Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar appeared in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Tuesday to face questions about the Trump administration’s budget proposal, but his role in the ongoing family separation crisis also demanded the attention of lawmakers.
Donald Trump staged an Oval Office photo-op last summer to announce a supposed end to his policy of family separation, but border agents have continued to steal kids from families, sometimes based on total lies and without any input from child welfare experts. In just one example, asylum-seeker Julio fled gang violence only to be falsely accused at the border of being a gang member. His 4-year-old son, Brayan, was taken from him.
“American people are horrified by this,” Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky told Azar. “They see this, I see this as state-sponsored child abuse, I would say even state-sponsored kidnapping. Children being taken away from their parents, hundreds, maybe thousands of children. And it’s continuing. I want to know what you are doing, a sense of urgency to come from you, about what you are doing about stopping this.”
But during the hearing, Azar instead defended taking kids like Brayan away from their parents, saying, "I will not stop or advocate DHS to stop separating children from individuals who present a harm for child welfare, and if that is what is occurring, that is what should be occurring.” But it’s not what’s occurring. In Julio’s case, officials refused to provided any evidence of his supposed gang ties. Julio and Brayan would not be reunited for months. “I still don’t understand why they did this to us,” he said. “I guess they can do whatever they want.”
Children kidnapped under the policy remain in HHS custody months after a federal judge’s deadline, and the reason for the delayed reunification of so many is that officials failed to track who was stolen from whom. Remember that in his Senate testimony last year, Azar claimed he could locate “any child … within seconds” through a government database. But a government watchdog report found there was no central database. Family separation remains a crisis, and Azar is square in the middle of it.