Trump Administration is spending 33 million U.S dollars for Empty Detention Camp

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The White House officials said the administration of Donald Trump has spent at least 33 million U.S dollars in the past 7 weeks to staff an immigrant detention center for unaccompanied minors in Texas that have been completely empty since last month. The last child left the Homestead detention center on 3 August, and yet the sprawling facilities have reportedly remained staffed to house as many as 1,200 immigrants at once. The director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Jonathan Hayes acknowledged the soaring figures during a congressional hearing on Wednesday regarding immigrant children in U.S custody and their specific mental health needs.

Hayes was asked by Wisconsin Democrat Mark Pocan if his office was, in fact, spending 600 U.S dollars a day to pay for each of the 1,200 available beds. Hayes said, “It’s the beds, but yes sir”. He said the initial idea was to keep the facilities open after sudden influxes of unaccompanied minors left detention centers inundated with newly-arriving migrants earlier this year. Reopening and re-staffing the Homestead center would take a minimum of 90 to 120 days. Hayes said the plan was made to keep the facilities open given the extreme uncertainty of referrals coming across our nation’s southern border and how many kids we might have to care for.

Hayes added that closing Homestead isn’t really a switch that we’re ready to turn off at this point. Pocan then chided the official over the staggering costs to keep the Homestead facilities open for invisible, imaginary, nonexistent human beings. The office of the Refugee Resettlement said the officials saw a high of about 16,000 unaccompanied migrant children in U.S custody last year, there are currently more than 5,700. Trump and his administration were criticized by Democrats at the hearing for taking hard-line immigration policies at the U.S-Mexico border. They said only further contributed to the humanitarian crisis in the region.