In September, Alexandria’s youth detention facility re-upped a contract to hold unaccompanied alien children (UAC) under a federal program that a U.S. Senate subcommittee is grilling for laxity.
The Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center (NVJDC) essentially rents excess bed space to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The contract entails holding up to 30 UAC until they’re placed with sponsors or returned to their country of origin. NVJDC is one of only three facilities with comparable security in the country.
Alexandria’s involvement includes contributions of about $1 million per year. Without the ORR contract, Alexandria would’ve been on the hook for an additional $3.1 million over the period 2010-2017, said Dr. Alfred Taylor, chair of NVJDC’s governing commission, in a May 4 letter to the City Council. Additionally, two of NVJDC’s commissioners are council appointees.
Hearing about the new contract in connection with an April 4 budget work session, Vice Mayor Justin Wilson expressed surprise: “When the ORR contract expired, I kind of thought that was going to stay expired. … We’re essentially running a youth immigration detention center here? I mean, we’re taking kids from the border and bringing them into Alexandria and detaining them?”
Taylor disagrees with that characterization: ORR is “not [part] of the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] or its sub-agency U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (‘ICE’),” he said. “None of [NVJDC’s] youth … are known by us to have [been] detained by ‘crossing the border;’ instead they have come from different locations in the eastern U.S.”
Though ORR’s website says: “[UAC] apprehended by [DHS] immigration officials are transferred to the care and custody of ORR.”
The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by U.S. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), investigated HHS and DHS in 2015. That year, Portman learned that, due to inadequate vetting, the federal agencies failed to protect eight Guatemalan UACs from human traffickers in his state.
At an April 26 subcommittee hearing, senators pressed HHS and DHS officials on still untaken corrective action.
Kathryn A. Larin of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified about follow-up with UACs after placement with sponsors, saying in an accompanying report: In 2015 ORR began “requiring grantee [ORR contract-holding] facility staff to place follow-up calls … to all children and their sponsors 30 days after the children are placed to determine whether they were still living with their sponsors, enrolled in or attending school, and aware of upcoming removal proceedings, and to ensure that they were safe.”
But from October to December 2017, “ORR was unable to determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,475 UAC,” or about one in five, HHS’s Steven Wagner told the subcommittee in his written testimony.
“We want to know how HHS plans to track them down,” said Portman in his written testimony.
NVJDC Executive Director Johnitha McNair, relatively newly hired, says the center hasn’t released any applicable UAC since the new contract in September. But she’ll look more into it for past years.
“Everything I do, I know I can do better. I think the same is true of all of us, and it’s certainly true of our federal agencies and our state and local partners. Kids deserve something better,” said U.S. Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE), the subcommittee’s ranking member.