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Border Children Stuck Longer at Processing Centers

The administration is scrambling to keep up with the higher than expected numbers of children crossing the border alone.
Image: Boys sit together while watching television at the shelter for underage immigrants and repatriated minors \"Mexico, my home\" in Ciudad Juarez
Tens of thousands of children unaccompanied by parents or relatives are flooding across the southern U.S. border illegally, forcing the Obama administration and Congress to grapple with both a humanitarian crisis and a budget dilemma. An estimated 60,000 such children will pour into the United States this year, according to the administration, up from about 6,000 in 2011. STRINGER/MEXICO / Reuters

The Obama administration is opening a third emergency shelter to house a larger than anticipated surge of young children showing up at the nations' border without parents.

The numbers are so high the administration said it is having trouble meeting a legal requirement that the children be turned over to Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee and Resettlement within 72 hours.

The latest facility to be opened is at Fort Sill, Army post in Lawton, Okla., joining another at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and Naval Base Ventura in southern California.

Anticipated numbers of children were previously set at 60,000, although that number is expected to be met or may already have been.

The emergency shelters is one of several activities the administration has undertaken in response, including appointing the head of FEMA to coordinate the federal response to what President Barack Obama has called a humanitarian crisis.