Jonathan Ryan, a lawyer with Raices, a nonprofit organization in Texas that provides free legal services to migrants, said in a statement to The Times that the children he met with felt “confined, distressed and like they are being punished.”
Another lawyer said the government had focused on moving the children out of the border facilities and into emergency shelters set up swiftly to house them. But it had not acted with the same sense of urgency about getting the children out of the emergency shelters.
The shelters were built to be temporary spaces where young migrants could be cared for after what was often a traumatic journey and their initial apprehension by Customs and Border Protection. But the average stay in the shelters has been over a month.
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