During the second oversight hearing on the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy and the treatment of migrant children in U.S. custody, legislators confronted Scott Lloyd, the former director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), about testimony from another ORR official stating that he had warned Lloyd and others in the administration about the harm family separation posed to kids, but essentially had his concerns dismissed.
"Did you ever say to the administration, this is a bad idea, this is what my child welfare experts have told us, we need to stop this policy?” Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington asked Lloyd. “Did you once say that to anybody above you?" Lloyd, who led ORR until his ouster last summer, replied, "To answer your last question, I did not say those words.” Of course he didn’t, and in fact Lloyd single-handedly prolonged the detention of perhaps hundreds of migrant children.
Legislators also criticized administration officials for failing to properly track who was stolen from whom at the southern border. While “Lloyd disputed Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s claim that children were not being properly tracked,” CNN reported, Jackson Lee is right: A government watchdog report last year found that the Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security lacked an “integrated … system to identify and track separated families.”
While the hearing focused on children and families torn apart under “zero tolerance,” Florida Rep. Ted Deutch further revealed that HHS has, horrifically, received thousands of complaints of sexual abuse against migrant children in its custody over the past several years. The documents, he said, "demonstrate over the past three years, there have been 154 staff on unaccompanied minor, let me repeat that, staff on unaccompanied minor allegations of sexual assault. This works out on average to one sexual assault by HHS staff on unaccompanied minor per week.” As of last month, the Trump administration had nearly 11,000 migrant children in custody. Some of them are kids who were stolen from families at the border, and, despite a federal judge’s court order, the families remain separated.
The Tuesday hearing came on the same day the House Oversight Committee, after months of Republican inaction, voted to subpoena the Trump administration for documents relating to family separation. “When our own government rips children from the arms of their mothers and fathers with no plans to reunite them,” said Chair Elijah Cummings, “that is government-sponsored child abuse.”
House Democrats’ investigations come as the federal judge who ordered the reunification of families separated under the “zero tolerance” policy may also order the administration to reunite the potentially thousands of families who were also separated at the border before the policy. "It's important to recognize that we're talking about human beings," said Judge Dana Sabraw. "Every person needs to be accounted for."
It’s certainly more care than many Trump administration officials have shown. “Two years into the Trump Administration’s wide array of dramatic and damaging immigration policy changes, it is unbelievable that so much harm has occurred to so many people with so little congressional oversight,” said House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler. “That ends with this new Congress.”