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Migrant Children Deserve Our Love, Not Detention
The Homestead detention facility may lock up innocent immigrant kids once again. It’s unconscionable.
I will be forever haunted by the memory of the boys in orange baseball caps playing soccer in the sweltering sun. They shouted and laughed while passing the ball, seemingly making the most of an oppressively humid southern Florida afternoon. If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought this was a typical group of boys. But of course, that wasn’t the case. A heavily guarded, chain-link fence wrapped around the playing field, imprisoning the children.
The kids were locked away inside Homestead, a detention center for unaccompanied immigrant children, located in the outer suburbs of Miami. U.S. officials had snatched them from their families and caregivers for attempting to cross the southern border. Many of the children had escaped lives riddled with violence, poverty, and despair only to be greeted with cruelty and incarceration once they entered the U.S.
Since my visit in July, the federal government announced plans to shutter the Homestead facility. Officials swiftly relocated the remaining few hundred detained children. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, some of them were reunited with sponsors; others were…
