How Healing and Love Grew a Family
February 4, 2016
By Robert Carey, Director, Office of Refugee Resettlement and Mark Greenberg, Acting Assistant Secretary for Children and Families
Unaccompanied children who make the dangerous journey from Central America to the United States, often in the hands of human smugglers, come in search of a better life. Many of the children we’ve spoken with are fleeing poverty and violence.
Clearly, these are vulnerable children in difficult circumstances, and we treat our responsibility for each child referred to our care with compassion and a commitment to their safety and well-being. Our mission to care for unaccompanied children who have been referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) has two key parts. The first is to create a safe and healthy environment in our shelters, one that ensures access to nutritious food, clean clothes, education and medical services. The second is to identify the most appropriate and least restrictive placement, usually with a sponsor, for each child while they await their U.S. immigration proceedings, subject to considerations of risk of flight, and danger to the child or community.
As soon as a child is referred to ORR, we begin the process of identifying potential sponsors, with preference given first to parents, then other family members -- some 87 percent of sponsors are parents or close family members. If there is not a suitable parent or other relative in the U.S., ORR works with the family to identify an individual who might care for the child while the immigration proceedings are pending. Once a sponsor has been identified, the potential sponsor undergoes a multi-step assessment process.
We require that potential sponsors provide a significant amount of information as part of the release evaluation process, including verification of identity and relationship to the child. ORR care providers conduct interviews with the child, the potential sponsor, and the child’s family. We also run background checks on every sponsor to identify potential criminal history or child welfare issues. For specific issues identified during the assessment process, such a trafficking indicator or if the child has special needs, the case worker requests a home study of the sponsor’s home before making a recommendation about whether or not to release a child to the sponsor.
Every release decision receives three levels of review. Once the case manager has all of the required documentation and forms, a recommendation for release is sent to an independent, third-party review office for their review. The final step in the approval process is review by a federal field specialist who works for HHS. At every stage of the process, the primary concern is the safety of the child.
Despite ORR’s efforts to place children with appropriate sponsors, a set of tragic cases occurred in Marion, Ohio, where dishonest people exploited the system and broke the law in order to take advantage of unaccompanied children and their families. We share the outrage that individuals were able to exploit the systems and protections that ORR has put in place to protect the children involved. When we learn of fraud or cases of exploitation, we immediately begin to work with all appropriate law enforcement agencies and state child welfare organizations so that those who took advantage of a child are brought to justice to the full extent of the law and these children and their families are protected. Anyone with information that a child is being mistreated should call our Help Line: 800-203-7001 so we can work with the proper local and state authorities to make sure the child is safe.
Continuous Efforts to Strengthen Safeguards
Over the last year, we have made a number of enhancements to our process for safely releasing children to qualified sponsors, strengthening our pre-screening protocols and augmenting the resources and protections available post-release. In addition, we are carefully reviewing the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on Protecting Unaccompanied Children from Trafficking and Other Abuses for areas where we can continue to improve the protections in place, and we welcome suggestions from our partners across the country.
Recently, ORR implemented new measures to enhance the pre-release screening of potential sponsors, such as requiring background checks on all adult household members living with the potential sponsor and instituting mandatory home studies for additional categories of children, including children 12 and under released to a non-relative or distantly related sponsor and cases in which a non-relative sponsor has previously sponsored a child or proposes to sponsor more than one child to whom the sponsor is not related.
We have also improved our post-release services. ORR provides post-release assistance to many children and sponsors, including help identifying resources in their communities for medical care and mental health services, accessing schools, and finding legal support. ORR provides these services for any child who received a home study or on a case-by-case basis if it is determined the child has mental health or other needs.
In July 2015, ORR began a pilot project to provide post-release services to all unaccompanied children released to a non-relative or distant relative sponsor, as well as children whose placement has been disrupted or is at risk of disruption within 180 days of release and the child or sponsor has contacted ORR’s hotline (in their native language). In fiscal year 2015, ORR provided post-release services for 8,618 unaccompanied children.
In May 2015, we expanded the capability of an existing telephone hotline, used to help parents locate children in ORR custody, to accept calls from children with safety-related concerns, as well as to sponsors calling with family problems or child behavior issues, or in need of assistance connecting to community resources. Every child released to a sponsor is given a card with the hotline’s phone number on it (Spanish language access as well) and all providers and sponsors are also provided with the hotline phone number. Starting last summer, we now call each household 30 days after the child is released from our care to check on the child’s wellbeing and safety.
While the changes ORR has made over the last year establish important new safeguards, ORR is mindful of the continued need to closely examine our policies and procedures. ORR appreciates the feedback and recommendations it has received from Congress, grantees, advocates, and other stakeholders and is actively working to identify additional steps we can take to strengthen our program.
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