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A 'Tender Age' Shelter For Separated Children Exposes A 'Gut-Wrenching' Reality In Miami

C.M. GUERRERO cmguerrero@miamiherald.com
Republican Congressman Carlos Curbelo speaks to the media after touring Catholic Charities' Boystown in Cutler Bay.

In this "tender age" shelter in South Miami-Dade, children as young as 4 can ask for a telephone when they miss their parents.

Two teenage mothers live here with their infants.

And some children — as many as 22 of them separated from their families at the U.S. border — go on field trips to hopefully take their minds off their solitude for an afternoon.

The near-impossible job of comforting some of the youngest boys and girls whose lives have been turned upside-down by U.S. immigration policy and conditions in the countries they fled falls to the dozens of employees at the old Boystown shelter in Cutler Bay. Run by the Archdiocese of Miami, the complex is tasked with housing children who came into the country by themselves or were removed from their parents as part of the Trump administration's now-defunct "zero tolerance" policy of taking children from their parents as they go through immigration processing.

Read more from our news partner, The Miami Herald.

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