Nation : INS Houses Immigrants in Tents

Illegal immigrants are being housed in tents after the dormitories at a southern Texas detention center filled up with rejected applicants for political asylum, an immigration official said today.

Twenty-eight men slept in a tent Tuesday night, after the Immigration and Naturalization Service ran out of bed space for male detainees in buildings at the minimum-security center here, INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice said. “This is the first time the tents have been deployed,” Kice said. “We’ve reached our capacity.” The INS has been faced with a flood of Central Americans it maintains are filing “frivolous” applications for political asylum after illegally crossing the Rio Grande into southern Texas.