HOMESTEAD HIGH HOMEWORK

 

 

The really hilarious thing about this week's comic is that it's based on a real place.

 

Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Minors is in Homestead, Florida, and kids 13-17 are housed in the facility run for profit by a subsidiary of Caliburn International.  It's for children who applied for asylum in the U.S., but "unaccompanied" isn't always accurate, because that's the designation for children arriving without parents, but they may have arrived with adult siblings, other relatives or family friends.

 

 

Separate from Trump's monstrous family separation policy, this treatment of "unaccompanied" minors differs significantly from the treatment under Obama:  It apparently takes much more time to place the children out of facilities with sponsor families and relatives, and there are reports that the children are being used as "bait" for sponsor families and relatives to come to claim the children and then get deported. There is no great solution for the humanitarian crisis in Central America, but I know that cruel and punitive deterrence policies deliberately inflicted on children can't be any part of the United States of America.

 

 

You can read more about Homestead here: NPR; Miami Herald; Concord Monitor; Berlin Consulting.

 

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Excerpted from this week's Inner Hive mailing