infamous now as a place where almost total censorship reigns under organized crime and reporters risk kidnapping and death.

Since 2010, ordinary citizens using Twitter, Facebook and other social media have tried to fill the vacuum left by traditional media. Many Reynosa residents rely on #reynosafollow to warn others of gun battles, narco blockades and other dangers in their city. They take great pains to hide their identities online. Defying the censorship can mean being killed or kidnapped.

@Miut3 was well known among #reynosafollow users and posted on a daily basis, says Sergio Chapa, interactive manager with the Harlingen TV station KGBT, who was one of the first to write about Fuentes’ alleged murder.

“It’s created a great amount of fear,” Chapa says. Reynosa’s online users worry that if the killers have Fuentes’ cell phone they’ll have their contact information as well. “Reynosafollow users are ditching their phones, changing phone numbers and doing other things to try and protect themselves.”

After the threatening posts, the @Miut3 account was deactivated by Twitter. On Thursday afternoon, the Tamaulipas attorney general’s office opened an investigation into Fuentes’ kidnapping and murder. But in a country where 98 percent of murders remain unsolved, the motives behind her killing may never be revealed and her killers never brought to justice. Because of the anonymity of the online community in Reynosa and extreme distrust of corrupt authorities in Tamaulipas, it’s difficult even to verify the simplest details of the case—like whether @Miut3 really was a doctor named Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio.

Chapa says one of the original leaders of the #reynosafollow hashtag who has been investigating the death is reasonably confident that @Miut3 was a doctor, but that her death had more to do with her day job than her online reporting. Chapa says his #reynosafollow source was told that Fuentes had been unable to save a young boy who’d been brought into her clinic. After that, a member of the child’s family sent men to kidnap her.

Later, according to Chapa’s source, the cartel members discovered Fuentes’ online identity and took the opportunity to intimidate other users online.

This isn’t the first time that social media users in Tamaulipas have been threatened or killed. Last year, a video on YouTube showed what appeared to be the execution of a contributor to the Valor Por Tamaulipas Facebook page, a popular place for residents to report crimes and corruption. In 2011, four social media users were murdered in Nuevo Laredo. Messages were left with their bodies threatening to kill others who reported crimes over social media.

One of the last messages from the @Miut3 account sent a chilling message to other well known online users in the #reynosafollow community:

“I found death and got nothing out of it. @Bandolera7, @civilarmado_mx and @ValorTamaulipas, death is closer to us than you think.”

After a second nurse from Texas Presbyterian Health Hospital in Dallas was diagnosed with Ebola on Wednesday, a national union said nurses are afraid and not receiving proper training or equipment to deal with the deadly virus.

Deborah Burger, a registered nurse and co-president of National Nurses United, said the Ebola diagnoses of the two nurses in Dallas were “truly heartbreaking, outrageous and totally preventable. We want to make sure it never happens again.”

Burger and at least 11,500 nurses across the nation, and as far away as Spain, participated in the press conference call Wednesday, and called for better training, equipment and resources to treat Ebola patients. In a letter sent to the White House on Wednesday, they asked President Obama to “invoke his executive authority” to order all U.S. hospitals to meet the highest “uniform, national standards and protocols” in order to “safely protect patients, all healthcare workers and the public.”

“We don’t have a national integrated health system,” Burger said during the press call. “We have a series of private corporate hospitals each responding in their own way. “

Several U.S. nurses said their hospitals were unprepared and that they had no protective equipment or training to deal with an Ebola patient, or any patient with a highly infectious disease.

El Paso nurse Yadira Cabrera said she and her coworkers received a 10-minute training, and nothing more. Cabrera did not name the hospital where she worked. “We need to get beyond business as usual,” she said. “Preparation is not a colored flyer or a number to call at [the Centers for Disease Control]. As RNs we need to be educated from triage to waste disposal.”

On Tuesday, nurses at Texas Presbyterian Health Hospital reached out to the union because they felt they were being blamed for the spread of the infectious disease. The nurses in that hospital were very angry, and they decided to contact us,” National Nurses United Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro told CNN Tuesday. The nurses are worried conditions at the hospital “may lead to infection of other nurses and patients,” Burger said.

The nurses, who are remaining anonymous for fear of retaliation, related a number of troubling accusations to the union about how the hospital treated Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States. “Mr. Duncan was left in an area where other patients were present,” Burger said. “The nurses wore generic gowns with three pairs of gloves with no taping and surgical masks.”

The gowns exposed their legs from the knees down and their necks. When the nurses complained, they were told to use medical tape and “wrap it around their necks,” according to Burger. “The nurses had to interact with Mr. Duncan with whatever protective equipment was available. … There was no protocol,” she said. Duncan was extremely ill with projectile vomiting and diarrhea, which the nurses had to clean up. “There was no one to pick up the hazardous waste as it piled up to the ceiling,” she said.

The nurses also had to continue treating other patients in the hospital. Those patients were later kept in isolation for one day, then moved to another section with other patients.

The hospital and the Centers for Disease Control received more criticism Wednesday as news spread that the second nurse diagnosed with Ebola, Amber Vinson, had been on a flight from Cleveland to Dallas the day before she showed symptoms of the disease.

By speaking out, nurses are not “fear mongering,“ Burger said. What they are advocating for is “the highest standards to eradicate the disease.” The U.S. should be setting an example on how to contain and eradicate ebola, she said. ”If I was writing for the newspapers I would say, ‘We need help.’”

Because of the government’s failure to reform immigration laws, faith leaders said Wednesday in a press call with media that they are building a new nationwide sanctuary movement and urging churches across the country to offer shelter to immigrants facing deportation.

The rebirth of the sanctuary movement began in Arizona in May when 36-year-old Daniel Neyoy Ruiz, who was born in Mexico, sought refuge in the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson. After nearly a month of living in the church, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials granted Neyoy Ruiz a one-year reprieve from deportation.

Currently, Rosa Robles Loreto, a mother of two young boys, is living at the Tucson church trying to fight her deportation to Mexico. Robles said she has lived in Tucson for the last 15 years. “My goal is to stay with my husband and children because they need me,” she said in the press call today. “My struggle goes further than from my immediate family, and it is a call and a national petition so that others can also have hope and establish their lives here, where we have already lived for so long.”

Arizona, specifically Tucson, was the birthplace of the sanctuary movement in the 1980s when thousands of Central Americans fleeing civil wars sought asylum in the United States. Many of the refugees were detained in prisons then deported to their war-torn countries where the U.S. was involved in providing funding and weapons to governments and forces viewed as anti-communist. The founding of the movement is credited in part to Rev. John Fife, minister at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson. Fife spurred other religious leaders to defy federal immigration laws and offer sanctuary to refugees at churches, spurring a powerful resistance movement that spread to Texas and other states.

In the press call Wednesday, faith leaders said the violence many immigrants are facing back home is just as dire as it was more than 30 years ago. They said the current movement is rapidly growing, from two churches in Arizona to 24 congregations promising sanctuary and another 60 faith-based groups offering support.

Rev. Noel Andersen, grassroots coordinator with Church World Service, a faith-based humanitarian agency, said faith leaders are reaching out to Texas congregations to join the movement but none have accepted yet. “We don’t have anyone in Texas but that could change in the coming weeks,” he said.

Rev. Alison Harrington of Southside Presbyterian said the deportations are destroying families across the country. Each day, the U.S. government deports at least 1,000 people, according to government statistics. “In Arizona we have witnessed again and again the destruction of families through inhumane deportation practices. Responding to the commands of our faith to love our neighbors, congregations throughout the state are declaring sanctuary for undocumented individuals like Rosa Robles Loreto who have final orders of deportation.”

Congressman Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Tucson, blamed elected officials for failing to act on comprehensive immigration reform. “The system has to be fixed,” he said. “There’s been nothing but cowardice on the part of House leadership who won’t even allow a vote on the Senate bill that while flawed deserves a vote.” Grijalva also blamed President Obama for delaying his executive action on immigration until after the election. “It was the wrong move,” he said. “The sanctuary movement is a response to the lack of action. It is a response to the humanity of the issue. And I think it is going to be a cornerstone in pushing the decency of the American people to demand of its elected officials to do something.”

Faith leaders who took part in the announcement included: Rabbi Linda Holtzman of the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, Rev. Julian DeShazier of University Church Chicago, Rev. Alison Harrington of Southside Presbyterian Church, Rev. Gradye Parsons, the highest elected official in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A as well as Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona’s 3rd District.

The group said that sanctuary is currently being provided to immigrants in Phoenix, Tucson, Chicago and Portland. Churches in the following cities are providing support: Boston, Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, New York, Oakland, Portland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Seattle and Tucson.

The Texas National Guard has deployed a team to Brooks County to conduct search and rescue operations for migrants lost in the brush.

Law enforcement has recovered more than 400 bodies since 2009 in the rural county 60 miles north of the Texas-Mexico border. Every year, thousands of migrants try to circumvent a Border Patrol checkpoint in Brooks County by walking through rugged, isolated ranchland. Many die during the journey from heat exposure and thirst.

The deployment is a separate operation from the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Operation Strong Safety and the National Guard soldiers deployed by Gov. Perry to the border, according to a DPS press release. Specially trained teams of 20 to 25 guardsmen will conduct search and rescue missions in the county when requested by the Brooks County Sheriff’s office. The National Guard didn’t say how long the deployment to Brooks County would last.

Eddie Canales, director of the South Texas Human Rights Center in Brooks County, said the guard deployment could save lives. “We welcome any assistance in search and rescue in Brooks County,” he says.“We’re very interested at the center in seeing how this works, and how they work with Border Patrol and the sheriff’s office.”

Canales believes the guard will mostly focus on 9-1-1 distress calls from the brush, which are received by the sheriff’s office. In the past, the Border Patrol has been criticized for taking two hours or longer to respond to distress calls, or in some cases not responding at all.

Another area where they need help is with missing persons reports, Canales says. The center received a dozen phone calls from relatives of missing migrants over the summer. But callers often have so little information about where their loved one went missing or fell ill in the county that it’s difficult—if not impossible—for law enforcement to locate them.

“I just received a call for someone who disappeared on the 18th of September,” he says. “But the only information we have about where he went missing is that it was near the checkpoint.”

Canales says families need help but he’s unsure what the National Guard search and rescue team can do in these cases with so little information. “What is the process to request a search and rescue deployment?” he asks. “I’m exploring all of the avenues right now, hoping they can help.”

As part of his continuing get-tough-on-the-border campaign, Gov. Rick Perry addressed several dozen National Guard soldiers today in a sweltering hangar at the Camp Swift training facility near Bastrop. While he provided little in the way of information on his deployment of troops to the Rio Grande Valley, he did provide some striking visuals for his presidential bid.

The press had been invited to attend presumably to learn more about Perry’s deployment of the National Guard to the border. But as we all stood fanning ourselves in a metal hangar in mid-August, the only new piece of information we gleaned was that 2,200 guardsmen have volunteered for the deployment and will be sent in rotation—1,000 soldiers at a time. There was no talk about rules of engagement, or what exactly the troops will be doing, or how long they will be on the border. When asked when they might be deployed, Perry said he didn’t want to tip the cartels off.

We did learn about the federal government’s inability to secure the border and how the good people of Iowa and South Carolina, not just Texas, are scarred by illegal immigration. Incidentally Iowa and South Carolina are key presidential primary states that Perry has been barnstorming in the past few weeks, always a few steps behind the competition Sen. Ted Cruz.

Lately, Perry’s been enjoying a political boost from the “border crisis” and it’s no secret he’s considering a 2016 presidential bid. Since he announced last month that he’d send 1,000 National Guard soldiers to the border, the governor has received standing ovations from some GOP voters. Never mind that the influx of Central American children and families, which constitute the recent “border crisis,” are mostly presenting themselves to immigration officials and asking for asylum.

It was clear Wednesday that Perry—with such a bump in the polls—couldn’t pass up another photo op with the National Guard. And even better, have it in a controlled setting on a military facility in Bastrop far from the border where he might face protesters who don’t want their communities turned into a war zone.

What Perry wanted the press to know today is that he’s protecting the nation from the “tentacles” of “narco terrorists.” The cost to Texas taxpayers isn’t an issue, he said, “because Texans support a secure border.” In a not-so-curious stroke of timing, Perry also released a web ad last week, paid for by his new RickPAC. The ad is all about border security and features numerous talking heads from Fox News, making Perry look like the last line of defense from the horde of brown invaders from south of the border.

After the press conference, the media were herded on to buses and taken to a firing range to watch Gov. Perry look through the viewfinder of what appeared to be a large box draped in camouflage. We were told by a National Guard public information officer that the contraption provides “specialized training for enhanced optics.” It was the only glimpse we were allowed into what the soldiers will be doing on the border. Regardless, the “border crisis” has provided plenty of “enhanced optics” for Perry’s presidential ambitions.

The Republican leadership in the House suffered an embarrassing setback Thursday after being unable to muster enough votes to pass a $659 million emergency supplemental spending bill for the influx of unaccompanied children from Central America. Now, Republican leaders say they’ll try again Friday to pass the spending bill.

Capitol Hill reporters described the scene at the Capitol as “embarrassing” and “chaotic” as Republican leaders pulled the bill down then met in the basement in a desperate attempt to muster votes before they adjourn for five weeks.

Republican leaders loaded the bill with plenty of red meat to appeal to the most extreme faction of their party. The measure guts a 2008 anti-trafficking law that protects vulnerable Central American children from being immediately deported. Leadership also offered a bill to stop the expansion of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which defers deportation for young undocumented immigrants, also know as Dreamers. The sentiment of Republicans seems to be “deport ‘em all” but this wasn’t enough to appease the party’s most conservative House Republicans, who had a tea party in Sen. Ted Cruz’s office yesterday. Cruz wants to see DACA completely defunded.

Kevin Appleby, director of migration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called the congressional debacle a “sad day for America” during a press conference Thursday for reporters.

“Instead of choosing immigration reform the House has decided to pass bills that will deport vulnerable children—both those who have recently arrived and those who have lived among us for years. This is a defining moment in the national debate. The real issue here is ‘who we are as Americans?’ As leaders in human rights protections we often instruct other nations to receive refugees or protect human rights of people, yet we see child refugees on our own border and we respond in an inhumane way.”

 

An immigration attorney, working with Central American asylum seekers, in a newly opened detention facility says it’s becoming clear that the U.S. government is doing whatever it can to deport families as quickly as possible and only going through the motions when it comes to the asylum seekers.

Immigration attorney Shelley Wittevrongel, a former nun, was one of the first to volunteer to help Central American women and children pro bono at a newly opened detention facility in Artesia, New Mexico. The isolated detention center is located at a U.S. Border Patrol training facility about 200 miles from the Mexican border. It currently houses about 400 Central American women and children, according to media reports.

In Artesia, Wittevrongel has 10 clients and a list of 20 other women who have asked for legal representation. From the beginning, Wittevrongel says she has struggled to represent her clients in an isolated facility with no access to photocopiers, scanners or a place to file documents. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials who have been deployed from across the country to staff the detention facility have been courteous and helpful to attorneys but they’ve made it known that their goal is to deport the families as quickly as possible. “The officer in charge told me, ‘I want you to know that all of these people are going to be deported,’” says Wittevrongel. “He said, ‘Our job is to get them deported and there’s maybe one in 1,000 entitled to stay in the United States, and the rest are going to go,’” she says.

Wittevrongel was startled by the admission. “I told him, ‘I appreciate you giving me such a clear statement about it because the whole place feels that way.’”

All 10 of Wittvrongel’s clients had signed a form while in Border Patrol custody, agreeing to expedited removal, a fast-track process to deportation. “They are kept two or three days in custody at the border and processed under difficult, cramped conditions,” she says. “A client told me she was held for several hours in a room with several other women and children. They called her in at 3:00 a.m. and told her to sign the papers. She told me she was so tired and confused she had no idea what she was signing.”

Once someone has agreed to expedited removal it’s extremely difficult to avoid deportation, says Dan Kowalski, an Austin-based immigration attorney. “Statistically it’s hard to overturn,” he says.

Another step in the process that has been cut short, Wittevrongel says, is the credible fear interview, in which an U.S. asylum officer determines whether the immigrant has a “well-founded fear of persecution.” The interview is one of the most important steps in the asylum process. If a person doesn’t pass a credible fear interview he or she will not be able to present their asylum case before a judge. There is a chance for appeal but it’s rarely granted. Many of the women are fleeing extreme violence and persecution and have been traumatized in their home countries and on the journey to the United States. The law requires that the fear of persecution be “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

But the type of violence afflicting Central America and Mexico doesn’t often fit neatly within these categories. Honduras, currently the lead country in the number of refugees arriving, has the highest murder rate in the world. But the violence is caused by a nexus of organized crime, street gangs and corrupt politicians. It takes time for Central Americans to relate their stories of persecution and explain the links between government and crime in their communities. “You’re interviewing traumatized people,” Wittevrongel says. “Typically, these type of credible fear interviews take several hours.”

Women are also forced to meet with the asylum officers accompanied by their children. This makes it difficult for them to focus on the interview and difficult to emphasize to the asylum officer the danger in their home countries. “They’re trying to protect their children,” Wittevrongel says. “They don’t want to say in front of them that they might be killed if they’re sent back, and it’s already likely they’re going to be deported.”

Some of her clients are deported before she can even meet with them for the first time, she says. “Yesterday I asked to see a client but she had already been sent back.” Another client told her that last week 80 women and children were woken up at 1:00 a.m., placed on a bus to the airport and flown back to Central America on a chartered plane. One woman, however, was allowed to stay at the last moment in the United States. She hadn’t passed her credible fear finding, but a judge disagreed with the asylum officer’s ruling and allowed her to continue her asylum case. “One out of 80,” Wittevrongel says. “That gives you an idea of the odds of staying.”

The 72-year-old immigration attorney says she left her home in Boulder, Colorado, to volunteer in Artesia so that the families can have “full access to what the law provides.” The families deserve a chance before they are sent back to the violence and persecution that forced them to flee their home countries. But unfortunately, the process at Artesia seems more like window dressing than what the law requires. “It’s more hurry up and deport than giving them their full due process,” she says.

Guadalupe “Lupe” Treviño, the former sheriff of Hidalgo County and once one of the most powerful lawmen on the border, was sentenced to five years in jail Thursday and a $60,000 fine for money laundering. The sentencing of the former sheriff capped off a two-year corruption scandal that included his son Jonathan Treviño and several other members of law enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley.

First elected in 2005, the 65-year-old Treviño was forced to resign in March after being charged by federal prosecutors. Treviño pleaded guilty in April to one count of money laundering. According to prosecutors, he took thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from a Weslaco drug trafficker named Tomas “El Gallo” Gonzalez.

At the sentencing, Treviño—who had won his last election with 80 percent of the vote—apologized to voters, his family and fellow law enforcement officers and told U.S. District Court Judge Micaela Alvarez at the McAllen hearing that he was “embarrassed” and “remorseful,” according to Sergio Chapa, from the Rio Grande Valley’s KGBT-TV.

In December 2012, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI arrested the sheriff’s son, Jonathan Treviño, a former Mission police officer. Jonathan’s arrest sparked two years of speculation among Valley residents about whether the sheriff was involved in illegal activities, which he repeatedly denied.

Since at least 2006, Jonathan Treviño had run a street-level narcotics task force called the Panama Unit in Hidalgo County. In March 2013, Jonathan and other officers associated with the Panama Unit—including five Hidalgo County deputies—were indicted for “conspiring to possess with intent to distribute cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine. Treviño and other Panama Unit members are now serving time in federal prison.

Former deputy Miguel Flores was at Treviño’s sentencing Thursday. He became an FBI informant after Jonathan Treviño and members of the Panama Unit tried to recruit him in 2012. Now a corporal with the La Joya Police Department, Flores told the Observer that Treviño’s five-year sentence was fair. But he said corruption is still a problem in the Rio Grande Valley. “I believe it will send a message but not everyone will get it,” he said. “It’s a way of life.”

In the last decade, U.S. Border Patrol has become one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the nation. But regulatory oversight and transparency haven’t kept pace. Border residents complain of civil rights abuses including body cavity searches and other harassment at immigration checkpoints. Border Patrol shootings have also increased. Since January 2010, at least 28 people have been killed by agents, some shot in the back while standing in Mexico, according to the ACLU. But for anyone with a grievance against the federal agency, there’s little remedy other than a lawsuit. In March, two border congressional leaders—one a Republican and the other a Democrat—filed a bill to make the Border Patrol more accountable to the public and to require better use-of-force training and oversight for its agents.

Whether the bill will make it through a Congress deeply divided on anything border-related is questionable. But Congressman Steve Pearce (R-NM), cosponsor of the bill along with Congressman Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), is pragmatic about its chances. So far, he’s the only Republican signed on to House Resolution 4303, known as the Border Enforcement Accountability, Oversight, and Community Engagement Act of 2014. “Immigration is one of the hottest, most volatile issues,” Pearce says. “So it’s not like we think it’s going to automatically pass.”

To date, six Democrats have pledged support, and in April the bill was referred to the Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, where it remains. Even if it doesn’t pass, Pearce says, it still sends a message many Republicans can get behind: that federal overreach—which is sometimes literal—needs to be reined in. “The Border Patrol agents are very arrogant, and I can’t tell you how many constituents I’ve had in my office complaining,” Pearce says. “I’ve had constituents subjected to body cavity searches.”

HR 4303 would require the agency to create a Border Community Liaison Office to field complaints and a committee to evaluate Border Patrol training and use-of-force policies, and to report to Congress on agent-related deaths. Momentum for reform is growing. Under pressure from lawmakers and human rights groups, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the umbrella agency of Border Patrol, recently released a highly critical report by an independent auditor evaluating the agency’s use-of-force policies. The report found that in some cases agents stepped in front of moving vehicles to justify shooting, and that other agents shot at people throwing rocks when they could have simply moved out of the way. “I think this bill—even if it doesn’t pass—communicates its own message to the Border Patrol,” Pearce says. “People are watching. And as other legislators learn more about the bill there’s going to be a predominant opinion that something needs to be done.”

President Obama issued a presidential memo Monday calling the huge number of unaccompanied children crossing the border—primarily into Texas—an “urgent humanitarian situation.” The White House announced it will put the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in charge of coordinating federal agencies to respond to the growing crisis.

Thousands of unaccompanied children—the majority between 7 and 18—are fleeing deteriorating security and economic conditions in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. They are primarily arriving in the Rio Grande Valley—the shortest distance from Central America to the U.S. border. The number of children has been climbing since 2009 from an average of 8,000 a year to an estimated 60,000 or more children in 2014.

In a media conference call arranged by the White House, Cecilia Muñoz, the White House director of domestic policy, said President Obama issued the memo to unify federal agencies and provide for a coordinated response. Muñoz acknowledged that the growing number of children crossing the border alone was not a new phenomenon, but the scale in the last few months caught the government off guard. “The number of children coming is much larger than we anticipated,” she said. “It’s a 90 percent increase from last year and we are seeing more girls and more children under the age of 13 compared to previous years.”

In response to the growing crisis, the Department of Defense opened the Lackland Air Force Base two weeks ago in San Antonio to house as many as 1,200 children. The government also plans to fly children to a naval base in Ventura County, California, which can serve as an emergency shelter for up to 600 children, said Mark Greenberg, assistant secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Service’s Administration for Children and Families, the agency primarily in charge of caring for the unaccompanied children. The nonprofit BCFS Health and Human Services will care for the children at Lackland, Greenberg said.

Craig Fugate, FEMA administrator, said the goal is that no child be in Border Patrol detention for more than 72 hours, when the law mandates that the child be transferred to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a shelter that is appropriate for children. Currently, Border Patrol stations are at capacity or overflowing in South Texas with children in need of assistance. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is struggling with the overflow, Fugate said. “They are backing up in facilities that were never designed for children.”