Federal authorities have released an 18-year-old Dallas-born U.S. citizen who had been detained in immigration custody for more than three weeks after being stopped at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint, according to multiple reports.
Francisco Erwin Galicia, 18, had been held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Pearsall. His lawyer, Claudia Galan, confirmed his release to The Dallas Morning News and the Associated Press on Tuesday, a day after the Morning Newsfirst reported about his case.
Galicia was traveling in late June with his 17-year-old brother, Marlon Galicia, and a group of friends to a soccer scouting event when they were stopped at an immigration checkpoint in Falfurrias, the Morning News reported. Francisco Galicia had a Texas ID, which can only be obtained with a Social Security number, but his brother, who was born in Mexico and lacked legal status, only had a school ID.
Both brothers were detained and put into CBP custody, according to the newspaper report. After two days in detention, Marlon Galicia signed a voluntary deportation form and is now residing in Reynosa with his grandmother. Francisco Galicia spent three weeks in CBP custody, where he wasn't allowed to use the phone, his mother told the Morning News. He was moved Saturday into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles the intake of single adults, and has been able to call his mother, the newspaper reported.
"He’s going on a full month of being wrongfully detained," his mother, Sanjuana Galicia, told The Dallas Morning News. "He’s a U.S. citizen and he needs to be released now."
Claudia Galan, Francisco Galicia's lawyer, told The Washington Post she presented CBP officers with the 18-year-old's birth certificate and other documents proving his citizenship but was unable to get him released. The Post reported that the delay could be in part because Francisco's mother, who is not a citizen, took out a U.S. tourist visa in his name while he was still a minor, falsely saying he was born in Mexico. Galan told the newspaper that the paperwork confusion only furthered the agency’s suspicion that Galicia’s U.S. documents were fake.
The lawyer told the Morning News she planned to present the same documents, which include a congratulatory certificate his mother was given by hospital staff when he was born and a high school ID, to ICE officers.
Less than a month after itsopening, the emergency shelter for migrant children in Carrizo Springs is reportedly shutting down.
Vice News first reported on its closure — and the potential that it could continue operating without children — on Tuesday. It's unclear what the U.S. Department of Health and Human services plans to do; a spokesperson for the agency declined to offer additional details.
"It was too much, too late," Kevin Dinnin, head of the San Antonio-based nonprofit BCFS Health and Human Services, which operates the facility, told Vice News. "By this weekend, we should have discharged all the children."
The 1,300-bed facility opened June 30 to alleviate the dangerous overcrowding, prolonged detention and filthy conditions at some Border Patrol facilities where children were being held because there was not enough space for them in permanent shelters. HHS officials offered tours of the facility to dozens of journalists and politicians earlier this month, when around 200 teenagers were housed there per day.
But the number of unaccompanied migrant children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped recently, falling from 11,489 in May to 7,378 in June, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. And the 35 state-licensed shelters for migrant children reported housing 4,937 children as of July 18, a large decrease from the more than 8,000 they held at the beginning of the year.
HHS signed a five-year, $8.8 million lease for the 27-acre complex, which had formerly served as housing for oilfield workers. BCFS was awarded a contract for up to $308 million through January 2020 to house and care for around 1,300 children.
Dinnin told The Washington Post that surge shelters like Carrizo Springs are expensive to run — they cost roughly $750 to $800 per child per day — because of their large size and the speed with which they need to be fully functioning. The property is dotted with dormitories, trailers and tents and also has its own fire department and emergency medical team.
The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
MCALLEN — They don’t shower or brush their teeth for days on end. They watch their sick kids cough and cry through the night. And some of them brave toilets so foul, one migrant said, that kids can’t help but throw up inside of them.
These are some of the descriptions provided during interviews this week with more than a dozen migrants held by U.S. border officials and then released to a Catholic shelter in the Rio Grande Valley, ground zero in the unprecedented surge of immigrant families crossing the southern border.
“They don’t have the humanitarian conditions for people to be there,” said Gary, a 33-year-old migrant from Siguatepeque, Honduras, who would only give his first name. “There were more than 200 of us in a single cage — seated on the floor, standing, however we could fit.” He said the stench inside overflowing toilets was so bad it made him gag and caused children to vomit.
“The bathrooms are full, they aren’t cleaning them regularly,” he said.
Some of the women and children were allowed to bathe. Gary’s wife and 7-year-old son, for example, bathed once during their four days inside. Gary, and most of the other men interviewed, said they never got to change out of the filthy clothes they wore when they crossed the border.
Many of those interviewed by The Texas Tribune were held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Central Processing Center in McAllen, one of the two facilities that volunteer attorneys recently described as dangerously overcrowded and unable to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions as required by the 1997 federal court settlement commonly known as the Flores agreement. The lawyers also described horrid conditions in tiny Clint, just outside El Paso.
The U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center, colloquially known as Ursula, in McAllen on June 28, 2019.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
The U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center on Military Highway in McAllen on June 28, 2019.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
Left: The U.S. Border Protection Central Processing Center colloquially known as "Ursula." Right: Another U.S. Border Protection Central Processing Center is located on Military Highway in McAllen. This facility has tents within its parameters.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
But that’s not the only facility struggling to provide basic necessities, some migrants said.
Two Angolans interviewed at a San Antonio migrant shelter said they were sent to a facility in Del Rio in West Texas where they couldn’t bathe or brush their teeth during a two-day stay — a testament to how overwhelmed federal authorities are up and down the border. Left with just $2, they were still trying to get bus tickets to Portland, Maine, as of Friday afternoon.
“We were in prison. For two days, we didn’t take a bath, we couldn’t clean ourselves, we couldn't brush our teeth. The way we got there was the way we left,” said a 43-year-old Angolan migrant who gave his middle name, Evaristo; he said he crossed from the Mexican border city of Ciudad Acuña into Del Rio this week with his wife and three children.
Migrants wait outside a makeshift center in downtown San Antonio where people are given food and a bag with basic hygiene products, then escorted to a nearby shelter to sleep for the night.
Marjorie Kamys Cotera for The Texas Tribune
On the other hand, several migrants gave mostly positive reviews of the big “white tent” they stayed in at the newest processing facility in Donna, near McAllen — demonstrating that conditions also can vary wildly from one center to the next, and in some cases, from one migrant family to the next.
“We were well taken care of,” said Guatemalan migrant Francisca Hernandez, 44, after stepping off a chartered bus from Donna and heading to the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in downtown McAllen. Although neither she nor her twin teenage girls said they got baths or changes of clothes over the 48 hours they spent in Donna, they slept on mattresses and had clean bathrooms and plentiful and decent food.
The migrants are sent to the CBP processing facilities after crossing the border and being apprehended or turning themselves in to agents. Most of the migrants traveling as part of a family seek out the first uniformed officer they can find and request asylum. Once they are processed, most are released with instructions to appear later in immigration court, then shuttled to the McAllen bus station, where chartered buses filled with migrants arrived like clockwork during the day this week.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol, said it could not comment or research any specific allegations unless the Tribune provided the agency with names, alien registration numbers, and times and dates of the alleged treatment.
But in a written statement provided by CBP, an official said “all allegations of civil rights abuses or mistreatment in CBP detention are taken seriously and investigated to the fullest extent possible.”
“U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) leverages our limited resources to provide the best care possible to those in our custody, especially children. As DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and CBP leadership have noted numerous times, our short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations and we urgently need additional humanitarian funding to manage this crisis,” the official said. “CBP works closely with our partners at the Department of Health and Human Services to transfer unaccompanied children to their custody as soon as placement is identified, and as quickly and expeditiously as possible to ensure proper care.”
One CBP official pushed back on the migrants’ descriptions, saying that reporters were able to see for themselves on a recent media tour that the Central Processing Facility has “medical personnel, has food, clothing, shower facilities and laundry facilities.” The CBP official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.
None of the migrants interviewed knew the names or precise locations of the facilities where they stayed. The Texas Tribune tracked chartered buses from both the Central Processing Center and Donna to the McAllen bus station, making it possible to connect the firsthand accounts of many of the migrants to specific facilities.
An immigration bus carrying migrants departs the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center known as Ursula in McAllen on Thursday. The bus will drop-off the migrants at the McAllen Bus Station.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
Their descriptions also match photos of the giant warehouse-like facility on Ursula Avenue — chain-link cells or, as they put it, “cages,” in the middle of a cavernous facility. Most would only give their first names for fear of jeopardizing their asylum cases or getting harassed by federal authorities.
“If you’re able to sleep two hours, you’re lucky,” said Kevin, 21, who had been in the Ursula center for two days and said he never got a bath, toothbrush or toothpaste.
Ananias, 42, was in a cell — “like a dog’’ — at the same center, with his son Gerson, 16. He said they had to sleep in their wet clothes and never got clean ones, let alone toothbrushes.
“It was bad because it was very cold,” he said.
The Central Processing Center — sometimes just called “Ursula” because of the street it’s on — is designed to hold 1,500 people but, as of Thursday, held just under 2,000, according to a Border Patrol official who gave the media a tour of the center. Media outlets on the tour reported that they were not allowed to speak with or photograph the migrants.
The Ursula center, an intake facility where migrants are taken for initial asylum examinations and the gathering of biographical information and fingerprints, was engulfed in controversy after plaintiffs' lawyers made inspections there and in El Paso County in mid-June to ensure compliance with the Flores agreement.
After some of the lawyers shared details of their visits with the Associated Press and other outlets, the news prompted an outcry by members of Congress, presidential candidates and Vice President Mike Pence, who called the conditions “totally unacceptable.” The blowback brought about a rare break from the partisan gridlock in Congress, which approved $4.6 billion in emergency funding that President Donald Trump is expected to approve.
Harlingen lawyer Jodi Goodwin was among those who participated in the inspections of both the Central Processing Center and a temporary tent city built inside the nearby McAllen Border Patrol station. After she and fellow lawyers “raised a stink” about several child migrants who were gravely ill, at least four were soon taken to a hospital, she said.
Goodwin disputed official accounts — delivered during the press tour of the Ursula center Thursday — that every migrant child gets a medical screening at the processing facilities.
"Of all of the people that I saw throughout McAllen Border Patrol and Ursula, there was only one person who ever told me that they had been medically screened, and I interviewed throughout both facilities, probably 60 kids,” Goodwin said.
The health of 6-month-old Yarely was the major concern for Alfredo and Merlin, two 20-something Salvadoran migrants who said they were held for four days without baths or clean clothes in the Rio Grande Valley — precisely where, they weren’t sure. Their daughter got sick inside — as did many other children they saw — and was still coughing at the bus station in McAllen on Wednesday night.
Yarely, the 6-month-old daughter of Alfredo and Merlin, was still coughing at the McAllen bus station Wednesday night.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
“I asked for medicine for my daughter, and they wouldn’t give it to me,” Merlin said. “They just said to give her water.” The young mother said it tasted like chlorine.
The migrants held at a new tent city in Donna, 12 miles east of McAllen, reported far better conditions, though the experience varied from migrant to migrant — some saying they got showers and toothpaste, others reporting they did not. Guatemalan migrant Miriam Diaz Lopez and her daughter spent two days in Donna before going to Ursula and said Donna is "cleaner, more hygienic, and they take care of you better."
Another migrant from Jalapa, Guatemala, Byron Humberto Roman Agustin, said he was in a “white tent” and described conditions consistent with photos of the Donna facility; he said he got a shower, toothpaste, access to medical care, square meals and snacks whenever he wanted. Roman Agustin, 35, also said he had a good mattress and stayed in the same room with his 13-year-old son.
“If you wanted a juice or a yogurt or something, you would just ask for it and they would give it to you at the moment you requested it,” he said. “I heard others saying they were in cages and could only see their kids through the [chain-link] mesh, but we were all together.”
The Tribune also tracked three busloads of migrants from Donna — many of them young children — to a runway at the Brownsville airport. The buses then moved next to a World Atlantic Airlines jet that, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware, flew to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio. That would be consistent with news reports from May saying that migrants in overcrowded centers are being flown out of South Texas to be processed at Border Patrol facilities that have more capacity.
A group of migrants exit an immigration bus at the McAllen Central Station in downtown McAllen on June 25, 2019.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
A young boy is escorted off of an immigration bus by a woman at the McAllen Central Station in downtown McAllen on June 25, 2019.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
Left: Migrants exit a bus at the McAllen Central Station in downtown McAllen. Right: A woman escorts a young boy off an immigration bus at the station.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
Regardless of the conditions they faced in processing centers, nearly all of the migrants said they were happy to finally reach their goal of entering the United States, just as Mexico is launching an unprecedented crackdown and making it harder for those who are trying to follow them.
Despite all the privations — the toilet stench, lack of personal hygiene and bad bologna sandwiches — Gary, the Salvadoran migrant from Siguatepeque, couldn’t help but smile. This weekend, at last, he will be rejoining his immigrant mother in Los Angeles.
“I knew that they treated people badly, but we were already mentally prepared to suffer through whatever we had to in order to be with our family,” he said.
Miguel Gutierrez Jr. contributed reporting to this story.
The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Immigrants held in a McAllen-area U.S. Customs and Border Patrol processing center for migrants — the largest such center in America — are living in overcrowded spaces and sometimes are forced to sleep outside a building where the water “tastes like bleach,” according to an attorney who recently interviewed some of the migrants.
"It was so bad that the mothers would save any bottled water they could get and use that to mix the baby formula,” attorney Toby Gialluca told The Texas Tribune on Saturday.
But when she recalls the conditions described to her by the immigrants she interviewed at McAllen’s Centralized Processing Center, Gialluca said she goes back to one thing.
“Their eyes. I'm haunted by their eyes,” Gialluca said.
Gialluca and a slew of other lawyers have been meeting with children and young mothers at facilities across the state this month as pro bono attorneys. At the McAllen Center, Gialluca said everyone she spoke with said they sought out Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande so they could request asylum.
Gialluca said the migrants, all from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, told her they aren’t receiving proper medical care and children don’t have enough clean clothes. Unable to clean themselves, young mothers reported wiping their children’s runny noses or vomit with their own clothing, Gialluca said. There aren’t sufficient cups or baby bottles, so many are reused or shared.
“Basic hygiene just doesn't exist there,” Gialluca said. "It’s a health crisis ... a manufactured health crisis," she said.
The stories she recounted echoed conditions at immigrant facilities across America that have been detailed in two recent government reports and a bevy of media stories. They offer glimpses into life inside taxpayer-funded shelters that have been compared to concentration camps by one member of Congress.
That has sparked intense debate among politicians and activists as the government grapples with how to respond to a crush of immigrants fleeing Central America in hopes of seeking asylum in a country whose president won office in part by tapping into many voters’ fierce opposition to illegal immigration.
Overhauling the country’s immigration laws has vexed Congress for decades. But President Donald Trump on Saturday said he would move forward with planned deportation sweeps in cities across the country in two weeks if lawmakers from both parties don’t fix what he called loopholes at the U.S.-Mexico border and in the country’s asylum process.
Texas has about 50 Border Patrol stations spread across its roughly 1,200-mile border with Mexico, and government mandates state that migrant children shouldn’t stay at these processing centers for more than 72 hours. But with a recent surge of migrants, mainly families from Central America seeking asylum, people are often detained for days and weeks at a time.
The agencies responsible for housing the migrants after they arrive — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles adults, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which handles minors — have been swamped by the influx.
To deal with the continuing surge, the federal government has been erecting tent complexes near Border Patrol stations in the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso, and converting U.S. military bases and other buildings into makeshift emergency shelters. Federal officials plan to convert a compound in Carrizo Springs that once housed oil field workers into an emergency shelter for 1,600 unaccompanied minors.
The Trump administration recently canceled English classes, recreational programs and legal aid for unaccompanied minors at shelters across the country, citing budget pressures. And in court on Tuesday, an attorney for the Department of Justice argued that the government shouldn’t be required to give detained migrant children toothbrushes, soap, towels or showers.
State Rep. Terry Canales, a Democrat from Edinburg, wrote to the Border Patrol on Saturday asking for a list of items the public could donate to make up for shortages. Canales said Border Patrol told his office they do not accept donations.
Public officials at all levels of government and from both sides of the political aisle have called the influx of immigrants a humanitarian crisis. On Friday, Texas’ top three elected leaders, all Republicans, announced they were deploying 1,000 additional National Guard troops to help at temporary holding facilities for single adult migrants and to help federal agents at international ports of entry. They also pressed Congress to reform the country’s immigration laws.
On Saturday, state Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, issued a letter to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission inquiring about the reportedly inhumane conditions at a Clint facility where another group of lawyers told the Associated Press about a group of 250 infants, children and teens who spent nearly a month without adequate food, water and sanitation.
Attorneys who visited the El Paso-area station said they found at least 15 children sick with the flu and described a sick and diaperless 2-year-old boy, whose “shirt was smeared in mucus,” being taken care of by three girls all under 15.
“HHSC has a responsibility to these children and individuals to ensure they are receiving, at a minimum, basic care,” Alvarado wrote, acknowledging that the facilities are managed at a federal level, but still imploring the state to do more. “As these facilities are in our state, the conditions under which they operate is a reflection of our values and commitment to the humane treatment of all within our borders.”
In late May, an El Paso processing center was the subject of a report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, which detailed severe overcrowding in holding cells. In one photo, a migrant’s hand is pressed against the glass of a cell that was designed to hold 35 people — 155 people were crowded inside. In another, 76 women are crouched side-by-side on the floor in a cell designed for 12.
Gialluca said a 16-year-old mother that she met at the McAllen facility had an 8-month-old daughter who wore only a diaper and a pastel tank top covered in “filth.” The mother told the attorney that guards took away her backpack full of baby clothes and medicine, and sent them to sleep outside on the concrete.
Gialluca said the pair were both ill, congested and coughing, and described the baby as “lethargic.” All of the babies were lethargic, she said.
"Sick babies are [supposed to be] crying … and these kids were just … silent."
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