President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance border enforcement policy has thrust thousands of migrant children into the care of a single health agency led by an anti-abortion crusader with little background in refugee resettlement.

The separation strategy — which Trump moved to reverse Wednesday amid growing furor — is raising fresh questions about whether HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement has the leadership or resources to properly care for and reunify more than 2,300 children scattered in shelters across the nation.


The office’s director, Scott Lloyd, has scant expertise resettling refugees in a career largely devoted to promoting Catholic causes, including rolling back abortion rights and protecting religious minorities in the Middle East from persecution.

A former attorney at the Knights of Columbus, Lloyd wrote reports to the State Department and Congress about the plight of religious minorities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. But he did not work with or resettle migrants, according to a December 2017 deposition conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union during a court case over the abortion rights of unaccompanied minors.

By contrast, his predecessor Robert Carey, who led the office during the last two years of the Obama administration, had decades of experience managing refugees‘ issues, including 15 years in resettlement and migration at the International Rescue Committee.

Since Lloyd‘s appointment last year, he’s already ignited controversy for personally stepping in to prevent unaccompanied minors from obtaining abortions — prompting a rash of lawsuits and calls for his firing from Democrats and women’s rights organizations.


“You can go back and check my comments on this: I’ve called for his resignation,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who’s led the effort to oust Lloyd. “I have no faith in him at all. I think his own ideological beliefs will get in the way of doing something effective.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has steadfastly defended Lloyd, telling POLITICO in March that he “absolutely” still had confidence in his ability to run the office.

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Azar said the abortion policy regarding unaccompanied minors in shelters was “not about Mr. Lloyd,” but longstanding policy — a point contested by reproductive rights organizations.

Lloyd is now overseeing an influx of migrant children that have quickly pushed the agency’s privately contracted shelters to near capacity. Trump’s abrupt decision Wednesday to halt the family separation policy is likely to complicate matters, putting his agency on the front lines of a reunification effort that immigration experts say will be severely hampered by lack of record-keeping.


“How do they find sponsors for all of these kids now if the logical person to come forward is in jail, or if a family member is too nervous to come forward?” said a former HHS official. “The policy decisions that have been made over the last few months and weeks will have ongoing ramifications for kids in ORR shelters.”

The task of caring for and reuniting kids with family members or sponsors is a challenge even under normal circumstances, said Carey, the former ORR director. Now, the influx of very young and traumatized kids, and fast-moving directives from the White House, makes the task more daunting.

Lloyd “doesn’t have a particular background in these issues, but that’s not unheard for political appointees,” Carey said, adding, “the job is certainly a lot easier if you know relevant laws and issues.”

Prior to assuming leadership at ORR, Lloyd cofounded the WitnessWorks Foundation for a Culture of Life — an organization dedicated to Catholic teachings and “guided by the principles of our faith” — and worked for years in its legal arm.

At the Knights of Columbus, he described himself on his resume as the “architect of late-term abortion restrictions” passed by six states, while writing articles about banning “dismemberment abortion” and “Big Abortion‘‘s evolving profit structure."

Lloyd also served in the George W. Bush administration as an attorney at HHS, co-writing the 2008 conscience rule allowing medical providers to refuse contraceptives, abortions and other care on moral grounds.

Even prior to his official appointment at ORR, Lloyd sought to halt abortions among pregnant teens in the agency’s care who requested the procedure. The office had previously paid for the procedure when the girl was a victim of rape or incest, but Lloyd overrode that policy by mandating that he needed to personally sign off on all abortion requests – prompting confusion among shelter operators.

In one case early in Lloyd’s tenure, a girl who had started a medication abortion by taking one of two pills needed to complete the procedure, had to undergo medical screening to see if it could be reversed, according to court documents.


Other political appointees sharing Lloyd’s views have helped implement them in HHS’ refugee work. Maggie Wynne, counselor to the HHS secretary, has worked closely with Lloyd to craft ORR’s policy of blocking abortions among migrant teens. Wynne, who first joined HHS during the George W. Bush administration, was formerly the director of the House Pro-Life caucus.

Health officials have yet to lay out any plan for reunifying children with their parents, emphasizing instead that the agency’s main job is simply to care for those in its custody.

“Immigration policy isn’t really what we at HHS do,” Azar said Wednesday. ‘That would be the Department of Homeland Security working with DOJ and the White House. … If we get kids, the unaccompanied children, we work to take care of them.”

Now as thousands more children are put under ORR’s watch, the office is facing increasingly intense scrutiny over its vetting of contractors in charge of shelters that in some cases racked up dozens of violations.

Texas officials cited Southwest Key, one of ORR’s biggest contractors, for about 250 violations in the past three years — nearly 80 of which were seen as high-risk issues.

Some of the problems cited related to out-of-date staff background checks, but other shelter inspections found far more serious issues.

In a handful of cases, children with injuries weren’t seen by doctors or given proper medications. In September 2017, one resident at a Brownsville shelter tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease but wasn’t treated until two weeks later. At another Brownsville shelter, a child sustained a wrist fracture in August 2016 but wasn’t seen by a doctor for three days.

Another big contractor, BCFS, a San Antonio-based nonprofit that runs facilities around the globe including emergency shelters and foster homes, is overseeing the construction and operation of the administration’s newest shelter for unaccompanied kids — a tent city in Tornillo, about 30 miles from El Paso.


Because the facility is on federal land, it’s not subject to state oversight like the other facilities that BCFS operates in Texas. But according to state inspection reports, the nonprofit’s six emergency shelter facilities recorded more than 50 deficiencies in the past three years, at least 13 of which were high risk including an incident in which a caregiver used physical violence on a child and another in which a caregiver didn’t provide medical assistance for a kid that had vomited twice.

“There is a lot of money in the privatization of this,” said Texas state Rep. Mary González, a Democrat who toured the Tornillo facility. “But these are kids’ lives that are being capitalized on. Meanwhile we are creating trauma. I would unapologetically describe it as child torture.”

Carey said he hopes that Lloyd relies on career ORR staff with expertise to handle the task of reunifying parents with children and finding sponsors for others. For years, he said, the office operated without an ideological bent under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“I have no insight into [Lloyd’s] ideological background other than his statement on access to family planning,” said Carey. “I don’t know how the reunification of children can become an ideological issue.”

Dan Diamond contributed to this story.

