U.S. government officials say they’ve moved more than 100 kids back to a remote border facility where lawyers reported detained children were caring for each other and had inadequate food, water, and sanitation.
An official from U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Tuesday that the “majority” of the roughly 300 children detained at Clint, Texas, last week have been placed in facilities operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, wouldn’t say exactly how many children are currently detained there. But the official says Clint is better equipped than some of the Border Patrol’s tents to hold children.
Attorneys involved in monitoring care for migrant children who visited Clint last week said older children were trying to take care of toddlers, The Associated Press reported Thursday.
They described a 4-year-old with matted hair who had gone without a shower for days, and hungry, inconsolable children struggling to soothe one another.
The mayhem that Hurricane Harvey unleashed on Houston didn’t only come from the sky. On the ground, it came sweeping in from the Katy Prairie some 30 miles west of downtown.
Water drains naturally in this stretch of Texas, or at least it used to. At more than 600 square miles, Houston has grown to be as big as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia combined, a giant spread of asphalt smothering many of the floodplains that once shuttled water from the prairies to the sea. When finished, the newest road to ring the city and propel its expansion, called the Grand Parkway, will encircle an area equivalent to all of Rhode Island.
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For years, the local authorities turned a blind eye to runaway development. Thousands of homes have been built next to, and even inside, the boundaries of the two big reservoirs devised by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s after devastating floods. Back then, Houston was 20 miles downstream, its population 400,000. Today, these reservoirs are smack in the middle of an urban agglomeration of six million.
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The Texas city’s response to a powerful storm says much about polarized visions of the country and diverging attitudes toward cities, race, liberty and science.
The water burbled from the floors of Vickie Carson’s cottage in the semirural northern edge of Houston, saturating everything she owned.
It seeped through the ceiling of Ebony Harrison’s apartment in the impoverished Sunnyside neighborhood, dousing her newborn daughter as she slept.
It swept so swiftly into Lidia Peña’s rental home in the city’s north side that she and her young son fled without taking any spare clothes.
It drove Rick Christie out of his midcentury ranch house in the southwest Houston neighborhood of Meyerland, leaving him to sleep on a couch above his garage.
Each of their homes was left uninhabitable by Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm that plowed through southeast Texas in late August. Its floodwaters capsized lives of the comfortable and the struggling, black and white, Latino and Asian. Tens of thousands of people across spectrums of race and income were left without permanent places to live, inspiring a newfound saying: Harvey was the storm that didn’t discriminate.
It was a hard choice, but in the end it was no choice at all. A small rescue boat had come up the driveway, offering help. Carl Ellis was with his frail, 73-year-old mother, Wilma Jean. The boat had room for one.
The water was already up to Mr. Ellis’s knees, so there was no time to wait for rescuers with more room. His mother would have to go alone.
Using the back of a pickup truck as a gangplank, Mr. Ellis helped his mother into the boat, her belongings trussed up in garbage bags. There were no life jackets, but it was a short trip and the rescuers promised to come right back for him.
He never saw them — or his mother — again.
Any catastrophic weather event has its measurable aspects: inches of rain, speed of wind, cubic yards of debris. Others are incalculable: waterlogged photos, frayed communities, the invisible moorings of permanence and safety swept away.
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Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital in Houston, where Wilma Jean Ellis, after being rescued twice, arrived in a body bag.Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times
A Houston-area teenager accused of killing a girl in a satanic ritual had gouged out her eye as she begged for her life, prosecutors said Monday during the opening of the teen’s capital murder trial.
Opening statements began in the trial of 18-year-old Jose E. Reyes, who prosecutors say is responsible for the February death of 15-year-old Corriann Cervantes in a vacant apartment southeast of Houston.
A 16-year-old boy also is charged with capital murder and is expected to stand trial later.
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This booking photo provided by the Houston Police Department shows Jose E. Reyes. Police say evidence of occultism was found in the weekend slaying of a 15-year-old girl. They say evidence of occultism was found on the girl’s body and in the vacant apartment where she was found. Authorities did not provide further details. Harris County jail records show 17-year-old Reyes was being held without bond Tuesday. A 16-year-old boy also was also charged and remains in custody awaiting an appearance in | ASSOCIATED PRESS
A house overflowing with more than 100 people presumed to be in the U.S. illegally was uncovered just outside Houston on Wednesday, a police spokesman said.
The suspected stash house was found during a search for a 24-year-old woman and her two children, a 7-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, that were reported missing by relatives late Tuesday after a man failed to meet them as planned at an undisclosed location on the city’s north side, said John Cannon, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department. Many of the people in home that authorities said appeared to be part of a human smuggling operation were dressed only in undergarments and they were sitting in in filthy conditions and surrounded by trash bags full of old clothing, Cannon said.
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Immigration officials believe they uncover a human smuggling ring when they found 100 people inside a Houston home. | KPRC
Health authorities in western Mexico said Thursday they have detected a probable case of flesh lesions due to the drug Krokodil, often referred to as “the poor man’s heroin.”
The head of the council on addictions in the western state of Jalisco, Dr. Enrico Sotelo, said the patient is a 17-year-old woman who is a resident of Houston, Texas. She came to Mexico to visit the Pacific coast resort city of Puerto Vallarta, where she has relatives, in November. Soon after, she checked into a local health clinic for digestive problems, and it was there that doctors detected the flesh lesions.
Sotelo, who in accordance with privacy guidelines did not reveal the patient’s name, said she told authorities she used the drug in Houston. Her current condition is unknown because she did not return to the health clinic there for any further treatment.
“She acquired this problem with Krokodil in Houston, not here in Puerto Vallarta,” said Sotelo, who in any case has implemented an educational program to warn about the drug’s ill effects.
Long stuck in fourth place, T-Mobile made itself a relevant mobile player in the United States again on Tuesday, with plans to rapidly roll out its 4G LTE network and offer bargain plans with no contracts to entice potential customers.
Oh, and it now offers that quaint little device called the iPhone 5.
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