Jackson Lee “The law enforcement officers have said these are the best behaved children they have ever seen.”
Via Houston Chron
Federal officials on Tuesday morning toured a vacant Houston middle school as a possible site to house unaccompanied children recently caught crossing the border, but offered no indication afterward of whether they planned to use the building on the city’s north side.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, said at a press conference following the tour of Terrell Middle School that she reached out to Houston Independent School District Trustee Rhonda Skillern-Jones after visiting Border Patrol facilities along the border last week and seeing children, some of them toddlers, sleeping on the concrete floors of holding cells.
“We owe to children no matter where they are,” Jackson Lee said. “Whether they are at Crosstimbers and 59” where the school sits, “whether they happen to have found themselves, glazed eyes, across a border and into a land they know nothing about.”
Jackson Lee stressed that the school is simply under review as a possible site, stressing that “there have been no determinations, no commitment, no confirmation.”
A spokesman for the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency charged with the long-term care of children caught crossing the border illegally and alone, declined to say if other sites in Houston are also under consideration. Spokesman Kenneth Wolfe said in a statement that organizations and governments across the country have offered to assist with what is widely being described as a humanitarian crisis along the southern border.
“While only a few facilities will ultimately be selected, a wide range of facilities are being identified and evaluated to determine if they may feasibly provide temporary shelter space for children,” Wolfe said in the statement. “Facilities will be announced when they are identified as viable options.”