“Providing unaccompanied children a safe, healthy place is both our legal and moral obligation. That’s why today I visited the Long Beach Convention Center, an Emergency Intake Site that HHS launched three weeks ago, which has a potential capacity of 1,000 beds to help us meet the influx of arrivals. Our federal volunteers and the many staff members here today are working tirelessly to care for the children as we move to safely unite them with their parents or legal sponsors.

While we have more work to do to meet the influx of arrivals and tackle the challenges this Administration inherited, we are making important strides. Last month, we doubled our capacity at shelters by adding more than 14,000 emergency influx beds. We have reduced the amount of time that children spend in our care from an average of 40 days to 29 days. And the upwards of 1,000 federal volunteers deployed at sites across the country are making significant progress to strengthen our case management work.”

For more information on the Secretary’s trip, follow @HHS_Spox.