Texas Could Soon House 'Tent Cities' For Migrant Kids: Report

Immigrant children separated from their parents could soon be sent to live in "tent cities" on Texas military bases, McClatchy wrote in an exclusive report Wednesday. El Paso's Fort Bliss, Abeline's Dyess Air Force Base and San Angelo's Goodfellow Air Force Base are all being considered for potential sites of temporary shelters that can hold between 1,000 and 5,000 children each.

A Health and Human Services official told McClatchy the department will visit the sites in coming weeks to determine if the sites are suitable for the construction of these tent cities.

The report comes alongside heightened tensions swirling around the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy for those who immigrate to the United States illegally.

PolitiFact reports that while no law mandates the separation of families, Trump's policy often leads to the separating of parents from their children when they are caught entering the country illegally.

This is done so the parents can be prosecuted while the children are held in the custody of a sponsor, often a relative, a foster home or a shelter, PolitiFact reports.

Before Trump took office, families were often detained as a unit and either deported immediately or paroled into the country. Prosecution is now the administration's main approach, meaning immediate deportations no longer happen, Peter Margulies, an immigration law and national security law professor at Roger Williams University School of Law told PolitiFact.

Those families being prosecuted are often sent to processing centers like the one in McAllen, Texas, which El Paso congressman Beto O'Rourke toured Tuesday.

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O'Rourke talked in a Facebook Live video after touring the migrant processing center in McAllen, where parents had already been separated from their children.

"They were in essentially very large cages, pods, cyclone fences 10-feet high with netting on the top," he said. "Polished concrete floors, it's just a gigantic warehouse where hundreds of kids and adults are kept divided by age, families no longer together..."

O'Rourke, who represents Fort Bliss, told the Texas Tribune he could not confirm reports that the bases were being considered for potential detainment centers.

“We have nothing confirmed about where or if military bases will be used for certain," he told The Tribune. "But, I first and foremost am opposed to this policy of family separation... This is absolutely the wrong thing for our country to be doing, and I would hate to see us continue this. The prospect of building tents or using resources at military installations is just wrong.”

Texas Tribune reports six Democratic lawmakers from the El Paso area penned a letter to Kristjen M. Nielsen and Scott Lloyd, Secretary of Homeland Security and director of the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement, respectively.

"The clear purpose of military bases is for armed services operations and housing of military personnel, not for housing immigrant children forcibly taken from their parents," the letter reads.

Some 10,773 migrant children spread across 100 shelters in 14 states were under the care of Health and Human Services at the end of April, Washington Post reported. Those shelters are at 95 percent capacity.

Lead image: Two young girls watch a World Cup soccer match on a television from their holding area where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center on June 18, 2014, in Nogales, Arizona. Brownsville, Texas, and Nogales, have been central to processing the more than 47,000 unaccompanied children who have entered the country illegally since Oct. 1. (Photo by Ross D. Franklin-Pool/Getty Images)