The Federal ORR Bureaucracy Continues To Endanger Vulnerable Refugee Children, In Texas Primarily: "Time's Up".

Even here, with seven months elapsed under a new Administration -- sadly, the federal Office Of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) seems unable to comprehend what "safe and sanitary" might mean. It may be time to dissolve the agency, outright (even though ORR is technically managed by HHS), and simply hand the whole operation over to a purely medical team, at the government -- like the CDC. It seems clear that while there are surely many, many professionals in Texas at ORR who want only to do the right thing, there must be some supervisory managers who are actively thwarting the humanitarian goals articulated in the Flores settlement -- especially in these Texas facilities.

This litigation has been active and hotly contested now, into its 37^th year. That alone bespeaks. . . governmental failures, system-wide.

So it is that in Los Angeles, the plaintiffs' lawyers have filed a new 31 page motion, and memo of law this week, to have the able USDC Judge Dolly Gee order new conditions, in enforcing the more swift transfer of children at risk to licensed care facilities -- even across state lines, into Illinois, Minnesota and even beyond.

This is not a GOP vs. Democrats issue -- this is an issue of being a. . . human, to other humans:

. . .[T]he agency is placing particularly vulnerable children at its worst EISs while licensed beds, influx beds, and even beds at better EISs, remain available. . . .

There are many vulnerable children at Fort Bliss and Pecos the Court can and should protect now, and Defendants must be held accountable for ensuring that EISs do not, by default, supplant the Settlement’s fundamental requirement that children be placed as expeditiously as possible in licensed dependent care programs. . . .

The four year back up created by Tangerine's thwarting our treaty obligations certainly plays a role here -- but it does not explain away all of the overcrowding. There are beds in licensed care facilities available. We need to act -- and act now, to remove anyone who does not want to comply with our treaty (and their own moral) obligations. That is what this litigation -- begun first in 1985 -- is all about. This is thus a generational problem -- of America not living up to its promises, in its laws and treaties.

We must do better, people -- we do know better.

नमस्ते