Thread: TX - Bid to turn Corsicana facility into center for minor undocumented immigrants rej

Bid to turn Corsicana facility into center for minor undocumented immigrants rejected

Board rejects plan to use Corsicana site as federal facility for youths

By Mike Ward, Austin Bureau
August 5, 2016 Updated: August 5, 2016 8:15pm

AUSTIN — A controversial proposal to turn a closed state school in Corsicana into a federal immigration center to house undocumented minors from Central America was derailed Friday after the Texas Juvenile Justice Department’s governing board rejected the plan.

By a vote of 8-1, the board turned back the plan promoted by Corsicana officials to house up to 800 foreign youths at the site, in what they said could bring up to 1,100 jobs to the Navarro County community about 55 miles south of Dallas.

State officials, led by Gov. Greg Abbott, state Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, and other lawmakers, had urged the board not to approve the transfer of the facility to the city. Part of the opposition was because they oppose federal immigration policies, but other officials opposed the transfer as a bad deal for Texas taxpayers because the state still is paying off millions of dollars in construction bonds on the facility, which closed in 2013.

Calvin Stephens of Dallas cast the lone vote in favor of the plan at a meeting in Austin, where more than a dozen opponents urged the board not to approve the transfer.

The Corsicana State School, which once housed more than 200 youths in state custody for committing crimes, was closed as part of a downsizing of the juvenile justice agency. The center housed youths with serious mental health issues, many of whom had been victims of sexual abuse.

Corsicana officials recently signed a tentative deal with a New York company, Cayuga Home for Children, to operate a transitional housing center for undocumented minors.

Under its proposal, the city would have gotten title to the center for free, and would have leased it to a private company for $3,000 a month.

“This facility has been in Corsicana for more than 100 years ... as a place to help children,” Mayor Chuck McClanahan said last week. “We think our proposal would ... be a good use. The only difference is that these are foreign children.”

Birdwell, who represents Corsicana, has been an outspoken critic of the plan.

“I do not support a taxpayer-funded property being used as a revolving-door facility for illegal immigrants,” Birdwell wrote in a July 8 letter to McClanahan and Navarro County Judge H. M. Davenport. “Regardless of how attractive the limited, short-term benefit such use of the TJJD property the federal government alleges will be provided to the city and/or county, I will not validate the mass influx of immigrants into a county I represent. ... I will not be complicit in assisting the federal government in its willful malfeasance of the enforcement of immigration law.”

McClanahan and other local supporters said the opponents are misinformed. Most of the children who would be housed at the center would stay for only 15 to 35 days, they said.

“Most of them would go from here to live with relatives and loved ones,” the mayor said. “They would get clothes, all their shots. Only 10 percent would stay in Texas. These are children who show up at the border unaccompanied. They have to go someplace.”

Advocates for the federal resettlement for the undocumented minors have for months pushed for sites to be opened in Texas and for more youths to be transitioned into resettlement here because Texas is a border state where many of them enter from Mexico and where privately funded programs have been active in resettling refugees from other countries.

Supporters also note that when the state youth lockups closed, a provision was inserted in state law to allow local governments to get the closed properties deeded to them for free if they were used “to benefit the public interest of the state.” Officials in Beaumont and Crockett took ownership of former lockups to lease them to private vendors.

In Beaumont, Jefferson County officials struck a deal to lease the former Al Price State Juvenile Correctional Facility to a charter school. Houston County officials, after unsuccessfully trying to find a use for the Crockett State School, considered turning it back to the state before reaching an agreement with Houston-based Serenity Place to house state Child Protective Services youths there.

“We were told that if the city of Corsicana found a good use, that would be good,” McClanahan said. “We think this is a good purpose.”

http://www.expressnews.com/news/loca...or-9125876.php

“Most of them would go from here to live with relatives and loved ones,” the mayor said. “They would get clothes, all their shots. Only 10 percent would stay in Texas. These are children who show up at the border unaccompanied. They have to go someplace.”

Okay, mayor, these kids came from someplace, so how about we send them back to the place they came from? Obviously someone had been raising them up to the point they illegally crossed the border ..... or would it be more appropriate to say when they were invited in?

Notice how this "act" that says we have to take unaccompanied minors from central american countries is still law? When will they repeal that?

They basically want all these poor, often inbred, over populating countries to be in the USA and paid for by American citizens. Doesn't matter if they have diseases, unvaccinated, carrying invasive larvae or work for drug cartels. Make states, cities hire special language teachers to accommodate them too while they keep the entire class back from the learning level of their grade.

Give them a smart phone & $17k a year and classify them as "refugees" so they can get more benefits and eventually each one can bring their entire family. One third of salvadorians are living in USA

I don't think that's what the law actually says, I think that's how our rogue corrupt treasonous government interprets it. I think what the law says is that unaccompanied minors can't be turned back, that they have to be taken into custody and their home countries contacted before deporting them. That would make sense. Anything other than that would not, so if what they're saying is we have to take them and keep them forever, then that is foreign kidnapping and the law must be changed. What we are doing now is the same finding a child in your yard, taking him inside, locking them up and raising them as your own, it's not only kidnapping by our government, it's child abuse. These children or "minors" must be returned to their home countries and reconnected with parents, family, or home country appointed guardians, whatever their rules are in that country. They shouldn't be in our country more than 24 hours, the time needed to place the call to home country authorities, and a local or nearest consulate will do for that, and buy a one way plane ticket.