Shifting mission of Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) under Trump

[suffragette]

Something I noticed while searching for more information about ORR is that The Trump administration has been shifting their mission in order to achieve their hardline stance on immigration and likely to try to support their narrative of undocumented immigrants being dangerous.

This is but one thread in the spiderweb that is the ever growing and changing role of ICE, Border Patrol and ORR, but I think it is an important one and one of which we should be aware.

This article notes how ICE has now begun targeting sponsors of unaccompanied children (UAC). The sponsors are sought and identified by ORR, whise mission has been to find sponsors regardless of their own immigration status and place the children with them. ICE now is using this information to go after sponsors, even adding Trumped up charges of aiding human traffickers.
So, people who are trying to help are now targeted for deportation and charged with onerous crimes for their humane act. Best to be skeptical now when seeing this charge being made in this situation.

ICE arrests young immigrant’s sponsor months after feds assured him he’d be safe.

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/ice-arrests-young-immigrant-s-sponsor-months-after-feds-assured/article_428366f5-6d03-552c-a277-93b83d3005e2.html

At first, Gari was apprehensive because it would require him to give his personal information to a federal agency — something that virtually all unauthorized immigrants try to avoid. But Health and Human Services officials assured him in January that it wouldn’t jeopardize his own safety. The boy just needed a legal guardian as he dealt with his own immigration case, they said.

Gari, 34, was arrested at his home Aug. 14 by federal immigration agents who had used his little brother as bait.
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The Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the Office of Refugee Resettlement, is tasked with reuniting unaccompanied children and youth with relatives in the U.S.
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But earlier this summer, the Trump administration announced that ICE would be targeting the relatives of unaccompanied children and teens and charging them with the crime of helping human traffickers.

This article notes how Trump policy is redefining protections for unaccompanied children as loopholes for youth who they view as posing a threat and how they are not only attempting to remove these protections but are proceeding as if these have already been removed. A key part of this is assuming/accusing the youth of gang ties whether or not they have them. Something not brought out in the article, but what seems evident to me is how they are conflating youth trying to escape gang violence in their home countries with the youth somehow then being involved in gangs. Note that this was the circumstance for the young brother in the preceding article. It was also the case for the DREAMER who was recently accused, then exonerated of gang involvement, though in his case he was fleeing one state for another to get away from gangs. So “gang-related” has been stretched to define youth who are trying to flee proximity to gangs to tag that very youth wrongfully with a gang label in the attempt to deport them.
As part of changing or over-riding these policies, they are changing the mission of departments, in this case shifting ORR from social services to something more like a branch of ICE.

Young Migrants: Victims of Gangs or Members of Them?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/us/immigration-minors-children.html

Over the past month, the Trump administration has taken aim at a set of child protection laws created to protect young people who cross into the United States without a parent or guardian, perhaps aided by smugglers. The administration now sees some of these same youths as a threat, and is portraying the laws as “loopholes” that are preventing the quick deportation of teenagers involved in gangs.

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The campaign is aimed at Capitol Hill, but the Trump administration is not waiting for legislation: In a series of at least a dozen moves across multiple federal agencies, it has begun to curtail legal protections for unaccompanied children who cross the border. Many of these safeguards were created by a 2008 law that provided protections for children who might otherwise be forced into labor or prostitution.

The young people affected by the administration’s measures have been fleeing deadly gang violence in Central America since 2014, when civil strife erupted in the region. They are a less politically shielded group of young people than the so-called “Dreamers,” most of whom came to this country as toddlers with their parents.
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And the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which provides social services to vulnerable immigrant youth, is now placing all children with any gang-related history in secure detention instead of foster care, whether or not they have ever been arrested or charged with a crime, according to an August memo to the President’s Domestic Policy Council.

“It’s law enforcement mission creep, and our office is ill-prepared for it,” said Robert Carey, who was director of the refugee agency under President Barack Obama.