Pocan Visits Florida Child Detention Center

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan says he wants to know more about why it’s costing $750 per day to hold migrant children at a privately-owned Miami detention facility following a Monday visit to the center to observe conditions there.

Pocan, a Democrat from Madison, suggested the amount paid by the federal government to the Homestead shelter in South Florida was creating a disincentive to reuniting the children with their families.

“When a facility is making $750 a day to honestly warehouse people — because that’s pretty much what’s happening at these facilities — there is maybe not the greatest incentive to move people out of the system,” Pocan said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters.

The Homestead facility is being overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. While it’s being run under a private contract, it operates on federal land.

It is designed to be a “temporary influx care facility” where children between the ages of 13 and 17 are held. According to a recent HHS summary of the facility, roughly 2,240 children were being supervised there as recently as May 30.

Pocan said there were approximately 1,300 children at Homestead when he visited, saying he thought public scrutiny had led to children being moved elsewhere.

The congressman said that during his visit he observed an education program at the facility, but he said that the facility was so loud that he couldn’t hear the lesson being read by an instructor over a loudspeaker.

“These are not the proper conditions for people who have gone through the traumatic experiences in their life,” Pocan said. “We essentially are warehousing people in bunk beds in large rooms, and for some reason that is $750 a day.”

A spokesperson for HHS did not immediately respond to Pocan’s comments, but the agency’s summary of the Homestead facility said the average length of stay there had fluctuated based on the number of children referred there. As of last month, HHS said most of the children in custody there are from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Pocan, who sits on the House Committee on Appropriations, said a subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies planned an oversight with senior HHS executives to discuss the facility.

Pocan also told reporters he expected a House resolution would pass Tuesday condemning President Donald Trump’s recent tweets about four Democratic U.S. Representatives.

Trump tweeted Sunday that “‘Progressive Democratic Congresswomen’ who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

Trump was referencing four lawmakers who have recently clashed with Democratic leadership: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

All four women are U.S. citizens, and all but Omar were born in the United States. Omar is originally from Somalia, from which she fled as a refugee before settling in the U.S.

Pocan told reporters the problems went beyond Trump’s tweet.

“I mean his entire policy at the border is a racist policy,” Pocan said. “It’s based on stopping people with brown and black skin from coming into the United States, and until we can change all of that, we unfortunately have what appears to be a person who is a racist who is the president of the United States. You have to put it that bluntly.”

Trump has pushed back against calls for him to apologize for his remarks.

“Those Tweets were NOT Racist. I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” Trump tweeted Tuesday.