Five members of Congress were allowed Saturday into a Homestead, Florida, shelter housing immigrant children, but five state and local officials in the same group were refused entry.
The group included four U.S. representatives from Florida and Bill Nelson, one of the state’s two U.S. senators.
Speaking to reporters after the visit, Nelson said the facility, which holds nearly 1,200 children, was “nice,” but he said they were not allowed to see the children or the person in charge of reuniting families.
He told VOA’s Spanish service that of the 70 children in the facility, “most of them have talked to their parents by phone.”
“I asked what is being done to reunify them with the parents that they were taken away from, and they said they don’t have any instructions on that,” Nelson said.
The Florida Democrat was denied entry to the shelter Tuesday, but Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio was allowed to visit Friday, although he was not allowed to meet the person in charge of reuniting families. A group of state and local officials was turned away Saturday, told they needed to request a tour two weeks in advance.
The officials turned away from the shelter included state Senators Annette Taddeo and Jose Javier Rodriguez, state Representative Kionne McGhee, and Miami-Dade County Commissioners Barbara Jordan and Danielle Levine Cava.
Nelson, Rubio, and their colleagues were among a number of government officials struggling to get answers from federal authorities and contractors about the children in the shelters who were separated from their families and reclassified as “unaccompanied minors.”
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti held a news conference Friday revealing that there were about 100 immigrant children staying in his city. He said he had been told the children were in group homes or staying with foster families, but he did not know where.
Garcetti said his staff had learned what it knew from activists and other groups that take in unaccompanied minors. He said most of the children were believed to be “among the very youngest” of those taken from their parents. He said he was worried that some might be too young to recognize their parents, complicating attempts to reunite families.
Kansas facility
In Topeka, Kansas, on Friday, officials from the state child welfare agency toured facilities of a group home known as The Villages, which has contracted with the federal government to house 50 unaccompanied minors. The executive director of The Villages, Sylvia Crawford, confirmed to The Kansas City Star that some of the children had been separated from their parents and had come from Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
In Chicago, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, told reporters that 66 children separated from their families were being housed in shelters across the city. He said one-third of the children were under age 5. Two-thirds, or more than 40, were younger than 13.
Durbin said he had toured one of the nine shelters operated by the Heartland Alliance, an immigrant aid group. He said the children were receiving proper care, although he said the separation from their families was “inhumane” and “cruel.”
Evelyn Diaz, president of Heartland Alliance, said her group had located about two-thirds of the children’s families, but that the process can be difficult when the parents are in detention.
“It’s like a scavenger hunt,” she said.
Reunited
Meanwhile, a migrant mother from Guatemala and her 7-year-old son were reunited early Friday after being separated a month ago at the U.S. border.
Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia and her son Darwin were reunited at Baltimore-Washington International Airport in Maryland, a day after the mother had sued in federal court and the Justice Department agreed to release her son.
WATCH: Guatemalan Migrant Mother, Son Reunited
On Thursday, President Donald Trump changed the family separation policy, telling federal agencies not to separate immigrant families who had illegally crossed into the country from Mexico.
However, it was unclear when or how more than 2,300 children already separated from their families since April would be returned to their families.
How officials will handle the immigrant legal cases also remains unclear. A VOA reporter at an immigration court hearing in Brownsville, Texas, on Thursday morning said prosecutors dropped misdemeanor charges against 17 migrants. But the Justice Department later insisted it was not dropping charges against detained immigrants.
DOJ lawyers Thursday asked a federal judge in California for an emergency ruling that would allow them to detain minors with their legal guardians until their immigration cases were adjudicated. Authorities now may hold families in immigration detention for only 20 days. On average, current cases are taking 721 days to resolve.
Senior White House Correspondent Steve Herman, National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin, Justice Department Correspondent Masood Farivar and Aline Barros contributed to this report.
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