Thread: NJ-County holds youths who entered illegally,facing charges

Union County to hold youths who entered U.S. illegally and are facing charges
by Alexi Friedman
Sunday June 14, 2009, 2:00 PM


The Union County juvenile detention center in Linden has signed a federal contract to hold young illegal aliens charged in the United States.

UNION -- The county will provide 15 beds at its juvenile detention center for children who have entered the country illegally and subsequently been accused of a crime, county officials said.

A contract was signed June 1 with the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, making Union County the first in the tri-state area to open its detention center for that purpose, officials said.

If successful, the current four-month contract would be extended, bringing the county more than $1 million a year, said Frank Guzzo, director of Union County's Department of Human Services.

The beds are in Union County's state-of-the-art juvenile detention center in Linden, which opened last year. The children will be held in one of the center's 15-bed self-contained wings.

Beginning Monday, detention center staffers will be trained on policies and procedures regarding the incoming children before accepting placements on Wednesday, said Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health's Administration for Children and Families. The kids will be ages 12 to 17. All will be male.

"These are the same kids, for the most part, that I'm holding now in our detention center," said Guzzo, whose department oversees operations. "They've broken the law, they've been charged with a crime, whatever that may be, and they require a secure setting."

The current contract with the U.S. Department of Health runs through Sept. 30, but includes four one-year options that could generate more than $1 million a year for Union County, Guzzo said. The money will be used to offset the cost of running the state-mandated facility. The agreement follows a request in January by county manager George Devanney to explore the potential for leasing beds there.

The $39 million juvenile detention center, which opened in March 2008, has 76 beds and about as many employees, but currently houses just 30 youths, Guzzo said.

County officials have begun accepting children from Burlington County as a revenue generator and had considered temporarily closing some wings in the detention center to cut costs. The new contract with the U.S. Department of Health has put that off.

Each year, the federal government provides shelter for more than 1,000 children who have reached the United States illegally to escape abusive families, find work or rejoin relatives, according to the Division of Unaccompanied Children's Services, which is under the Department of Health. The children, mainly from Central America, have been left on their own and without a legal guardian, and have not been accused of a crime.

A small fraction are apprehended for suspected criminal acts, federal officials said, and remain in secure detention while their cases are heard. A handful of those detention centers are scattered throughout the country, though the closest one to New Jersey is a five-bed facility in northern Virginia.

A shelter in Queens, N.Y., for kids who have not been accused of a crime houses 24 of these "unaccompanied children," who have no guardian. Guzzo said a separate contract with the government would be for a shelter similar to that one, which would transition the children out of detention until a guardian is found or the minor is returned to his or her home country.

The more than 50 federally funded shelter beds and detention centers nationwide are near areas where "immigration officials apprehend large numbers of aliens," according to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, also under the Department of Health's purview.

"From a human service perspective, which detention is under, it's an interesting program to run," Guzzo said of the county's connection. "These are kids that have committed a crime, but you have to look at the circumstances under which they did it. A lot of these kids who are here have come into this country because they were brought here, and abandoned and lived on the street, and did what they needed to do." Union County will provide services "to find the best possible settings for these kids," he said. "It's a challenge and it's an interesting challenge."

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/0 ... hs_wh.html

Send them back to their birth countries, we have enough problem youth to take care of! Find the families of those abandoned and deport them too. There is NO excuse to abandon a child, but we should not be taking them in. This will increase the "abandonments". Send them back to their home countries and let their home countries take care of them.