Tensions rise within Biden administration as migrant kids crowd shelters
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[April 15, 2021]
By Ted Hesson, Mica Rosenberg, Kristina Cooke and Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top aides to
President Joe Biden are ramping up pressure on the agency that shelters
thousands of unaccompanied migrant children, voicing frustration that
kids are not being released quickly enough from detention, three U.S.
officials said.
In daily calls with representatives from the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS) and other agencies, White House officials have
demanded HHS speed up releases from its overloaded shelter system to
free up space for children packed into crowded border patrol stations,
the officials said. HHS is in charge of housing the migrant children and
vetting potential U.S. sponsors, often parents and close relatives, who
seek to take them in.
The pressure on HHS comes as the administration is scrambling to open
shelters to house children - mostly from Central America - who are
crossing the border in record numbers, deepening a humanitarian crisis
for Biden that is one of his first major tests in office.
The main White House aides exerting pressure on HHS are Susan Rice,
Biden's domestic policy adviser and a powerful voice within the
administration, and Amy Pope, a senior adviser for migration hired last
month to help deal with the escalating situation at the southern border,
said two of the three officials. All were familiar with the matter and
spoke on condition of anonymity.''
Rice, in particular, has pressed HHS staffers on what she sees as an
unacceptably slow pace of releases of children to sponsors, the three
officials said. While the number of children in HHS custody has grown by
more than 65% between the end of March and mid-April, reaching more than
19,000, the number released from shelters has stayed around 300 per day,
according to a Reuters analysis of government data.
"Everyone's working around the clock, and there's a big morale issue” at
HHS, said one of the three officials. "These are people who signed up to
help kids."
The tensions within the administration have not previously been reported
in detail. They are emerging as U.S. Customs and Border Protection
expects to arrest more unaccompanied children https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-children-explainer/explainer-why-more-migrant-children-are-arriving-at-the-u-s-mexico-border-idUSKBN2BA11B
this year than in any year since record-keeping began in 2010, according
to an internal U.S. government estimate reviewed by Reuters.
Mark Weber, an HHS spokesman, said government agencies were working
together with the common goal of trying to get children out of crowded
border patrol stations. But he conceded that Zoom and phone calls can
get heated.
“It’s tense,” Weber said in an interview. “But it’s a healthy tension
with high-powered folks aligned around the mission of making sure these
kids are well-taken care of.”
White House spokesman Vedant Patel said the pace of moving children out
of border stations and into HHS shelters was “unacceptable,” but added
that "the entire federal government is working tirelessly to add
capacity and take steps to swiftly unite unaccompanied minors with
vetted relatives."
RUSHING TO OPEN SHELTERS
The Biden administration has been hurrying to open up more than a dozen
emergency shelters, including in convention centers and on military
bases, to help house migrant children who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico
border without a parent or legal guardian.
The new president is under fire from migrant advocacy groups and some of
his own Democratic Party allies for not releasing the children more
quickly from shelters. Republicans blame him for the rising numbers,
saying he was too hasty in rolling back former President Donald Trump's
restrictive immigration policies.
Biden's administration has promised a more humane approach to
immigration and pledged to reverse many of Trump's policies. But those
goals have collided with a jump in apprehensions at the southwest
border.
The backlog in the number of children waiting to be released to sponsors
is partly due to logistical hurdles, migrant advocates said, including
difficulties of staffing up shelters quickly; providing guidance to an
unwieldy bureaucracy of contractor-run sites; and reaching potential
sponsors by phone.
But the slow pace is to some extent deliberate.
HHS officials worry that speeding up the vetting process too much could
lead children to be released into unsafe situations, according to two of
the three Biden administration officials. In a notorious case in 2014,
HHS released at least six children to traffickers who forced them to
work on an Ohio egg farm, according to court documents.
"There's a balance of timeliness and safety," said one of the three
officials who is critical of the White House approach. "We can't just
release kids without doing checks."
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Unaccompanied immigrant children walk with staff members supervising
them at the Carrizo Springs Influx Care Facility in a frame grab
from pool video shot during a tour for White House officials and
members of Congress held by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement
and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who run the
facility for immigrant children, in Carrizo Springs, Texas, U.S.,
March 24, 2021. The videographer was prohibited from photographing
the faces of any of the immigrants by government officials. POOL via
REUTERS
Rice has "pressed consistently" for HHS to speed up its releases of
children to make space in children's shelters, said another of the
three officials familiar with the matter. HHS efforts on that front
have been inadequate, the person said, but are now improving.
HHS defenders say the criticism in meeting after meeting where HHS
"is getting yelled at" is taking a toll on the staff.
In support of Rice's approach, one of the three officials said the
government was in "crisis response mode" and that Rice was simply
"trying to marshal people into action."
"It's like appearing before a really tough judge in a courtroom,"
the official said of Rice. "You don't go in with excuses, you go in
with plans."
MILLIONS IN CONTRACTS
So far, the government has been able to reduce the number of kids in
border patrol stations from a high of more than 5,700 on March 28 to
less than 2,900 on April 13, according to government data. HHS has
announced plans to add around 18,500 emergency beds this year,
according to a Reuters tally, which would more than double capacity.
This year, between Jan. 25 and April 6, HHS and other federal
agencies signed contracts worth about $400 million specifically
related to services for unaccompanied children, according to a
Reuters analysis of U.S. government spending data.
HHS also has temporarily waived some vetting requirements, including
most background checks on adults who live in the same household as
sponsors who are close relatives, the department confirmed to
Reuters. The agency told congressional staffers this week that it
has reduced the amount of time children spend in its custody to 31
days on average from 42 days in February.
But the majority of children in the emergency shelters do not have
case managers and so "haven't even begun the process of initiating
release to a sponsor," said Neha Desai, an attorney with the
National Center for Youth Law.
The administration has identified thousands of federal government
volunteers with expertise in case management to assist with the
effort, one of the three officials said. Still, it has taken weeks
to get them trained and supplied with computers and other equipment.
A March 28 job ad seeking people to work with 13- to 17-year-old
boys at the Dallas Convention Center highlighted an "IMMEDIATE
need."
'YOU HAVE TO WAIT’
Given the lagging case management, some desperate parents remain in
the dark about their children's whereabouts.
Fifteen-year-old Ilene traveled alone from Honduras and crossed the
U.S.-Mexico border in mid-March. Her mother, Sarahy, who lives in
Dallas, wasn't able to speak to her until Monday, after Ilene had
been in government custody for more than a month. Ilene, who told
her mother she was in a shelter in San Diego, said she had been sick
with COVID-19 for 14 days.
Her mother said the girl, allowed just 10 minutes to talk, seemed
sad and anxious and said she had been given no medicine.
“She said ‘Mami, I don’t want to be here any more. The kids just
scream and cry, the big ones and the little ones, they just are
crying all the time,’ she told me,” said Sarahy. She spoke on
condition that she and her daughter be identified only by their
first names.
Sarahy said she sent documents to someone who said they were a
government caseworker and heard nothing back. Recently, another
staffer told her the government hadn't received her paperwork.
"All they tell me is, 'You have to wait, you have to wait, you have
to wait,'" Sarahy said.
Attorney Melissa Adamson, who represents migrant kids as part of a
long-standing legal settlement governing their care, said she
recently visited two shelters and spoke with children there. "The
first questions of every single child I spoke to were: 'When am I
going to be released to my family? How much longer do I have to stay
here?"
(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington D.C., Mica Rosenberg in New
York, Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Steve Holland in
Washington D.C. Editing by Ross Colvin and Julie Marquis)
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