According to reports from very angry elected officials in Baldwin County, Alabama, there is nothing on the federal land but airstrips for practice landings and takeoffs and a hayfield at the moment. Construction of housing, including sewer and water, will be very costly.
But apparently the Obama Administration is in the process of determining if the Dept. of Defense sites in Alabama would be good ones to “temporarily” house some of the tens of thousands of so-called ‘unaccompanied alien children’ streaming across the US border at the moment.
I suspect that considering a site in Alabama is probably because the Obama Administration wants to take a whack at Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, the most important Senator in America questioning Obama’s opening our doors to illegals of all sorts (this article uses the word “refugee” in the title, these are not refugees!), and the fact that Sessions is a chief adviser to the Donald Trump campaign.
Forget Alabama for a minute and consider the import of this story—they are anticipating another summer invasion of the US border, perhaps larger than the invasion of 2014 as a Trump Presidency looms on the horizon.
And, could this involve the creation of a ‘refugee camp’ for future use?
Keep your eyes pealed on your county!
From the Lagniappe Weekly:
A plan from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to assess the feasibility of housing unaccompanied illegal immigrant children at two airfields in Baldwin County is being met with hostility by elected officials at the federal and local levels because of concerns about the lack of infrastructure at the sites and the plan’s potential impact on the county.
ORR, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, notified officials of the assessments in a letter last week. In the letter Rose Hacking, an HHS representative, said ORR is trying to identify locations to provide shelter for potential increases in unaccompanied children apprehended at the Mexican border.
The letter notified officials HHS would soon schedule site assessments at the Naval Outlying Fields in Silverhill and Josephine to determine the feasibility of using the sites as semipermanent shelters if HHS exceeds its current shelter capacity.
[….]
According to Hacking’s letter HHS currently has 8,700 beds in its “shelter network” and an additional 2,000 beds on reserve if needed. Some reserve beds are already available at the Homestead Job Corps Center in Homestead, Florida, and the semipermanent structures would be used only if the department were to experience a “substantial” increase in unaccompanied children.
Andrea Helling, ORR chief of staff, said the temporary shelters are typically used for roughly 30 days while the unaccompanied children are evaluated in the court system. She stressed none of the children who may come to Baldwin County sites would impact the county school system or the local health care system.
[….]
According to Helling, the assessors will inspect the sites to determine the ease of installing temporary infrastructure and buildings. They also consider each sites’ proximity to airports and the amount of land available for construction.
Baldwin County Commission President Tucker Dorsey said county officials have not been told how many children may be moved to the site in the event it is used.
“Forget the fact that these would be children who are in the country illegally and the federal government doesn’t properly enforce immigration law,” Dorsey said. “Apart from that, this would be a logistical nightmare for us and them.”
Dorsey said while both sites are large, the federal government would have to install infrastructure and construct buildings at a great cost because the sites currently amount to nothing more than large fields with landing strips.
There is much more, continue reading here.
Some things you should know!
The Office of Refugee Resettlement is shelling out nearly $1 billion this year (FY2016) to take care of the children.
And, the ‘children’ who arrived in FY2015 are 82% teenagers and 68% of the total are boys. See here.