Thread: Feds chide Congress for holding up family unifications at border

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Tuesday, July 3, 2018

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department chided members of Congress on Tuesday for all the demands to visit the dorms where illegal immigrant children are staying, saying the hundreds of hours it took to show facilities to lawmakers could have been better spent reuniting parents and children.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, a part of HHS, said more than 70 lawmakers have been granted access to government-run dorms for unaccompanied alien children, absorbing nearly 500 hours of staff time.

“Many of these hours would otherwise have been spent by ORR field and grantee staff verifying parental relationships to prevent child trafficking, facilitating check-in calls between parents and children, facilitating and reviewing foster family home studies, coordinating the delivery of food and medical supplies, and many other duties vital to the health and welfare of the children,” wrote Matthew D. Bassett, an assistant secretary at HHS.

He said the department has bent its own rules, which usually require two weeks’ notice ahead of visits, to accommodate the flood of requests from lawmakers.

The demand for access is coming chiefly from Democrats who are using the dorms as a backdrop to complain about the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy.

They say they worry about the treatment of the children and the trauma some 2,000 of them may be experiencing after they were separated from their parents at the border.

Those parents are generally being prosecuted for illegal entry. Because the criminal justice system can’t accommodate families, they were being separated.

President Trump last month issued an executive order halting separations, saying the families should be kept in the immigration detention system — effectively halting the criminal prosecutions.

That has cut down on separations moving forward, but with more than 2,000 children already separated, Democrats and many Republicans have demanded that the government work faster to reunite them. A federal judge has also stepped in and ordered firm deadlines for reunification.

The facilities where the children are being kept has become a symbol of the situation, with the press and members of Congress demanding access to the dorms and to the children.

HHS says it is following a long-standing policy of requiring advance notice for visits — a policy that was in place when the crisis of unaccompanied alien children began in 2014, under President Obama.

Democrats did not object as vociferously at that point to the policy.

Now, however, they condemn as inhumane the conditions in which the children are being kept — and the slow pace of reunification.

Repeated demands for more information have been stonewalled, and deadlines missed, the Democrats say.

The issue is now before the federal courts, with judges increasingly policing Mr. Trump’s immigration policies.

One judge in California has set a nationwide deadline of the middle of next week for the government to reunite all children younger than 5 who had been separated from parents at the border.

The judge gave the government an additional 15 days to reunite older children.

The government has said it is attempting to comply — though it hasn’t given any updates on its progress, and critics say they doubt the government has a concrete plan.

One major problem is the children are held by HHS, while the parents are either in Homeland Security or Justice Department custody — and it’s not clear the government has the ability to tie those families back together in their systems.

As of early last week, the government had 944 unaccompanied alien children in HHS-run dorms in Texas, 379 in Arizona, 327 in New York, 179 in Florida, 65 in Illinois, 47 in California, 27 in Michigan, 24 in Pennsylvania and 20 in Virginia. Another seven states combined for 35 more.

Under the law and court rulings, the government can keep illegal immigrant children in immigration detention for only a short period of time — three days if they are without their parents or up to 20 days if they are with their parents.

If they are unaccompanied, they are sent to the HHS-run dorms. They are not jails or detention facilities, and indeed children are able to walk away if they choose and disappear into the shadows with other illegal immigrants.

While at the dorms, they are given three meals a day plus snacks, play games on new ballfields, attend classes, go on outings to amusement parks and bowling alleys, and enjoy their home country’s soccer teams on lavish cable television packages, according to contract documents obtained by The Washington Times.

The children also receive medical care — in some cases the first of their lives. But critics contend that care sometimes includes behavior-altering drugs administered without approval of the parents.

Parents have also reported sicknesses and injuries to their children at the dorms.

In a court filing this week, Angelica Rebeca Gonzalez-Garcia, 31, said her 8-year-old daughter was assaulted by a boy at the dorm where she was taken.

The girl also had contracted conjunctivitis and was isolated from the other children, spending her eighth birthday separated from her mother.

Ms. Gonzalez-Garcia said she hasn’t seen her daughter since they were separated May 11.

“I still cannot stop crying over this incident,” she said in a court declaration, translated from Spanish. “Nothing can prepare a person for the pain of watching their child be forcibly removed from them. … It is not clear that I can recover fully from this incident.”

She is in the process of applying for asylum, was released from detention June 19, and immediately began searching for her daughter.

She arranged for an attorney and began the 36-page reunification packet the government requires, but she said she has to have everyone in her household provide fingerprints — part of the government’s safety check — and that will take until the end of July.

Other parents describe having come to the official ports of entry to apply for asylum and still having their children separated.

The government has insisted that in most cases, it was only people jumping the border who were being charged with crimes and therefore separated.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...y-unification/

They need to "reunite" them ALL back home!

They are not our responsibility to pay for. I do not want to pay for their detention, lawyers, Judges, lawsuits, clothing, medical, education or food.

WE ALREADY FOOT THE BILL TO SEND THEM BACK...THAT IS ENOUGH!

PROCESS AND DEPORT WITHIN 48 HOURS. START TO CHARTER BUSES AND BARGES AND SEND THEM BACK.

THEY NEED TO GET THE MESSAGE LOUD AND CLEAR...DO NOT COME HERE!