The Trump administration plans to build a “tent city” in a rural patch of West Texas, to house the seized immigrant children it cannot fit in the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) existing shelters, NBC News reports.
The tents will not have floors, and will hold roughly 450 children’s beds. Many of the children that will be housed in the tents have been separated from their parents at the border.
The tent city will function as a temporary shelter location, an HHS spokesperson told ThinkProgress.
Immigrants were housed in tents under President Barack Obama in 2014 due to an unexpected influx of border crossers, according to NBC. But the current shelter overload is the result of the new policy of prosecuting all adults crossing the border, even those with children. This “zero tolerance” policy began May 7th.
