Remember the Trump administration official who made it his business to try to personally block immigrant women from getting abortions? That guy, Scott Lloyd, is in charge of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for the children who the Trump administration has stolen from their parents. So let’s revisit who Scott Lloyd is.
Lloyd has no background whatsoever in child welfare or refugee resettlement. Again, this is the person Donald Trump has put in charge of refugee resettlement. Including thousands of traumatized children whose trauma is a result of Trump administration policy. Mostly, Lloyd is an anti-abortion activist whose “most relevant work was on behalf of Christians persecuted by ISIS during his time as an attorney in the Knights of Columbus public policy office in Washington.”
How’s he responding to the sudden influx of stolen, terrified children under his department’s responsibility? We don’t know, because:
Lloyd hasn't been heard from publicly since he spoke on a United Nations panel in April about his desire to create stricter standards for accepting unaccompanied minors who cross the border into the federally run shelters.
But we do know that advocates for the children report 30-minute wait times on an ORR hotline and that:
Right now, ORR is working with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) in a way that will very likely lead to an increase in deportations and more children being stuck in government programs. ORR signed an agreement with DHS to provide them with the personal information of potential sponsors for the children with whom I work. These sponsors are often undocumented themselves. The children they hope to sponsor are often their biological children, nieces, nephews or family friends.
Now our case managers are obligated to inform the sponsors that by sponsoring a child, they have to give their personal information and location to DHS, and therefore, to ICE as well. If they surrender their personal information to ICE, they could potentially get deported.
Is that Scott Lloyd’s personal policy? We don’t know—it could easily come from above his head—but he’s certainly in charge of implementing it.
So we don’t know a lot about what Lloyd is personally doing on this issue, but we know that when he does get personally involved in migrants’ lives it’s often to deny them the right to make their own medical decisions and we know that his office does not seem to be doing a great job looking out for the traumatized children in its care. In short, he remains an unqualified ideologue; a perfect fit for the administration he serves.