March 30, 2021 Dear John,
While there has been major focus recently on the sizeable increase in the number of unaccompanied children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border and the resulting backups in U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities that are ill-suited for children, far less attention has been paid to the reduction in Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelter capacity that occurred during 2020.
As Migration Policy Institute (MPI) Senior Fellow Mark Greenberg notes in a new commentary, the Biden administration took office with less than half of the shelter capacity that ORR had estimated was needed for preparedness.
These preparedness shortfalls, along with the increasing numbers of child arrivals, must be examined in tandem to understand the challenges now facing the administration and the options for moving forward, writes Greenberg, who heads MPI’s Human Services Initiative and was Acting Assistant Secretary for the Administration of Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2013-16.
ORR had approximately 13,500 state-licensed beds available in July 2020 and 5,000 more funded but not yet available for use—a number that fell to 7,800 operational beds that November due to pandemic-related factors. Despite the sharp reduction, ORR did not face a bedspace shortage last year because the number of children referred to the agency’s care fell to the lowest level since 2013. This was the result both of a dramatic slowing of human mobility of all types during the pandemic and the Trump administration’s imposition of a public-health order permitting the expulsion of virtually all border arrivals, including unaccompanied children.
The commentary traces the trends in child arrivals and referrals to ORR, examines whether the mismatch between arrivals and ORR capacity could have been avoided, and discusses the near- and longer-term strategies at the government’s disposal.
You can read it here: www.migrationpolicy.org/news/unaccompanied-child-arrivals-earlier-preparedness-shortfalls. And find all of MPI's historical and current analysis on child migration to the United States here: www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/us-immigration-policy-program/rising-child-migration-united-states.
Best regards, 
Michelle Mittelstadt
Director of Communications and Public Affairs
Migration Policy Institute |
