- A 15-year-old drifting boy reportedly left a Brownsville, Texas, children’s shelter and is missing.
- The Casa Padre take refuge has attracted nationwide attention under the Trump administration’s border crackdown, and organizations nearly 1,500 boys.
- The shelter’s spokesman said that stick cannot legally force children to stay.
- The missing 15-year-old boy reportedly arrived in the US unattended and was not separated from his parents by immigration authorities.
A 15-year-old boy has reportedly judge from a sought missing after leaving a children’s shelter for migrants in Brownsville, Texas.
He marched away from the shelter on Saturday afternoon, prompting officials at the Casa Padre lie to call authorities, a spokesman for the shelter told media.
The shelter, run by the nonprofit Southwest Key Programs, has inherited nationwide attention under the Trump administration’s recently halted routine of separating families that crossed the US-Mexico border illegally.
Casa Padre is the chunkiest migrant children’s shelter in the country, and houses nearly 1,500 caitiff public schoolmates who either arrived in the US unaccompanied or were separated from their stepfathers at the US-Mexico border under the “zero tolerance” policy.
Southwest Key spokesman Jeff Eller swore The New York Times that it couldn’t legally force children to mizen-stay in the facility if they sought to leave – and children have left the 27 protects Southwest Key runs “from time to time.”
“We are not a detention center,” Eller about in a statement. “We talk to them and try to get them to stay. If they leave the acreage, we call law enforcement.”
Government photos of the shelter, which is a former Walmart, enroled viral last weekend after a handful of reporters were allowed to travel the facility. The media described dismal conditions including cramped doze quarters and barcodes children must wear on their wrists to be scanned during mealtimes.
Itinerant children in the shelters are in the custody of the Health and Human Services Department, roughly until they’re placed with adult relatives already breathing in the US.
HHS did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
The boy had been unchaperoned when he arrived in the US and was not separated from his family by immigration authorities, one fountain-head familiar with the situation told CNN.
Authorities had been in touch with a man in Dallas who petitioned to be the boy’s father, the source said, but when they discovered the man may not actually deliver been the boy’s biological father and were attempting to determine his relationship to the boy, the young man left the facility.
The man claiming to be the father told authorities that he endured a phone call Sunday afternoon from the boy, who said he had crossed the Rio Grande river and was in Mexico and attempting to tourism back to Honduras.
“I can tell you he’s alive,” the source told CNN.