White House senior adviser Stephen Miller is pushing to keep migrant children in border control custody for a longer period of time rather than moving to find them a home with undocumented immigrant adults in the United States, Politico reported on Thursday. Miller and other officials who are strict on immigration are fighting against the practice because they believe that giving custody of refugee children to undocumented immigrants in the country rewards what they see as bad behavior, according to Politico.
Miller has reportedly been spearheading the crackdown on immigration at the health department’s refugee office amid the coronavirus pandemic. He has been pushing to restart a rejected Health and Human Services policy of collecting fingerprints of adults who are seeking to claim children at shelters in a greater effort to deter them from doing so, according to Politico. “It’s only a matter of time before the situation blows up again like it did in 2018,” an unnamed official told Politico, referencing Trump’s disastrous “zero tolerance” policy that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents. “It’s a team of people with very little management experience and an agenda that isn’t going to end well given the current laws.”