CNS is reporting that the requirements of the grant are that recipients provide residential shelter to the children and that this care be delivered in a manner that is "sensitive to the sexual orientation and gender identity of the youth.
"Residential care providers are required to provide...family planning services," says an official description of the grant program published by HHS. "Residential care providers are required to provide or arrange for the program required services in a manner that is sensitive to the...sexual orientation, gender identity, and other important individual needs of each UAC [unaccompanied alien child]."
UACs are defined as minors who have no lawful immigration status in the U.S., who have not yet reached the age of 18 and who have no parent or legal guardian in the U.S. These youth are to be given a complete medical examination that includes screening for infectious disease within 48 hours of admission. They also receive “appropriate immunizations,” emergency health care services, “family planning services,” other routine medical and dental care, prescription drugs, special diets, and mental health intervention as needed, CNS reports.
The new grant is being offered in response to the crisis presently unfolding on the nation's southern border where children from South American countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are streaming across the US southern border.
The White House claims the sudden influx of youth is due to escalating violence in their home countries, but media outlets in those countries tell a much different story and say the Obama Administration's reluctance to deport illegals is attracting many people who think the time is ripe to get a "free pass" into the U.S.
For example, Judicial Watch is reporting that according to Honduras’s largest newspaper, minors coming to the U.S. will spend "three to four months in federal camps until they can be turned over to family in the U.S. Besides receiving food and shelter, the Honduran newspaper article says, kids will receive English classes, participate in sports and other programs while their relatives are tracked down in the U.S."
El Salvador's largest newspaper reported just a few days ago that US officials in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed that the amnesty offered to illegal immigrants who come to the U.S. as minors under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) law could be extended by another two years.
"The article quotes DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson saying that everyone agrees that a minor who crossed the border illegally in search of a parent or a better life is not breaking our laws," Judicial Watch reports.
Notwithstanding the legal implications of it all, the sheer number of these children is causing a humanitarian crisis along the border with holding centers being described as "jam packed" and rampant with disease and sexually active teens. In some cases, hundreds of children are being housed in facilities that have only four showers. Some children are simply being taken by bus to towns with large Hispanic populations and left on street corners to fend for themselves.
Another serious problem is the potential of disease spreading into the U.S. population.
"We are starting to see chicken pox, MRSA staph infections; we are starting to see different viruses," said Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera told ABC15.
Officials are seeing many people with contagious infections crossing the border and being housed in detention centers where they are separated from the healthy by nothing more than yellow caution tape.
“There's been an outbreak of scabies that's been going on for the past month,” Cabrera said.
And along with the children who are flooding into the country are many miscreants who are taking advantage of an overwhelmed U.S. border patrol who simply cannot keep up with the numbers.
As one agent explained in a desperate letter for help sent to InfoWars, "We have encountered numerous instances of fraud, kidnapping, and exploitation where adults are claiming that very young children are their own, when in fact they are not. Many of the unaccompanied juveniles are claiming that they have a responsible parent to be released to, when in fact they do not."
He goes on to say that "on a good day" they are only able to catch about 30 to 40 percent of the people who are crossing the border, which translates into as many as 10,000 immigrants per week who are simply getting lost in the population.
"And the aliens that are getting away are not the juveniles or the family units because they are turning themselves in at the first sight of agents. The ones we are losing are convicted felons, aliens from special interest countries, and other high risk individuals. We are so overwhelmed and preoccupied by the flood of juveniles and family units that we cannot use our resources to catch the more serious aliens."
The situation at the border is expected to continue escalating in the weeks to come with no real solutions coming out of Washington for either the children or the communities into which they are being sent.
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