Upon President Trump’s signing of a supplemental emergency appropriations bill to support the humanitarian work HHS does to care for unaccompanied alien children, HHS Secretary Alex Azar released the following statement:

“We are pleased that Congress finally responded, in a bipartisan way, to President Trump’s call for more funding to address the huge influx of unaccompanied alien children arriving at our southern border. Thanks to Congress’s action, we began working as soon as legally possible to restore all services that had been endangered by the lack of funding, for unaccompanied children and other recipients of services from our refugee office.

HHS is proud of the efforts of our career civil servants and grantees to provide essential care for children until they can be placed with parents, other relatives, or sponsors.  Unfortunately, that important humanitarian work was endangered by a lack of funding in recent weeks. We hope Congress will take further action to fix our broken immigration system that drives so many children to make a dangerous, often-traumatic journey to our border.”