The youngsters are part of at least 2,000 separated from their parents and they are filtering into nine shelters licensed by New York State, the governor said.
The crisis at the southern border has reached New York City, as waves of children separated from their parents have been arriving in the area.
At least 74 children have been sent to nine shelters in New York, according to the office of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
That number appeared to increase overnight, as a video captured by NY1 showed a group of young girls being led in the darkness into a shelter in East Harlem run by Cayuga Centers, an agency that has a contract with the federal government. The shelter also has contracts with the city and the state to house children. A director for Cayuga, when reached by phone Tuesday, said she was not able to comment because the contract prohibited her from speaking to the news media.
The federal agency that cares for unaccompanied minors — the Office of Refugee Resettlement — did not immediately return a request for comment.
The children have been separated from their parents at the southern border, as part of the federal government’s zero tolerance policy, in which adults are prosecuted for entering the country illegally, and their children are taken from them and placed into custody separately. More than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in the last two months.
Jessica Lynch, a lawyer for Catholic Charities of New York, which represents the children in immigration court, said that since the policy was announced, “we’ve had a surge in minors coming who have been separated from their parents in the shelters.”
New York State regulates the shelters, which are also on Long Island, in Westchester and the Bronx, that care for what the federal government calls unaccompanied minors. But Mr. Cuomo said that the facilities have been instructed by the federal government not to speak to state authorities, a process he deemed problematic.
Mr. Cuomo said on Tuesday that he intended to sue the federal government within the next two weeks for its zero-tolerance policy because it violated the constitutional rights of parents to care for their children.
“There’s been a lot of talk about the morality of this practice,” Mr. Cuomo said on Tuesday. “But we also believe that this practice is illegal.”
The children are entitled to their own court hearings and, according to lawyers who deal with their cases, they are asking to be sent back to Central America. That is a shift from earlier cases, in which children who often arrived alone at the border would be placed with family members in New York and seek to stay in the United States.
The children arriving now, “ didn’t make the decision to come,” said Anthony Enriquez, the director of the unaccompanied minors program for Catholic Charities. “They said, ‘I just followed my mom here.’ I am dealing with that trauma, of family separation.”
But sending children back can be difficult because often the government does not know where the parent is, or, whether the parent has been deported ahead of the children.
“There is no system whatsoever to track these family separations, no efforts systematically to reunite these families,” Mr. Enriquez said. “There is no supervisor, there is no database saying, ‘child here, parent there,’ so they can come back together.”
