Health secretary stays loyal to president while trying to reunite immigrant families

ABOVE: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar pauses inside the HHS Situation Room on Capitol Hill. TOP RIGHT: President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy that was enacted in May separated immigrant children from their parents. The Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for reuniting them, though HHS wasn’t told of the plan in advance. Here, people who have been taken into custody are detained at a border facility in Texas.

Midnight had passed, and Alex Azar was still in a coat and tie as he looked at a computer screen inside the Department of Health and Human Services emergency-operations hub. It was a room built for managing responses to hurricanes and disease outbreaks, but the HHS secretary was instead scrambling to deal with a disaster instigated by his own boss — a “zero tolerance” immigration policy that caused thousands of children to be separated from their parents.

Azar was not consulted on the zero-tolerance policy before it was announced in May, according to people familiar with the events,

even though his department is responsible for housing migrant children who are on their own.

In the months since that late June night when the secretary was trying to help figure out which children had been separated, HHS has managed to return more than 2,000 to their parents. That leaves more than 200 separated youngsters in government-contracted shelters — at risk of becoming orphans as federal workers, civil-rights lawyers and aid activists scour remote villages of Central America for mothers and fathers who have been deported back home.

The reunification efforts have overshadowed the other work of the department that Azar arrived

to lead in January with a four-point agenda — including a promise to lower drug prices — and a role as frontman for the Trump administration’s strategy of shifting health-care policies to the right through executive actions.

The migrant crisis also has put on the line his carefully cultivated reputation as an orderly, competent executive who understands how to make government work. With the midterm elections fast approaching and public outrage over the policy of separating immigrant children from their parents an animating issue, Azar also risks drawing the wrath of Trump, who tends to publicly humiliate top officials when he thinks they are hurting his standing.

As the crisis escalated and the secretary became its public face before Congress and on cable TV, Azar adhered to the administration’s talking points, betraying no hint that he had been caught unaware by zero tolerance. Such loyalty reflects the priority that Azar has long placed on nurturing relationships, whether with Trump or with conservative legal luminaries who have long been his mentors, including the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom he clerked, and Justice Clarence Thomas, whom he considers a second father.

Those close to Azar say he has worked hard to stay in the president’s good graces.