Bill Nelson to tour South Florida facility holding roughly 1,000 migrant children

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson will be touring a Homestead facility Tuesday where an estimated 1,000 undocumented migrant children are being held by the Trump administration.

As first reported by the Miami New Times, the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children was reopened under the Trump administration recently. Previously, the Obama administration used the compound to house unaccompanied migrant children – the average stay was about a month.

But it’s currently unclear whether the children being detained in Homestead are just unaccompanied minors who entered the country without their parents or also children who were taken from their families under the Trump administration’s new “zero-tolerance” policy. The policy forcefully separates undocumented immigrant families who are detained – nearly 2,000 minors were separated from their adult guardians between April 19 and the end of May, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The Trump administration has been widely condemned after U.S. Customs and Border Protection released videos and photos showing children and adults held in cages and sleeping on mattresses on the floor at a Texas immigration processing center.

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This article appears in Jun 13-19, 2018.