Thread by @ReichlinMelnick

Meanwhile, while all this trolling goes on by Rep. Boebert and the right wing, the Biden administration has quietly been extremely effective over the last month at getting kids out of Border Patrol custody.

The number of kids in Border Patrol custody has dropped 82% in a month.

https://twitter.com/SaraCarterDC/status/1387781988610936836

As I've talked about before, we are not out of the woods yet when it comes to kids at the border, because a new bottleneck could still form if kids aren't sponsored out of Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters fast enough.

But here, too, clear progress is being made.

The Biden administration's efforts to get kids out of custody have been helped by decreasing numbers of unaccompanied kids coming to the border, down 10-15% from March highs.

If you want to know what's happening at the border, check out our fact sheet.

americanimmigrationcouncil.org/rising-border-…

While the Biden administration deserves credit for their work on unaccompanied children, they are still expelling tens of thousands of *accompanied* children with their parents, sending them to Mexico. The results for many of those families are disastrous. latimes.com/politics/story…

One final chart. When kids leave CBP custody they go to the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement for that agency to find a sponsor.

Biden's gotten kids out of CBP custody by massively expanding ORR capacity, not releasing kids more quickly. But look at the trend. That's changing.

"Emergency Influx Shelters" run by ORR are much better than Border Patrol cells, but they're still not places you want a kid to spend weeks in, sitting on cots and doing nothing for days on end. So the administration needs to keep working to speed up the sponsorship process.

If you've made it all the way to the end of the thread, I talked about a lot of these issues when I testified in front of Congress on Tuesday.

You can watch my testimony starting at 31:20 here, and read my longer written statement by clicking on my name.
homeland.house.gov/activities/hea…

Adding to the thread: This story from today makes clear the struggle to speed up the sponsorship process to get kids out of ORR custody and into the hands of their family. There is clearly a LOT of work still to be done on that front.

https://twitter.com/priscialva/status/1387750621730705409

But as of today, the number of kids in Border Patrol custody—the jail cells and cages at the border where kids sit around in mylar blankets—is down below 1,000 for the first time in two months.

Right now, the Biden administration needs to get this trend line below zero, which is the only way to start really reducing the number of kids in custody.

The line goes down when either (1) fewer kids come to the border, or (2) more kids are released from ORR.

Regarding (1), the number of unaccompanied kids coming to the border IS going down, with an estimated 10-15% drop in April compared to March.

And regarding (2), the number of unaccompanied children released to sponsors is also going up every week.

So if (1) keeps going down and (2) keeps going up, within a week or two we should start seeing real progress made on reducing the overall number of kids in custody.

To sum up: the trends for unaccompanied kids are good, BUT trends can reverse at any time and there is still significantly more work to be done, AND there are still kids languishing in inadequate shelters—still better than Border Patrol cells—while they work to speed things up.

An update on this thread from the end of the week; the good trends continue. Today the Biden administration reported the highest overall drop in kids in custody (CBP + ORR) since reporting began in March.

https://twitter.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/1388244843982467081