Pressure building on Biden, aides as young migrants crowd shelters
WASHINGTON — The desperate plea landed last week in the email inboxes of employees in government agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and NASA: Will you consider taking a four-month paid leave from your job to help care for migrant children in government-run shelters packed with new arrivals at the border?
The request to much of the federal workforce came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which is at the heart of a frantic effort by the Biden administration to keep up with a surge in young people crossing the southwestern border hoping to reunite with relatives already in the United States.
The numbers are daunting. In March, Border Patrol agents encountered nearly 19,000 children at the border — the largest number recorded in a single month — most of them fleeing poverty and violence in Central America. And the flow of migrant children is expected to increase in coming weeks.
More than 20,000 children and teenagers are in the custody of a government system that is already at “103 percent of capacity,” including nearly 17,000 in shelters run by the health department, according to briefing materials from Operation Artemis, a response to the border crisis led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Government projections show there could be more than 35,000 migrant children to be cared for by June — a prospect that one former senior health and human services
official called “terrifying.”
The ability of the Department of Health and Human Services to build shelters, move children quickly into them and then unite them with relatives and other sponsors in the United States is the first major test of whether the Biden administration can respond swiftly and effectively to a growing immigration crisis that has far-reaching political and human ramifications.
The pressure is producing tension inside the White House. President Joe Biden expressed frustration with Xavier Becerra, his secretary of health and human services, in a White House meeting March 30, for what Biden views as bureaucratic holdups in increasing capacity, according to two administration officials familiar with the exchange.
Susan Rice, director of the Domestic Policy Council, and Amy Pope, the president’s senior adviser for migration issues, have been aggressively pressing officials from the health department and other immigration agencies for explanations about the failure to quickly move more than 4,000 migrant youths out of jail-like detention facilities run by Border Patrol, according to several people familiar with the meetings.
Harsh conditions
When they first cross the border, unaccompanied children are taken to border jails. By law, they are supposed to be held there for no more than three days before being moved to about 150 shelters and other facilities and group homes overseen by HHS.
But because of a lack of available space in the shelters, the young people are frequently held far longer in the often-harsh conditions of the border facilities.
When they eventually are shipped to the health department’s shelters around the country — where they are required to receive schooling, medical care, psychological services and recreation while officials vet family members, friends or foster parents who can take them in — they typically face further long waits.
The latest surge, on pace to be larger than those that prompted crises for President Barack Obama in 2014 and 2016 and for President Donald Trump in 2019, has administration officials racing to erect facilities and recruit staff for them.
Officials have opened a dozen emergency shelters in vacant spaces such as convention centers in Dallas and San Diego, an expo center in San Antonio, and a military site and a former camp for oil workers in West Texas.
They have also moved to cut the time it takes to conduct background checks for parents in an effort to release the young migrants from the shelters more quickly and open up spots for those being held in border jails. But even with the early signs of progress, over 4,100 minors were stuck in border facilities last week, far more than the 2,600 detained in border jails at the peak of the surge in 2019.
Transition problems
Aides to Trump said career officials warned the incoming Biden team of the likely surge of arrivals in the spring but said the new administration did not move quickly to begin reactivating emergency facilities for added space.
Biden administration officials reject that criticism, saying they were not given enough information during the transition and they notified Congress of the need to begin adding emergency capacity in early February.
They said they were also hampered by a decision by Trump administration officials during the pandemic to freeze hiring at the health department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the shelters. And they accused their predecessors of merely relying on the existence of Trump’s harsh policies that blocked migrants from entering the country.
“They were turning away unaccompanied migrant kids so they were not taking efforts to expand the shelter system,” said Cecilia Muñoz, one of Biden’s top immigration officials during the transition.
Biden’s aides are scouting additional locations and planning to add more tent camps at the border jails.
The United States has long struggled to quickly move children out of the government’s care to make room for new arrivals.
Most are eventually matched with a parent who is already in the country. But others are handed over to more distant relatives, friends or foster parents. The more distant the connection, the longer the children are typically held in the shelters while health officials do background checks to ensure their safety.
Of the roughly 2,000 minors released to sponsors this past week, about half were reunited with parents or legal guardians after an average of 23 days. Those with more distant relatives had to wait on average nearly two months.