The prison camp for migrant children in Tornillo, Texas, is no more. Following months of intense public scrutiny and a blockbuster report revealing that a top Trump administration official had waived FBI background checks for employees tasked with supervising these kids, officials said last Friday that the remaining jailed children had been moved.
“Officials said about 5,500 of the 6,200 Central American teens who cycled through the Tornillo camp since June have been released to a parent or guardian inside the United States to await a decision in their immigration cases,” the Washington Post reported. “About 700 were transferred to other facilities overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.”
While Tornillo’s closure represents a victory for the humane treatment of vulnerable children, it absolutely cannot mean a free pass for those responsible, considering that BCFS, the organization contracted to run the prison camp, “filed more than 30 reports on ‘significant incidents’ at Tornillo since June, some involving interactions between children and staff, but none of a sexual nature.”
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats who tried to visit and talk to detained children were blocked. “We wanted to talk with the young people here and when I asked why we couldn’t talk to them, I was told that we shouldn’t interrupt their schedule," said Sen. Mazie Hirono last month. "There’s probably a word for that and it’s called BS.”
It’s this shroud of secrecy that necessitates freedom for the nearly 11,000 other kids still detained in facilities across the U.S., almost all of them unaccompanied minors who came here by themselves. “Instead of putting these children with family and a public school, they are warehousing these kids,” said Florida Congress member Frederica Wilson. “For most of these children that we have in detention, we have sponsors that have volunteered to take them and to sort of act as foster parents until their asylum cases have been heard.”
It was the federal government that stretched out this supposedly “temporary” jail for months on end, by intentionally making it harder to release kids to willing and qualified sponsors. There’s no doubt that public outrage helped fuel the prison camp’s demise. Now that same outrage is going to be needed not just to investigate what happened in Tornillo, but to make sure other kids detained elsewhere have the freedom and justice they deserve too.
"The last child has left Tornillo," Beto O'Rourke wrote on Twitter. "It's good for these kids and their families. And it shows the power of people who showed up for them and shared with the rest of the country that we were locking up immigrant kids for months at a time. You made this happen."