Becerra to face border surge, virus crises
WASHINGTON — When Xavier Becerra takes over as President Biden’s health and human services secretary, he won’t just be confronting a pandemic. He’ll also be responsible for the care of thousands of immigrant children.
Health and Human Services manages shelters for undocumented immigrant children who arrive in the U.S. by themselves. The California attorney general will take his post in the Cabinet amid a nearrecord surge of immigrant children coming to the southern border at a time when the shelter network is already near capacity and is constrained by the coronavirus pandemic.
Overseeing the response will be a massive logistical and political challenge for Becerra
once the Senate confirms him, which is expected to happen this week. Republicans are already criticizing Biden for not denying entry to the children as former President Donald Trump did, and progressives are rebelling against any measures they see as reminiscent of Trump’s antimigrant policies.
“Secretary Becerra will need to navigate a highly politicized context even while he tries to keep a focus on child wellbeing,” said Maria Cancian, a former senior child welfare official with the agency and now dean of Georgetown University’s public policy school. “Sometimes people don’t fully understand how difficult it is to establish a place that can take care of kids appropriately, and to find staff that can work with children who speak a variety of languages and parents who speak a variety of languages, and provide them with the care that’s required.”
The issue received no attention during Becerra’s confirmation hearings, and the administration did not make him available for an interview, but two senators did ask written questions about caring for unaccompanied immigrant minors.
“Ensuring these children’s safety and wellbeing is both our legal duty and our moral obligation — I take both seriously,” Becerra told Sen. Ron Wyden, DOre., saying he was committed to ensuring children are released to safe homes as quickly as possible.
He told Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas that Health and Human Services seeks to be “a good steward of taxpayer funds” while still ensuring the system has enough space during waves of migration.
Last month, almost 10,000 immigrant children arrived at the southern border by themselves, the highest number of any month in the last three years besides May 2019. Not only is the influx straining the system, but the shelter network that normally has the capacity for roughly 13,000 migrant children is restricted by the pandemic. State and local regulations in parts of the U.S. require the facilities to operate below capacity.
The agency is also struggling to emerge from the shadow of the Trump administration, which in 2018 separated thousands of children from their parents at the border and placed them into Health and Human Services’ custody without clear plans to reunite them. Although most of those migrants have been released, the government’s shelter network is largely associated in the public mind with that widely opposed policy — creating political complications for current efforts to house youths until a suitable home is found.
In addition to desperation in the Central American countries from which most of the children are traveling, the influx is due to pentup demand after the Trump administration blocked the entry of children seeking asylum at the border last year and pushed them back into Mexico.
Some efforts are already under way to help the stretched system. The Biden administration ended a Trump administration policy of having the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency vet sponsors seeking to take in the children, often family members, which had a chilling effect on a largely undocumented population. It is also establishing temporary facilities and working to identify new shelter space that can accommodate the larger numbers.
When he comes in, Becerra will have to determine which decisions to make personally and which to leave to career staff and leaders in his department.
“In a situation like this, there’s strong reason to want to be sure that the secretary is never surprised when a development occurs and is not reading about it for the first time in the newspapers,” said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and former child services official in the Obama administration.
Greenberg said the secretary plays an important coordination role within the administration as well as with partners like Congress, states, local governments and nongovernmental organizations.
None of the choices will be easy, Cecilia Munoz said, echoing Greenberg. Munoz led former President Barack Obama’s Domestic Policy Council during the similar 2014 surge of child migrants. She had a leadership role on the BidenHarris transition team, and Greenberg and Cancian both assisted the effort, but neither joined the administration.
Munoz said the secretary often needs to be directly involved in the decision on opening new facilities or steps that would speed the release of children from custody.
“There are some very challenging judgment calls that need to be made because the options for shelter space are very limited,” Munoz said. “There’s just not a huge number of different kinds of places you can deploy for a shelter that will be appropriate for children . ... You’re balancing the need to move children out of those facilities quickly and reunite them with their families and the obligation to make sure you are putting them in settings where they are safe.”
One such potential site is Moffett Field in Mountain View — an option that has already drawn local protests from activists who favor fewer restrictions on immigration.
Munoz, who worked with Becerra when he was in Congress, said he is well positioned for the challenge.
“He understands the process well, he understands the needs of migrants well, and he has his compass really firmly set, which is really important because this is very challenging work,” she said.
One of his first tasks will be convincing Americans that one of the most vulnerable groups of children in the world will be treated fairly and cared for.
“This is a remarkably complex operation, and I think one of the challenges is that, for good reason, the American public has come to doubt whether officials have the best interests of children in mind because of some of the policies of the previous administration,” said Cancian, the former child welfare official. “It’s a hard job. I have never worked on anything harder.”