Politico
By TED HESSON and DAN DIAMOND
July 02, 2018
Federal officials are struggling to reunite migrant children with their families despite a court deadline, and agencies do not have the resources or procedures to help thousands of children detained at the border back into the arms of their parents, according to a dozen current and former officials, advocates and experts.
With a July 10 deadline looming, staffers at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the division within HHS that oversees the care of unaccompanied children, have received no instructions on how to proceed, the sources say.
“It’s been really difficult to start the reunification process because we just don’t have a lot of direction from leadership,” said one official at the refugee office, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “That’s been slowing things up, because there’s just been a lot of confusion.”
U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw ruled last week that the Trump administration had until July 10 to reunite migrant children under 5 with their parents, and until July 26 to reunite the rest. But the refugee office is still struggling to answer basic questions such as how many children in its custody were separated from their parents.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar told Congress last week that his department could find children in his department’s care “within seconds.” But he subsequently called for volunteers to review the case files of each of the roughly 11,900 children in custody to determine whether HHS missed any who had been separated from adults at the border, according to two current officials.
U.S. Border Patrol agents arrive to detain a group of Central American asylum seekers near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12,
Azar even started reviewing the files personally, staying past midnight in the Secretary’s Operations Center — the agency’s round-the-clock emergency hub — last week, according to one HHS official.
HHS staffers searched for children separated under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, as well as children taken from adults because authorities suspected a fraudulent familial relationship or feared harm to the child. The latter category was exempted from Sabraw’s order.
The review may reveal that the total number of children separated from their parents is larger than previously reported. Azar told a Senate committee last week that his department had 2,047 children in its custody who had been split apart from adults.
The urgency has taken a toll on morale in the refugee office, which typically deals with children who arrive at the border without a parent — not kids split from their families intentionally.
“I think a lot of people are frustrated,” the refugee office official said. “They just don’t feel like this is what our program was supposed to be doing.” The official added that “people are just feeling very overwhelmed” with the task at hand.
Sabraw’s order put immediate pressure on refugee office case workers to calculate the scope of their task and how they would execute it, but so far they’ve made little or no progress.
More than 2,300 children were separated from parents during a five-week period under the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, which sought to refer all people suspected of crossing the border illegally for prosecution, without exceptions for families and asylum seekers. The administration has not stated publicly how many children were separated before President Donald Trump halted family separations on June 20.
The likely reason is that it doesn’t know. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a letter Friday that administration officials still could not tell him and other lawmakers how many children had endured separations and how many remained in the federal government’s custody. Eleven mostly Democratic senators followed up Monday by demanding information about the unaccompanied minors.
After a bipartisan backlash to the separations, Trump issued an executive order on June 20 that required families to be held together in detention. But that order conflicted with the 1997 Flores settlement agreement and subsequent court rulings that limit to 20 days the time that an undocumented minor may be detained. And with the federal government’s 3,326 family detention beds roughly three-quarters full, administration officials will need to find more space to place newly reunited families. Military facilities are under consideration, but it’s not clear that such housing will meet the criteria laid out in the Flores agreement, or how it would be funded.
Officials at the refugee office, meanwhile, have scrambled to figure out what to do with children in their care who have been split apart from family members, an experience health experts say can cause lifelong, irreparable harm.
The Administration for Children and Families, the branch of HHS that oversees the refugee office, did not respond to a request for comment.
Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said DHS and HHS have been working closely together regarding the handling of unaccompanied minors, including the sharing of “names, date and sector of apprehension, and alien numbers in a timely manner for all children separated as a result of zero tolerance.”
HHS recently tasked its emergency response team, which typically handles public health crises like hurricanes and epidemics, to help support the refugee office — an indication that the challenge of quickly reunifying thousands of families is beyond its normal capabilities.
Azar’s assertion before the Senate Finance Committee that HHS can locate children in its care “within seconds” was not inaccurate, HHS officials say. “Every person who crosses the border is assigned an alien number,” an HHS official said. “We can type it in and tell exactly where they are in ORR custody.”
But the refugee office has limited access to information about whether a child arrived at the border with an adult. DHS reporting that tracks separations was “spotty” as the zero-tolerance policy went into effect, but has improved, the HHS official said.
The refugee office typically collects as much information as possible to determine where children should be placed. But in the past, the office dealt mostly with teenagers who arrived at the border alone — not younger children who might or might not be able to describe what they experienced.
“The system was set up largely to serve verbal individuals who often had documentation with them about who they were and who they were going to,” said Bob Carey, former refugee-office director during the Obama administration.
The agency is struggling to figure out how to handle children in three previously uncommon categories: those whose parents were released recently from detention; those whose parents are still detained; and those whose parents have been deported.
The cases of recently released parents might appear straightforward, but there are technical snags. The refugee office normally engages in a vetting process for people who will take custody of children. That involves a background check and the collection of fingerprints and other information.
Under a new policy announced in June, the office collects fingerprints from every adult in a potential sponsor’s household and shares that information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to check criminal history and immigration status.
“My position would be that is not necessary, if they themselves physically separated the parent from that child and there’s a court order to reunify them,” said Michelle Brané, a director at the non-profit Women’s Refugee Commission. “It’s not law, it’s just their own policy.”
“They seem to be ignoring the really obvious option of releasing parents to be reunified,” Brané added.
But the Trump White House wants to discourage any perception that it has backed off from its “zero tolerance” border policy, even though a top border official said in late June that Border Patrol had suspended referrals of families for prosecution unless family status was judged suspicious or the adult in question was judged a potential threat to the child.
Some advocates argue that quick releases might expose children to dangerous situations.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower levels of immigration, cites “nightmare scenarios” in which children have been released to human traffickers.
In one 2014 case, Guatemalan children who had arrived at the border alone were retrieved by traffickers from federal custody and forced to work on an Ohio farm.
“It exposes how fragile this whole system of dealing with unaccompanied minors really is,” she said. “The better option all along was to detain the kids with their family units.”
The refugee office requires recently released parents who seek to be reunited with their kids to supply proof of income or an address in the U.S. — something the parents often lack, according to a refugee office staffer. The agency may even elect to perform a home visit to determine suitability of a placement.
“Our understanding is that they’re still continuing with the same ORR process that they had before, which is way too slow,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union representing the plaintiffs in the San Diego case on family separations.
Azar said during the Senate committee hearing last week that the department was barred by Flores from reuniting children with parents in immigration detention. But three days later, the administration argued in court that Judge Sabraw’s order overrode Flores.
For parents who are already deported, the situation is more complicated. Children may elect to be repatriated to their home countries, but any decision to honor that request must take into account the child‘s age and capacity to make the decision, according to Brané.
“If the parent has been deported, ORR has not historically been charged with reunifying children with relatives who are in another country,” said Maria Cancian, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and former deputy assistant secretary at the HHS Administration for Children and Families. “So that is uncharted.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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