When the Democratic presidential debates were held in Miami back in June 2019, several candidates visited the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children, an unlicensed and for-profit detention center that held thousands of migrant children who came to the U.S. without their parents throughout the administrations of presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The shelter became the subject of national scorn because of reports of sexual abuse, negligent hiring practices, overcrowding, and human-rights violations. Some children described
crying themselves to sleep at night, worrying they would never be released.
The Democratic candidates and campaign representatives who visited Homestead that summer — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Marianne Williamson, Elizabeth Warren, John Hickenlooper, Bill de Blasio, and Tulsi Gabbard, plus Bernie Sanders' wife and adviser Jane — made some speeches, stood on ladders to get a look at the shelter behind a tall fence, and summoned the attention of national media outlets.
Conspicuously absent was Joe Biden, who announced his candidacy for president in April 2019 and served as vice president when the Obama administration opened the shelter in 2016.
Just a few months after the Democratic debates, the shelter was shuttered in October 2019. But this morning, the
Miami Herald reported that the Biden administration
plans to reopen the Homestead center, which is now called the Biscayne Influx Care Facility.
Immigrant-rights and social-justice groups who previously ran a grassroots campaign to shut down the facility are already decrying the decision to reopen the shelter.
Lis-Marie Alvarado, director of the American Friends Service Committee in Florida, one of the organizations that advocated for the center to be shuttered, tells
New Times the Biden administration has no business reopening the facility.
"This is not a place for children," Alvarado says. "This is a place that is going to be impossible to maintain COVID safety regulations. We're already putting these children in danger. This detention center doesn't have
safety measures for hurricanes. The operators
hire random people who don't have experience or knowledge on how to work with children, especially children facing trauma from leaving their home countries. They're at risk of getting sexually assaulted, and many of them did. They have zero access to
education. They just draw on little papers the whole day and play
soccer. There is zero investment in them."
diverse 
