Elected officials in Alabama’s Baldwin County celebrated last week as the Obama administration backed off its plan — for now — to place illegal immigrant children on a pair of little-used military installations.

The proposal, which took local officials by surprise earlier this year, is only the administration’s latest attempt to find places to house the unaccompanied minors — who began arriving en masse at the U.S-Mexican border in 2014.

“The biggest concern was safety. These aren’t 7-year-olds who stumbled across the Rio Grande … It’s hard to even call them kids.”

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But the government lacks the detention space to handle the overflow. So the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement hit upon the idea of using current former military facilities. It has used or tried to use facilities in Texas, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New Mexico.

In Alabama, the federal government planned to use airstrips in the towns of Silverhill and Orange Beach used for training pilots assigned to Naval Air Station Whiting Field in Florida. Although the feds assured county authorities that there would be no impact on local schools or health resources, elected leaders voiced concerns about inadequate security. Baldwin County Commission Chairman Tucker Dorsey said federal officials planned to use private security officers to monitor up to 2,000 immigrants, who would be mostly male and an average age of 14.

“The biggest concern was safety,” he said. “These aren’t seven-year-olds who stumbled across the Rio Grande … It’s hard to even call them kids.”

Worries are ‘Justified’
Those worries are justified, said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies. She noted that about a dozen youths who came as part of the wave of unaccompanied minors are sitting in jails on murder charges. She said there have been reports of escapes at similar facilities across the country.

“There are some legitimate concerns,” she said. “First of all, we have no idea who these kids are. We do know some of them are violent gang members.”

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Dorsey said a video conference with federal officials drew 2,500 local residents, the biggest turnout for any public hearing has seen since taking office in 2010. He said he was frustrated by the failure of HHS officials to specify details, such as they type of facilities they would build at the air fields.

“They used the word ‘temporary’ so much, it sounded like they were going to set up tents,” he said.

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Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) last week praised the decision by the federal government to back off plans to use the former air bases in his district. He had persuaded the House to pass an amendment to a defense spending bill prohibiting the Defense Department from using federal funds to upgrade facilities to accommodate illegal immigrants. He said in a prepared statement that military facilities were not an appropriate solution for a problem he accused the government of creating through lax border enforcement.

“The reality is the larger problem of illegal immigration will not go away until we get serious about enforcing the immigration laws already on the books and actually secure our borders,” he stated. “I will continue to make those some of my top priorities here in Congress.”

In an interview with LifeZette before last week’s decision, Byrne said the military facilities are completely inappropriate. The facilities in Baldwin County lack suitable buildings, potable water sewerage, and other infrastructure.

“There’s so many reasons why these sorts of locations don’t work,” he said. “It’s just not a good idea to put children on military bases.”

Playing Politics? 
Byrne said he initially rejected suggestions by some that the Obama administration chose the location to embarrass Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who has been a vocal critic of the president’s immigration policies. As time wore on, Byrne said, he became more frustrated by a lack of response from the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Now, I’m beginning to wonder if politics did play a role,” he said.

[lz_table title=”Aliens Apprehended at Mexican Border” source=”U.S. Customs and Border Protection”]Fiscal year,Apprehended minors
2012,24.4K
2013,38.8K
2014,68.5K
2015,40K
2016*,43.4K

* First 9 months
[/lz_table]

For his part, Sessions and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) blasted the proposal in a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Department of Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson, and HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell.

“Transporting some of these juveniles more than 900 miles away from our southern border to the State of Alabama, instead of expeditiously and humanely sending them back to their homes, will only make the situation worse,” they wrote. “It rewards illegal conduct, and arguably renders the United States complicit in criminal conspiracies to violate our immigration laws.”

The number of unaccompanied minors showing up at the U.S. border — often with the aid of smugglers — has spiked again after dipping in fiscal year 2015. According to the latest Customs and Border Protection statistics, 52,193 unaccompanied children younger than 18 have been apprehended at the Southwestern border since Oct. 1.

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The Obama administration’s policy has been to place Central and South American children with sponsors in the United States as quickly as possible. The administration has argued that it is following a provision of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, designed to crack down on human trafficking. But Sessions and other critics maintain that the vast majority of immigrant children can and should be returned home as quickly as possible because they do not meet the technical definition of trafficking victims.

Vaughan said the government could set up special processing facilities near border installations, identify the true human trafficking victims, and then send the rest home. Swift enforcement would convince people in South and Central America that it is pointless to send children on a long and dangerous journey, she said.

For Alabama officials, last week’s celebration could be short-lived. The Office of Refugee Resettlement promised only that Baldwin County and Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery would not be considered as a temporary home to unaccompanied minors for 2016 — and that the office would instead look to property in New Mexico.