Hundreds of migrant girls transported after abrupt closure of Houston shelter

Representatives aiming to help the migrant girls said they want answers regarding the heavy law enforcement presence on Friday night before agencies shut the facility down.

Video Transcript

- So we're going to go ahead and get started. I will make a statement first in English and then in Spanish, and then I will-- at that time, we'll go ahead and take questions. So [SPANISH]-- well, let's start in English. My name is [INAUDIBLE] Espinoza, and I'm executive director of Fiel. Today, we are-- we have semi good news in the sense that we just found out that the detention center in the north side of Houston, which was abruptly opened, now has abruptly closed. The good news on this is, number one, is that the conditions that we saw inside of the center were not the most appropriate or the best conditions for anybody to be in, much less kids, much less young girls.

The other good news that comes out of this is that we-- we-- we would hope, or we have heard that some of these young girls are going to be reunited with their families. It's important to point out that when we visited the center about two weeks ago now, we were told that, out of the 464 kids that were inside of this center, could be immediately placed with a sponsor or family member. And when we say a sponsor, it doesn't mean like somebody from off the street, but rather a family member or a person who has family ties to these children that they could be placed with.

The unfortunate news, or what we're asking for more transparency on, are a couple of things. Number one is what led to the closing of the center. Number two, why was the center chosen to begin with. And number three, where are these girls going after this. Where are-- what's going to be the process, and what really is being done to make sure that the remaining kids can be placed with their family members or placed with their sponsors to make sure that, rather than focusing more time and effort into opening these centers, we can focus our time and energy into reunifying families and having family reunification.

So those are some of the things that we have, those are some of the questions. So we're asking for transparency from the ORR, as well as HHS, to know as to what happened in the center. The other thing that rings a bell, and we don't know if this is related, but last night there was an incident, something happened at the center that prompted a very large response of first responders.

[? A ?] [? line ?] from our team was there, and we were in contact throughout the night with the different members of Congress, as well as we would try to get in touch with the center as so they could tell us what all occurred last night, if something occurred last night. So we are waiting still for answers on that. We have not gotten answers up until this point. And we're hoping that, in the near future or immediately, ORR and HHS can provide us with information as to these two things are related or what led to really the closing of this center.

But once again, we are happy in a sense and this is a victory in a sense for the community in the sense that some of these children are going to be placed with their parents or with their sponsors. And number two is that the living conditions in which these children were at, which was a warehouse, were taken into account-- we hope that they were taken into account in the closing of the center.

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