A plan to use the campus of a recently closed Historically Black College and University in Virginia to house illegal child immigrants is on hold, pending community input, The Daily Caller has learned.
Saint Paul’s College in Lawrenceville, Va. closed last year after it failed to meet accreditation standards amid financial difficulties.
But the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services identified the campus as an ideal facility to house young Central American immigrants who have been apprehended at the U.S. border in southern Texas.
Thousands of them, called “Unaccompanied Children,” or UACs, because they came to the U.S. without their parents, have overwhelmed federal authorities, causing what some have called a “humanitarian crisis.”
Last week, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that federal officials with HHS visited Saint Paul’s College and were nearing an agreement to utilize the property for six months.
The facility will soon go up for auction, but the temporary housing plan, which would involve leasing housing on the campus, would give it more time to pay down debts.
BuzzFeed also reported that it obtained a “transportation flow chart” showing that Saint Paul’s College would serve as a temporary site for the UACs.
As part of the plan, the minors, who are mostly between 12 and 17 years old, would be flown from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection holding facility near McAllen, Texas to Richmond International Airport in Virginia. From there, they would be bussed to Saint Paul’s College, which has room for up to 500 UACs.
But a spokesman for HHS says that the plan is now on hold.
“The project of developing Saint Paul’s College as a site for caring for minors in the Unaccompanied Alien Children program is on hold pending community input,” Kenneth Wolfe, of HHS’s Administration of Children and Families office, told TheDC.
“Representatives from this program will be available at a community meeting this Thursday evening at 6:30 p.m. at Brunswick Sr. High School Auditorium,” he added.
Wolfe did not clarify when asked, as a follow up, whether holding the community forum indicates a hiccup in the plan to use the campus at Saint Paul’s or is merely a normal step in the process of designating a site for the purposes of housing the child immigrants.
So far, there have been no reports of community forums being held in other cities to discuss the issue.
Some residents near Saint Paul’s have expressed concern over the pending plan.
“It’s kind of a win-lose situation because you don’t know what the kids have been through and you don’t know what it’s going to put the people in this community through for them to be here,” Vonda Barnes told NBC Richmond.
“We [Brunswick County] don’t have the cash flow and that’s one of the reasons St. Paul’s has shut down. Now, the federal government is going to bring people here? If that’s the case the federal government should have tried to keep St. Paul’s open,” Barnes added.
HHS is one of the agencies under the direction of the Federal Emergency Management Agency that is charged with placing the UACs at facilities across the U.S.
One of the first facilities to house them was Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Soon after, temporary shelters were opened at Ventura County Naval Base in Oxnard, California and Fort Sill Army Base in Lawton, Oklahoma. Nearly 100 non-profit federal grantees are also housing around 6,000 child immigrants.
Other facilities in Massachusetts and Maryland have reportedly been explored as well.
The number of UACs attempting to enter the U.S. has spiked in recent years. The number that have been apprehended so far this year is up 92 percent over the same time last year.
Part of the difficulty facing the federal agencies arises from U.S. immigration policy, which requires holding UACs from countries that do not share a boundary with the U.S. from being immediately deported. Hailing mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the UACs are instead placed in temporary holding facilities while awaiting deportation proceedings.
Virginia Intermont College in Bristol is another site that has been mentioned as a possible temporary home for the UACs. The college officially closed last month after years of financial difficulties and accreditation issues.
Wolfe was unable to comment on any potential plans for that campus.