While governors in Connecticut and Maryland and elsewhere are saying "No," Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick Friday said he’s offering two locations in the state - the former Camp Edwards at Joint Base Cape Cod in Bourne and Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee – to house up to 1,000 immigrant children who have fled Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Patrick stressed that the facilities would be controlled and paid for by the federal government under leases of four months, with the typical child detainee spending 30 to 35 days there before they are reunited with family or relatives or deported or otherwise processed by immigration enforcement officials.
“They've asked us for a facility that could accommodate up to 1,000. Whether that is a few hundred or whether it's a thousand remains to be seen,” Patrick said. “Everything for the children will be provided at the expense of the federal government. How they contract what, I don't know.”
Besides shelter and medical care, the facilities would include school and recreation facilities. Patrick said it would be either Bourne or Chicopee, not both, and said he had no idea when the Department of Health and Human Services would make a decision.
Accompanied by Christian, Jewish and Muslim clerics as he announced the policy at the State House, Patrick often spoke emotionally of he he has approached the issue as not just a governor, but as a father and as a Christian.
“These are children, alone, in a strange land,” Patrick. “We are admonished [in Scripture] to take in the stranger ... Every major faith tradition in the world teaches us to treat others as we would want to be treated. I don’t know what good faith is if we don’t turn to it in times of human need.”
Cardinal Sean O’Malley of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston said the children entering the country in violation of immigration laws nonetheless represent “a humanitarian emergency.”
Politics
“I ask my faith community and the wider public to understand the extreme circumstances of these children,” the cardinal said. “As a country and as a church, we are capable of providing assistance.”
While the governor’s move is aimed at the immediate crisis of thousands of unaccompanied children who have been sent to the U.S. by their parents from Latin America, it’s also drawn questions and concerns about whether it ultimately will encourage still more children to enter the country illegally.
State Rep. Brad Jones, a North Reading Republican who is the House minority leader, said he disagrees with Patrick’s move and said it would be a different issue entirely if it were a question of welcoming children who were victims of a hurricane or tornado rather than “one more straw on the camel’s back” when it comes to controversy over the country’s failure to fully enforce or agree to reform immigration laws.
“There's been this ongoing failure at the federal government to adequately address immigration, and you can fault both parties, and I do fault both parties,” Jones said. “They're unable or unwilling for whatever reason to reach some consensus to address illegal immigration, closing the borders, however you want to define it, and this is yet another manifestation of that problem.”
While Patrick stressed that the entire cost of housing the children would be borne by the federal government, Jones said, “I don't feel comfortable that we're able to take care of the people that are already on our doorstep, that are already in our commonwealth. We've had any number of issues with children in the care of DCF” – the troubled Massachusetts Department of Children and Families – “that we don't have a comfort level that we're able to take care of them in the way we'd like to. We've had any number of issues with spending millions of dollars on homeless families that are our fellow citizens within the commonwealth at hotels and motels ... I think there are a whole host of unanswered questions. How many? How long? And is there a level of confidence that when we're told it's ‘this many for this long’ that it will actually be that?”
With videographers John E. Stuart and Christopher D. Garvin
