(car engine roaring)
- [Lorraine] Along Los Reales Road,
large white tents dot the skyline.
Inside the green gates,
customs and border protection officers and agents
are working alongside contract workers
readying for the hundreds of migrants,
mostly children who cross the border without a parent.
- Tucson sector's experienced about 100% increase
over last fiscal year in the number
of unaccompanied children that we're apprehending
that are crossing the border.
Everyone's seeing there's this surge,
this migration surge across the Southwest border
which is really putting a lot of strain
on the resources that exist.
- [Lorraine] That's John Modlin, the Interim Chief
of the Tucson Sector Border Patrol.
He and his team hosted an open house this week.
Among the attendees, representatives
from the Mexican consulate, non-governmental organizations
and the media.
- Our facilities, if you were to be inside them
you would see, it's basically small holding cells.
They're made to hold people for short periods of time.
There are cement benches in there, cement floors.
They're not made for children.
Moreover, border patrol agents are not trained
to care and detain children.
It's something we're just not built for,
we're not trained for it.
So we asked for a soft sided facility to be put up here.
- [Lorraine] The tour began at intake where migrants
will answer questions and submit information
about how they got here.
There's a medical room to assess a person's needs.
These racks will hold personal belongings.
Every room and hallway under close surveillance.
- [Man] We're gonna enter our first pod system
that we have here.
We should probably call it a housing unit.
We have...
- [Lorraine] Down this hallway, we saw the housing units.
Pods that can sleep up to 16.
Though this facility has a maximum capacity of 500,
it's estimated only 200 to 250 will be here on a given day.
The agency has to manage physical distancing guidelines
as well as existing litigation dictating the conditions
inside centers like this one.
Who goes where will vary.
A mother with young children for example,
may be in a unit together with other women and children.
Siblings depending on their age may be separated
but near each other.
To manage health and safety,
each pod is separated by plastic.
Up on these stands agents and contract workers
will oversee the space.
Per federal law, stays here should be less than 72 hours
but it's a careful balance of ensuring federal agencies
are able to handle the flow of people in the system.
Our tour visits the outdoor recreation center.
Contractors erected this entire facility in 20 days
at a cost of more than $30 million.
It's equipped with laundry and shower facilities
and a multi-purpose room.
Migrants will also have access to private phone booths.
The last stop is through outtake.
A collaborative effort border patrol
says between the federal government
and non-governmental agencies,
working to place migrants with families
or sponsors in the U.S. until a court date is secured,
a schedule that in some cases takes years.
Before we left, we spoke with one Juanita Molina
from the Border Action Network.
- I think it's much better than some
of the other facilities that we've seen.
And the reality is that we've seen stop gap measures
that have been woefully inadequate.
We've seen situations that could really perpetuate injury
in a vulnerable population.
And so I'm glad to see this happen in a more fulfilling way.
It's an incredibly complex issue
that we're seeing here on the border.
We have the urgency of the children
and families who are coming through
and we wanna be able to process them as quickly as possible.
And yet at the same time,
even though we've known this as a government
for over the last 12, 15 years
that our demographic has changed,
we still have not adjusted our governmental systems.
And so, here we see border patrol making value and effort
to try to accommodate this particular instance.
But at the same time it's difficult
because it's not adequate for the needs of the children
that are coming through.