As pressure mounted to find a place for thousands of immigrants caught up in the government’s crackdown on illegal border crossings, U.S. officials identified the two military bases in Texas that will house migrant children: Goodfellow AFB at San Angelo and Fort Bliss near El Paso.

Neither the Pentagon nor the Health and Human Services Department, which would operate the facilities, could say how soon they would open. The Air Force said Goodfellow was one of the sites, and Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, confirmed that the Pentagon has picked Fort Bliss to “be used for temporary shelter for undocumented immigrants.”

“At this time, we do not know if children or families have arrived or will arrive, and I have not been made aware of any specific timeline,” Cuellar said.

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In recent weeks, Health and Human Services has created several tent encampments to house immigrant detainees or their children at federal facilities, including a U.S. port of entry at Tornillo, near El Paso, even as it conducted site visits at Fort Bliss, Goodfellow and two other Air Force bases.

The government’s contract to run the Tornillo shelter, with San Antonio-based nonprofit BCFS Health and Human Services, expires July 13. It could be renewed, but if not, Fort Bliss, a 1 million-acre Army post, is less than an hour’s drive away.

The administration’s need for such facilities has become more urgent. President Donald Trump did an abrupt U-turn last week amid an uproar over family separations stemming from the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy of criminally charging undocumented adults who arrive at the border. He signed an executive order Thursday to keep families together but didn’t rescind his vow to prosecute all who enter the country illegally.

The resulting need to detain entire families created legal and housing uncertainties. In response, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced Monday that the Border Patrol had stopped referring parents for prosecution until those questions can be resolved, formalizing a retreat evident for several days.

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Some parents have been released, a de facto resumption of the so-called “catch and release” policy that Trump vowed to end. In the weeks preceding the border crisis, the administration ordered the Defense Department to support an expanded network of camps and the Pentagon said last week that four bases — Bliss, Goodfellow, Dyess AFB at Abilene and Little Rock AFB in Arkansas — were being considered as places to hold up to 20,000 minors who arrived at the border unaccompanied by their parents.

The Associated Press reported Monday that a Defense Department official said Fort Bliss would house families of migrant detainees and that Goodfellow would get unaccompanied minors, and that a Pentagon memo to members of Congress indicated that the military had been asked to have the facilities ready as early as July.

Defense Secretary James Mattis did not confirm those specifics Monday when he identified the two bases that would get immigrants.

“We’ll provide whatever support the Department of Homeland Security needs in order to house the people that they have under their custody,” Mattis told reporters in Alaska while on a trip to Asia, the AP reported. “We will work that out week by week; the numbers obviously are dynamic, so we will have to stay flexible in our logistics support.”

The Tornillo facility currently contains a mix of immigrant children, numbering 326 on Monday, most of them teenage boys. It has cared for a relative handful, just 26, of the children who were separated from their parents under the zero-tolerance policy.

Fort Bliss, stretching into New Mexico, hosts the 1st Armored Division and the 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command.

Goodfellow is home to the 17th Training Wing, which produces intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance specialists as well as firefighters for the services.

Health and Human Services officials have said the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the agency’s Administration for Children and Families is legally required to accept unaccompanied minors for placement. As of Wednesday, it said, 2,053 separated minors were cared for in agency-funded facilities, 17 percent of them placed there as a result of the zero tolerance enforcement, and the remainder having arrived in the U.S. without a parent or guardian.

“Expanding a mix of permanent and temporary bed capacity is a prudent step to ensure that the Border Patrol can continue its vital national security mission to prevent illegal migration, trafficking and protect the borders of the United States,” the agency said in a news release at the time. The agency, it said, “can place unaccompanied children in an appropriate setting while a sponsor is identified who can care for the child while their immigration case proceeds.”

Mattis declined to discuss what he said were the “political aspects” of the situation on the border but said the military has a long history of providing shelter to people fleeing tyranny or natural disasters and that it was “a legitimate governmental function.”

The Pentagon has helped HHS settle migrant children in years past, placing around 100 unaccompanied young people at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in the spring of 2012. Those children, who were among a surge of children arriving at the border from Central America, were cared for by Health and Human Services’ Unaccompanied Children’s Services and lived in a vacant 1,000-student dormitory with showers and a dining hall.

San Antonio housed around 20,000 people after Hurricane Katrina, and “the military was absolutely critical to that mission,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said. “I don’t know what their (current) plans are. All I know is it can be done and has been done.”

In a prepared statement, Rep. Joaquín Castro, D-San Antonio, said questions that remain include, “How many migrant children will be held, how long will they be held for, what conditions will they be held in and what background processes are in place for those overseeing the facilities?” He added that “we need more than just press reports, given the gravity of this humanitarian situation caused by this administration.”

Ruben Vogt, interim county judge in El Paso County, said he has not been told of the government’s plans for Fort Bliss and has waited more than a week for answers to key questions concerning the housing and reunification of migrant children and their parents.

HHS sent him a list of frequently asked questions, he said, “but it was very basic.”

“It was, ‘Who are these kids? How are they being cared for? Can donations be given?’ But again, it wasn’t kind of that holistic picture that so many of us were hoping to get, in that how do the kids get ahold of their parents? How will they be reunified? Where are the parents? Where are the kids? Are they all in the same cities?

“Just a bunch of questions still left unanswered,” Vogt added.

sigc@express-news.net