New Jersey agency has federal contract to shelter migrant children

An agency in South Jersey is among more than 100 across the country that have contracts with the federal government to provide shelter to immigrant children who have crossed the southwestern border.

The Center for Family Services Inc. of Camden has a $4 million contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide temporary shelter to children in its care, an official there said Wednesday.

The agency has served 90 children, 95 percent of whom entered the United States without a parent, under a program that has been in place for over a year, said Jen Hammill, the agency's associate vice president of development and public relations. The center has 17 “safe homes” in South Jersey, she said.

“We do not have foster homes; we have shelter homes," she said. "We have various levels of care, emergency housing to permanent supportive housing to group homes to shelter homes."

The center is currently housing 27 children for the federal government, Hammill said. Of those, 19 boys and girls are being housed in one place, while four teenage mothers and four babies are at another location, she said.  

"The children are being housed in a home setting,'' she said, "

She referred specific questions about the children to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.

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“These children have needed a safe place to live while teams are working on family reunification," she added, "and we are providing that safe home as we do for any child who comes to us who is vulnerable, who is disadvantaged, who needs a safe place to live while we work on family reunification.”

Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told reporters in a conference call on Tuesday that more than 80 percent of the 11,786 children in his organization's care have entered the United States by crossing the border by themselves. He said more than 2,000 had been separated from parents at the border.

He said the department would prefer to keep children who have been separated from their parents nearby. Claims that children were sent to New York because there weren't enough beds in facilities near the border were incorrect, he said. 

“We would tend to not to want to put separated kids in New York because we would want to keep them closer to their parents so when the parents are adjudicated and if they are removed, then the child can depart with the parents,’’ he said. 

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that calls for migrant families to be detained together after they cross the border, following a public outcry and criticism from both Democrats and Republicans about a new "zero-tolerance" approach to immigration enforcement that led to the separation of children from their parents. 

Migrants crossing the border will continue to be criminally prosecuted, but children will be able to stay with their parents while their legal cases are considered by the courts. The detentions could be indefinite. But the administration will have to address a 1997 settlement that prohibits the federal government from detaining children for more than 20 days. 

While the children are in the care of the federal government, they are housed in more than 100 shelters across 17 states that provide educational services as well as food, clothing and the opportunity to exercise and play, Wagner said.   

“The children in our care are receiving a full range of services, including medical and mental health services as well as counseling," he said. "They are under constant supervision." 

Hammill, of the Center for Family Services, said the organization uses a "trauma-informed approach" to support the children in its care, including services for their emotional, psychological and physical well-being.  

Sally Pillay, program director for First Friends of New Jersey and New York, an organization that sends volunteers to visit immigration detainees, said she was in contact with a woman who entered the country as an "unaccompanied minor child" with her 2-year-old son and was sent to a shelter in New York. She said when the woman turned 18, she was transferred to the Bergen County Jail by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and separated from her son, who was kept in a group home. 

She said the woman was released on bond last month but was unable to reunite with her son for weeks. She said they were able to reunite and now live in Texas.

"It was very traumatizing for them,'' she said.