Democratic Illinois Reps. Jan Schakowsky, Mike Quigley and Bill Foster on Monday visited a migrant children’s shelter in Schakowsky’s district operated by the Heartland Alliance as the Trump administration grapples with reuniting children officials separated from parents at the U.S. – Mexico border.
The Trump White House is struggling with meeting a court-ordered deadline for identifying children separated from their families and bringing them to their parents.
The facility houses children who crossed the border on their own – as unaccompanied minors. The location of the shelter is not disclosed in order to protect the children. Heartland takes care of the minors under federal contracts. The lawmakers were there in part to throw a local spotlight on the child separation debacle.
“There doesn’t seem to be a great record of those people,” Schakowsky told the Sun-Times.
The three lawmakers toured the facility with Doug O’Brien, named by the Trump administration last November to be the Health and Human Services Region V Administrator
