Nearly 620 immigrant children have come and gone at the shelter at Naval Base Ventura County in Port Hueneme that is temporarily housing teenagers apprehended illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent.
As of Thursday, there were about 520 13- to 17-year-olds living at the shelter that opened its doors June 6 to help cope with the surge of unaccompanied children crossing the southwest border.
Customs and Border Patrol detained 24,000 unaccompanied minors — primarily from Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras — crossing the border in 2013. By May, that number had already reached 47,000, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Unaccompanied minors detained at the border are placed into deportation proceedings, but they are turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services. The department’s Administration for Children and Families provides short-term housing until the children can be placed with a family member or sponsor in the U.S. leading up to their immigration court hearing.
As the 100 permanent shelters became overwhelmed, military housing facilities were opened in Port Hueneme, Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and Fort Sill in Oklahoma.
Since news broke that Ventura County would become a part of this story garnering national attention, the local response has been prominent and swift.
A county-affiliated medical clinic signed a yearlong contract to provide on-site physicians every day of the week; congresswoman Julia Brownley, D-Westlake Village, is seeking transparency of the shelter’s operations; community organizations have gathered to jointly address political and humanitarian concerns; and private citizens continue to use social media to rally donations.
“I’m really proud of Ventura County for coming together in a welcoming and humane way,” said Lucas Zucker, a community organizer for the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, or CAUSE. “It’s especially inspiring because there are some other places in the country where people are protesting at these facilities.”
Buses transporting migrant children and families had to be rerouted to San Diego for processing Tuesday after protesters blocked the path to the Murrieta U.S. Border Patrol Station, according to The Associated Press.
CAUSE and Ventura County Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, or CLUE-VC, along with other nonprofits and members of the private Facebook group, “Kids Housed at the Base,” have formed a coalition specifically dedicated to providing assistance to the shelter.
“These are children in a certainly vulnerable position,” Zucker said. “We obviously want to make sure there’s safeguards against misconduct.”
Barry Zimmerman, Human Services Agency director, said the agency will respond to referrals and allegations of abuse at the shelter, but will have to work with the federal government and law enforcement officials to determine jurisdiction of any potential cases.
Vanessa Frank, board chair for CLUE-VC and a Ventura-based immigration attorney, is helping lead the coalition.
“The children are fleeing violence in their home countries. Those countries are increasingly unable to protect anybody,” Frank said. Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, “in the past few years, suffered. They’re not really making the gains that we’re hoping in educating kids and assuring their rights.”
Honduras has the highest homicide rate of any country with 90 intentional homicides per 100,000 people in 2012, according to the World Bank. El Salvador and Guatemala round out the top five with rates of 41 and 40 homicides, respectively.
In 2011, Honduras had a poverty rate of nearly 62 percent — surpassed only by Zimbabwe. During that year, 54 percent of Guatemala’s residents were living in poverty while 41 percent of El Salvadorans were impoverished.
Frank said “the increase in violence and lack of security is the primary push” driving children to leave their native countries in Central America, “even more than reuniting with family” in the United States.
But since identifying this “humanitarian crisis,” the Obama administration is also working to make it clear that U.S. immigration policy does not grant deportation relief to children illegally entering the country.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson wrote an open letter at the end of June to the parents of the unaccompanied children detailing that the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is for children that entered the U.S. illegally before June 2007.
Johnson’s letter adds the immigration reform bill being considered by Congress provides an earned path to citizenship, but only for certain people who came to the U.S. before 2012.
Frank, however, said misunderstanding immigration policy is not the reason for the flood of children deciding to “jump on top of a train for three days and walk through the desert.”
“People are fleeing with fear of their lives and well-being,” she said. “It’s pretty far-fetched that you’re an 11-year-old in Guatemala saying, ‘If I go there, I heard about this California Dream Act. I would probably get a full-ride to Cal.’ That’s not what’s happening.”
Part of the local coalition’s goal is to ensure the immigrant children housed at the Base receive some sort of introduction to the deportation process because Frank said the proceedings will last several years.
The Los Angeles immigration court is the third-most backlogged in the country, with cases taking an average of 800 days — more than two years, Frank said.
“It’s really important that the kids get … at least a fundamental orientation of what’s going to happen to them,” she said.
Texas-based Southwest Key Programs was contracted to staff the Port Hueneme facility and held a career fair in Oxnard the weekend before the shelter opened looking to fill hundreds of jobs, according to its website.
There are 45 Spanish-speaking case managers working at the shelter, but Frank said it is a concern that many of the children coming from Guatemala speak an indigenous language instead of Spanish.
“There hasn’t been a lot of transparency,” Frank said of Southwest Key. “I’m not sure if they were really prepared for the broad and committed response from the community.”
Brownley said in an email that she has “been working closely with the Department of Health and Human Services, the Naval Base, and local elected officials and nonprofits to make sure the children are receiving appropriate care and legal counsel, and I will continue to monitor the situation very closely.”
Joan Araujo, Health Care Agency deputy director, said a one-year contract to provide medical staff at the shelter was signed between Southwest Key and the West Ventura Medical Clinic.
Dr. Ramsey Ulrich, medical director for West Ventura Medical Clinic, signed the contract through his corporation to provide two four-hour shifts each day of a physician or midlevel practitioner.
Araujo said the county has never dealt with a shelter of this magnitude.