A new report in The Texas Tribune found that despite a federal court order that immigrant children separated from their families be reunited with their parents, the number of of youngsters being detained in the state is on the rise.
According to The Tribune, the number of children housed in Texas shelters rose from 4,919 on June 21 to 5,024 on July 13. This includes both immigrant children who arrived at the border unaccompanied and children that were separated from their families by federal authorities.
The report says that there are applications for up to four additional shelters to be built in Texas. The shelters would be built to “care for unaccompanied boys and girls up to 17 years old or as young as infants.”
These findings come on the heels of the Trump administration’s claims that it has reunited hundreds of children with their families. The administration claims it currently has 2,551 immigrant children between the ages of 5 and 17 in its care who were separated from their parents under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy. So far, only 364 of those children have been reunited.
Children currently being held also face extremely harsh living conditions. Previous reporting has found that some children are being housed in vacant warehouses, while others are being sent to unsafe homes.
New reports from Texas have also exposed the psychologically abusive treatment that children in the “Casa Padre” facility in Brownsville, Texas faced even after President Trump signed an order that supposedly halted his administration’s zero-tolerance approach.
A judge has given the Trump administration a July 26 deadline to reunite all of the children with their families, but the government claims that hundreds of parents are ineligible for reunification.