The Trump Administration has opted to use an Army base in Oklahoma to hold growing numbers of immigrant children in its custody after running out of room at government shelters.
Fort Sill, an 150-year-old installation once used as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, has been selected to detain 1,400 children until they can be given to an adult relative, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
— Time.com
As of April 30, 2019, the department of Health and Human Services has taken 40,900 children seeking asylum into custody along the southern border, a 57% increase from 2018, according to Time.
The surge in detainees has overwhelmed existing and new temporary detention facilities in southern border states, so the department has had to make use of a variety of improvised facilities as it undertakes the lengthy, disorganized, and laborious process of reuniting these children with their family members.
That includes holding children in a repurposed former Walmart superstore in Brownsville, Texas, detaining asylum-seeking families in a makeshift, dirt-floored outdoor camp located underneath a highway overpass in El Paso, Texas, holding 1,500 migrants in a private prison in Louisiana known for documented cases of inmate abuse and medical neglect, and now, shuttling temporary detainees to Fort Sill, a military base in Oklahoma that was used during World War II as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans.
Though the architecture industry has been relatively silent, with a few exceptions, on issues relating to how detained refugees are held and treated, the issue persists and grows more ominous by the day.
5 Comments
Terrible.
Feels like a larger scale failure of urban planning throughout the US that we can't take in more people, build more cities. Not in a YIMBY urban renewal sort of way, but in a well-designed, trains in every city, humane, post-war German kind of way
The problem in America is not big or small government, but dumb government.
The problem is easily solved by changing immigration laws to make it cheap, quick, and easy so that any reasonable person would legally enter. Then, the only people entering illegally would likely be actual criminals...it’s like we are putting crosswalks every 10 miles and locking up every jaywalker...
But they don’t want to solve anything...the private prisons are making lots of our tax money locking people up....
One thing Bernie is right about....the republicans don’t seem to mind corporate socialism...
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