BOSTON (MyFoxBoston.com) -- The federal government asked Massachusetts to find space for unaccompanied minors who have crossed the southern border for four months, Governor Deval Patrick said Thursday.
The governor initially broke the news to FOX 25's Sharman Sacchetti Wednesday that the state was asked to shelter some of the unaccompanied minors, but how many and for how long where unclear. Thursday, Patrick told Sacchetti that the time frame would be about four months, but that the average time just to process the children could take several days or weeks.
When asked about how many children would be housed here, Patrick said, “I don’t have a number. I can't imagine it's more than several hundred.”
State Representative from Sandwich, Randy Hunt, said that Patrick agreed to house 1,000 children, which Patrick said was not true.
“Of course it's inaccurate. I will tell you I’m not sure I’ve even met Rep. Hunt but he's certainly not a part of the deliberations we're going through and when we're ready and when we have something we can offer to the feds and it is acceptable to them and to us we will make all that information available to legislators and to the general public,” he said.
With regard to location, Patrick said they are considering several different places that meet the specifications of Health and Human Services. He went on to say that it would have to be secure and there should be “appropriate places to sleep and eat and play and be educated for the period of time they would be with us for processing.”
No decision has been made on whether or not Massachusetts will house the children. That is still under consideration.
The military training installation in Sandwich temporarily housed more than 100 evacuees after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Patrick says he hopes the decision will be made soon, “because there's a humanitarian crisis that's happening now at the southern border.”
He went on to say, “It bears remembering they're children. And they're alone. And I think we are the kind of country and the kind of Commonwealth who can step up and help as in where we can.”
When asked to confirm that Camp Edwards was a possible location, Patrick said that it wasn’t his decision, but one for the federal government.
“They’ve given us some specs. We've looked at the different places in the Commonwealth that might meet those specs,” he said. “We've looked at Camp Edwards as well, there are a number of others and they have different features and different challenges as well. So we'll see whether any of them are ultimately acceptable to the federal government and we'll go from there.”
Congressman Stephen Lynch is part of a delegation leaving Thursday for El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to find out exactly what's driving the young people from those countries over our border. Fox25 spoke with Lynch before he left. He said the federal government needs to step up and do its job.
"One of the problems with our immigration policy is that we don't' have one. All of this is happening by default because we don't have an immigration policy in place. We don't control our border, quite frankly, our border with Mexico, we don't control it," he said.
Lynch is a senior member of the subcommittee on National Security.
FOX 25 reached out to both of our senators.
Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a statement calling this a humanitarian crisis, and that every state that can help should. Senator Ed Markey also calling it a humanitarian crisis and saying he is supportive of Patrick's efforts.
