President Joe Biden\u2019s administration has portrayed its immigration policy as a humane departure from recent precedent. In a March briefing at the White House, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that his agency was coming \u201cout of the depths of cruelty\u201d in which it operated during the Trump administration. But as the new administration prepares to detain thousands of migrant children at sites with histories of toxic contamination, environmental justice advocates are questioning whether such circumstances can truly be considered humane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last month, hundreds protested in the Miami-area suburb of Homestead, where the once-largest youth migrant detention center<\/a> in the U.S. was slated to reopen, despite the fact that it had been deemed too environmentally toxic for humans by the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Air Force, and Miami-Dade County. The Homestead Migrant Detention Facility, which former President Donald Trump temporarily closed in 2019 neighbors a Superfund site where 16 sources of highly contaminated military waste, including arsenic, lead, and mercury, are still found. (It was also notorious for reports of sexual abuse<\/a> by staff.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a move to quell the ruckus, Biden told the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency charged with caring for migrant minors in U.S. custody, to find other options. However, two of the sites they went on to offer instead, Texas\u2019 Fort Bliss and Joint Base San Antonio<\/a>, are themselves known to be contaminated with toxic chemicals that exceed government safety thresholds. While Joint Base San Antonio is still waiting on new arrivals, 500 unaccompanied youth were moved to El Paso\u2019s Fort Bliss last week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the Trump Administration first began toying with the idea of using Fort Bliss as a holding site in 2019, the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice released government documents showing that the facility\u2019s grounds had a history of cancer-causing chemical contamination<\/a> far above official safety thresholds \u2014 and that cleanup of these toxic areas had not been verified. In 1998, some carcinogenic volatile organic compounds were found at more than 460 times the level deemed safe by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. Since then, at least 80 toxic sites on the base have been identified and remediated, but even after the cleanup effort sites were found to contain levels of arsenic as high as 19 times the EPA\u2019s maximum safe level for residential soil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Joint Base San Antonio on the other side of Texas, the water is contaminated with the so-called \u201cforever chemicals\u201d known as PFAS at levels two times higher than what the EPA deems safe<\/a>, thanks to the military\u2019s decades-long use of toxic firefighting foam. The air pollution levels on the base and in the surrounding community are some of the worst in the country<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The administration\u2019s move to open these new holding sites comes in the middle of a period that has left roughly 20,500 unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody as of Thursday, according to Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS. Reports from the border<\/a> have described overcrowded facilities that have left hundreds of children younger than 13 jailed for longer than the maximum 72 hours permitted by law.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In response to concerns from environmental justice activists about the new holding sites, HHS told Grist that the agency continues to take \u201cthe safety and health of unaccompanied children referred to [its] care with the utmost seriousness\u201d and that it would conduct environmental assessments before children enter any new facilities, in accordance with its longstanding policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n News reports and administrative leaks show that other toxic sites<\/a> are under consideration as new holding sites as well. Since 2018, Earthjustice has identified at least six youth facilities, either in active use or under consideration for future use, that are home to levels of toxins and chemical waste considered unfit for residential use. Many of them are current or former military bases. Earthjustice says that HHS\u2019s environmental assessments are insufficient and that many past sites were deemed safe by the department despite evidence showing contamination levels that were potentially harmful to humans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThese children don\u2019t deserve to be sentenced to cancer and other consequences of environmental hazards within these facilities,\u201d said Raul Garcia, a legislative director at EarthJustice. \u201cThey shouldn\u2019t be punished for something that isn\u2019t their fault and is out of their control.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Garcia called it ironic that many of those displaced by natural disasters are subjected to a new form of environmental violence once they reach the U.S. A large portion of youth arriving at the border are from Central American countries that were devastated by Hurricanes Eta and Iota<\/a> in November. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPoor people of color generally tend to receive all the burden of the racist system that already exists within the United States,\u201d said Garcia. \u201cThere is this cycle of environmental trauma for immigrants.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Historically, Earthjustice and other advocacy groups have found more success blocking the use of migrant detention sites that are privately-owned, rather than military bases. In addition to the canceled reopening of the Homestead Migrant Detention Facility in Florida<\/a>, two other detention sites have been nixed for their environmental failures over the past month. A site in Midland, Texas, was briefly closed to new arrivals after the state warned that its water wasn\u2019t drinkable<\/a> due to chemical contamination<\/a>. A proposed holding location at a NASA research center in Moffett, California, was also scrapped after activists highlighted its proximity to a known Superfund site<\/a> with high levels of toxic chemicals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a statement<\/a> following the opening of Fort Bliss, Earthjustice said that the Biden administration\u2019s recent moves show that the country has failed to create conditions to keep those in custody safe. Pointing to reports of forced sterilization<\/a>, the use of industrial chemical disinfectants at other migrant detention facilities<\/a>, and uncontrolled outbreaks of COVID-19<\/a>,\u201d the group is calling on Biden to immediately halt the use of both private and government-owned sites that \u201cplace children in such unsafe facilities\u201d and find options that don\u2019t use \u201ctoxic sites, military sites, or detention-like settings\u201d to house children.<\/p>\n This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline Migrant children are being held in toxic U.S. detention centers<\/a> on Apr 9, 2021.<\/p>\n