: It is something unusual to see children attending school inside the jail. Classrooms monitored by security cameras, artificial turf soccer field in the courtyard, this is the school for immigrants who have fled to the US along with their mothers-mostly from Central America.
Classes are eight hours a day at Karnes County Residential Center. The curriculum for pre-kindergarten to 12th grade is the same as bilingual schools across the state. Days begin with the reciting of pledges of allegiance in English to the Texas and American flags.
Amid a surge of families and unaccompanied minors pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border, authorities converted what had been the all-male Karnes facility about 50 miles southeast of San Antonio to one with capacity for 532 women and children.
The Karnes center allows detainees to move freely around the grounds, enjoying free Internet access, flat-screen TVs, and a hair salon. Instead of guards, lockup personnel are “resident advisers.”
The Karnes officials are helping the children to socialize and acclimate in order to bring back from the trauma of what they had undergone before making to US.
Facilities in Leesport, Pennsylvania, and Artesia, New Mexico also house immigrant parents and children. The Leesport center offers schooling, while Artesia plans to begin classes in a few weeks.
Families in detention at Karnes are from Brazil and a few are from Mexico, but all others are from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, where immigrants are fleeing street gangs and drug smugglers or extreme poverty. Many have sought U.S. asylum.
Thousands of other children detained without their parents — comprising the bulk of the immigration influx — are processed differently. Many of those unaccompanied minors have already been released to live with relatives in the U.S. and have matriculated into ordinary public schools as their cases progress.
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