Migrant kids quietly moved to Texas camp

In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.

Until now, most unauthorized children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. 

They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases, reports NY Times. But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Texas, children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. 

The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children the largest population ever - whose numbers have increased more than five-fold since last year.

The average length of time that migrant children spend in custody has nearly doubled over the same period, from 34 days to 59, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. To deal with the surging shelter populations, which have hovered at near 90 per cent of capacity since May, a mass reshuffling is underway and shows no signs of slowing.