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'Tender-age' children from border held at Virginia home for troubled kids

Silent video provided by the feds has been our only look inside the facility.

BRISTOW, Va. - The Office of Refugee Resettlement is sending some of the youngest children taken from their parents at the border thousands of miles to Youth for Tomorrow in Bristow, Virginia.

The center is a home for troubled youth.

RELATED: Young immigrants detained in Virginia center allege abuse

Both of Virginia’s U.S. Senators want access to the Youth for Tomorrow facility in Prince William County, but so far, it’s been a no-go for Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, both Democrats, and for the media.

When WUSA9 went there Thursday, three staffers had created a blockade with cars and traffic cones in the middle of Youth for Tomorrow's long driveway and were ordering people to turn around.

Silent video provided by the feds from inside Youth for Tomorrow shows girls in class in an auditorium, boys playing soccer on a basketball court and a young child cradled in a woman’s arms.

WATCH: HHS VIDEO: Inside a center for young immigrant children separated from their parents

The Department of Health and Human Services called Youth for Tomorrow a "tender age" shelter. It also houses teenage migrants and has been doing so since 2012.

"As a facility, it’s a perfectly fine facility," said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg of the Legal Aid Justice Center, Immigrant Advocacy Program. "The problem is there are a bunch of kids behind a locked door, who, at least 80 percent, have some other family member here in the U.S., who would be happy to take care of them... We agreed a long time ago to do away with orphanages. And the answer to problem Dickens highlighted is not to have better orphanages. It was, let’s place kids with other family members."

RELATED: What's changed after Trump's immigration order: For families, the military and Congress

"We want to see that facility," said Sen. Warner, while on his way to a meeting on the crisis at the border.

Sen. Kaine complained the Trump Administration has turned away members of Congress from shelters across the country. "They will not let members of Congress, the Article One branch, on the facilities to see what’s being done. That means they’re ashamed," said Sen. Kaine. "We want to not only see, we want to talk to the kids, hear they’re experiences."

For now, the government video is as close as the senators or the media is going to get.

RELATED: How we covered immigrant children at the border – and what we learned

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