Photography by Monica McGivern
Audio By Carbonatix
Migrant children are still being housed without parents in Miami-Dade County. The Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children is still operational: Kids are living on the compound, taking classes there, seeing doctors, and playing sports on the recreation fields. But they’re not allowed to leave, and as of earlier this summer, some of them had been ripped away from their parents at the U.S. border in contravention of international law.
President Obama opened the shelter in 2016 to house unaccompanied minors who’d arrived at the border, but it was later closed. It quietly reopened under President Trump earlier this year with little public disclosure until New Times visited the facility in June and discovered more than 1,000 children inside. Since then, the stories coming out of the shelter have been uniformly sad: A 15-year-old Honduran girl ran away, for example, and was caught at an auto-parts store and taken back. Here’s the lowdown on why the place should be permanently shut down already:
1. The family of one former immigrant housed there described the facility as “child prison.”
In late 2016, a 17-year-old Guatemalan teen fled her home. Her father was a prominent local politician and had been receiving repeated extortion threats over the past year. He had continually refused to pay, so his enemies warned they would kidnap his daughter. The threat was serious enough that she made the long, treacherous journey to the United States, where her aunt and uncle lived, to seek asylum.
Instead of being released to stay with her family while the government evaluated her plea for safety, though, the teen had to battle for months to get out of a facility she and her guardians described as a “child prison” – the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children.
“It took long,” the young woman told New Times in Spanish this past Friday. (Her name and the dates of her time in custody have been obscured to protect her identity because she still has an open immigration case.) “I was detained for three months, and I was worried about the time [the process was taking].”
The woman, who is now an adult, is the first former detainee at the Homestead camp to speak publicly about her experience since New Times broke the news last week that the site had quietly reopened to house more than 1,000 migrant children – including dozens separated from their parents under President Donald Trump’s new border policy.
The woman said that, after being bounced through multiple prison-like detention centers, she was glad to enter the comparatively clean and orderly Homestead facility. But her family and her lawyer say that they were repeatedly threatened by social workers and that the teen cried through her scheduled phone calls.
“She came into the country, and they bounced her from place to place until she ended up there in Homestead,” the woman’s guardian tells New Times, “and we just bent over backward with whatever it would take to get her out of what I like to call ‘child prison.'”
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2. The company running the facility once paid a $3.8 million medical-fraud settlement.
In Homestead, a federal compound housing as many as 1,000 migrant children is managed in part by a federal contractor based in Cape Canaveral called Comprehensive Health Services, which has held a contract at the Homestead camp since February 2018. Sen. Bill Nelson says 94 children at Comprehensive Health’s facility have been taken from their parents by U.S. immigration agents.
According to a New Times review of past state documents, that contractor is operating in the Sunshine State thanks to a handy assist from Gov. Rick Scott’s administration. In December 2016, Comprehensive Health announced a new project that would “create 150 new jobs” at its Cape Canaveral headquarters – and in exchange, the state in July 2017 awarded the company a $600,000 “qualified target-industry” tax-incentive package.
But just as Scott was negotiating that tax break, Comprehensive Health was hashing out a deal with the feds to pay a $3.8 million settlement to the U.S. Department of Justice over a medical-fraud claim. After Comprehensive Health paid the fine in February 2017 (without admitting any wrongdoing), Florida gave the company the tax breaks anyway.
Before Miami-Dade County’s now-infamous child-migrant camp reopened earlier this year under President Trump, the facility operated under President Obama from 2016 through April 2017.
3. One
And while the facility was up and running the first time, one worker at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children was sentenced to ten years in prison for sexually exploiting children.
According to federal news releases and previous reports from the Miami Herald, Merice Perez Colon, then age 35, was arrested in 2017 and charged with attempted coercion and enticement of a minor to engage in illicit sexual activity and attempted production of child pornography. Prosecutors said she had sent a boy a series of explicit text messages, including images of herself nude and masturbating. In another set of messages, Perez Colon asked to see the underage boy’s penis.
“I want a video of you masturbating,” Perez Colon told the child. “Since I already sent you several of mine.” The boy reportedly then sent images to her.
