President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, may soon have the ability to reform how the federal government cares for unaccompanied migrant children.
Becerra, the son of Mexican immigrants, as California attorney general sued to stop a range of Trump administration immigration policies.
Now, after four years of calling for changes to how HHS handles children in its custody, the incoming Cabinet member will have the ability, albeit limited, to remake HHS’s child care policies, according to Migration Policy Institute Policy Analyst Sarah Pierce.
If confirmed as HHS secretary, Becerra could end contracts with private detention facilities that hold at-risk children. Instead, he could force HHS to work more closely with nonprofit organizations to care for children who arrived at the border without a family member and for whom the government has not found a relative in the United States.
“The very first thing that Mr. Becerra can do is go back to [that],” said Tony Payan, the director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. In that scenario, HHS would return to working with Catholic Charities, the Quakers, and other religious organizations that have had contracts with the government to house and care for children who do not have family to be released to and are awaiting court hearings for asylum claims.
“What the Trump administration did, frankly, was to dismantle the [HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement] system almost completely. Detain everyone, deport everybody without due process,” said Payan. “If Mr. Becerra restores these processes that were put in place back in the 1990s, I think he will have done a great bit to restore processes for asylum-seekers.”
Pierce said the top priority for Becerra ought to be to end a practice used by the Trump administration in which officials would use unaccompanied minors as “bait,” critics charge, by arresting relatives when they came to pick up the children in HHS custody.
Becerra has sued the Trump administration in the past four years for issues related to the funding for the border wall, ending protections for protected classes of illegal immigrants, and the citizenship question in the 2020 census. Last year, Becerra led a multistate lawsuit that alleged children were being held in “inhumane” conditions for weeks at Border Patrol facilities, a violation of detention conditions as outlined in the 1997 Flores settlement agreement, a court agreement that outlined how the government can detain illegal immigrants, including children.
Any person arrested after illegally crossing the U.S. border from Mexico or Canada is taken into custody by Border Patrol, which is part of the DHS agency Customs and Border Protection. He or she is then transferred from a regional Border Patrol holding station to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for longer detention, immediately removed from the country by CBP, or in the case of children who arrive without parents or are separated from a parent by the government, they will be turned over to ORR, the federal agency that cares for unaccompanied children.
Although Becerra will not have authority over DHS agencies CBP or ICE, he can still affect how HHS treats the thousands of children who flow through its doors annually.
“Much of the criticism of the care of immigrant children is directed against DHS, not HHS,” Dr. Nestor Rodriguez, professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s department of sociology, wrote in an email Monday. “Since he will not have power in DHS, I don’t see how he could help the immigrant children detained by DHS (Border Patrol/ICE). Still, he could try to improve on the issues that do concern HHS.”
