Move ORR to DHS and Kill Flores — Project 2025 Would Strip Child Welfare, Enable Indefinite Detention
Project 2025 (HHS chapter) proposes moving the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) from HHS to DHS and eliminating the Flores settlement agreement — a plan partially executed via DOJ motions in 2025 — and urges passage of the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act. These actions would strip child welfare protections, enable indefinite family detention, and allow faith-based discrimination in foster care.
The source excerpt is from Project 2025's Department of Health and Human Services chapter (pp. 478–479), not the HUD chapter. The editor is correct: the policy targets ORR and child welfare, not HUD programs. Yet the connection to housing justice is direct. ORR is the federal agency responsible for placing unaccompanied migrant children — many of whom are infants and toddlers — into safe, licensed housing. Moving ORR to DHS, as the plan demands, would subordinate child welfare to border enforcement, undermining the 'least restrictive setting' standard of the Flores settlement that has protected children from prolonged detention for nearly three decades.
As of this writing, the Flores termination is partially in motion: the Trump administration filed motions to end the settlement in April and May 2025, but the effort remains enjoined by ongoing litigation. California's Attorney General filed an amicus brief opposing termination in January 2026. The ORR move to DHS has not been executed. The Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act (S.3344) remains unpassed in the 118th Congress. The path forward is prevention: Congress must reject any transfer of ORR to DHS, reaffirm the Flores settlement through legislation, and oppose the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act. Housing justice organizers must recognize that the same logic that would strip protections for migrant children — efficiency, faith-based exemptions, punitive deterrence — will next target the Housing Choice Voucher program, fair-housing enforcement, and tenant protections. The fight to keep children safe is the fight to keep housing a right, not a commodity.
The humanitarian alternative
Congress should reaffirm the Flores Settlement Agreement, keep ORR within HHS to separate child welfare from immigration enforcement, and reject the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act. Instead, invest $30 billion in Section 8 vouchers and the National Housing Trust Fund to house families, paired with right-to-counsel programs in eviction court and Housing First services for homeless families. This approach prevents family separation by keeping parents housed and able to care for their children.
Rollback path — how this gets undone
This action has already been implemented. These are the concrete levers that could reverse it.
- Congressional reaffirmation or court denial of Flores termination motion Congress can codify Flores standards into law, or the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals can deny DOJ's motion to terminate, maintaining the 1997 settlement's protections for detained children.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 15: Department of Housing and Urban Development (pp 511-512)"— 478 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise in their forever homes. ACF and OCR should also survey their programs to consider whether additional waivers of HHS grant conditions—waivers the Biden Admin - istration revoked in 2021—are needed for faith-based agencies. Additionally, Congress should pass the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act62 to ensure that providers and organizations cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The Office of Refugee Resettlement should be moved to the Department of Homeland Security. Having health and welfare functions managed by HHS and border security functions managed by DHS has created intolerable failures in both. HHS and ORR have forgotten their original refugee-resettlement mission and instead have provided a panoply of free programs that incentivize people to come to the U.S. illegally. Even more troubling, ORR has too often placed children into dangerous situations when releasing them into the country. Nearly all of HHS’s care, custody, and placement of children is done through cooperative agreemen…"