Dismantling ORR and Flores: The Plan to Indefinitely Detain Families
Project 2025 proposes moving the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) from HHS to DHS, eliminating the Flores Settlement Agreement, and passing the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act. As of this writing, the DOJ has filed motions to terminate Flores (now enjoinied), the ORR move remains proposed, and the Act has not passed. These changes would replace child welfare standards with detention-focused operations, stripping due process and family unity from migrant children.
Project 2025's proposal to move the Office of Refugee Resettlement out of Health and Human Services and into the Department of Homeland Security is not a bureaucratic reshuffle—it's a declaration that child welfare is subordinate to border enforcement. Currently, HHS's ORR operates under a statutory mandate to place children in the least restrictive setting, with a focus on reunification and well-being. DHS, by contrast, operates detention and deportation. Merging the two would erase the firewall that ensures children are treated as children, not as enforcement assets. The Flores Settlement Agreement, enjoinied since a 1997 court order, requires prompt release to family—not indefinite detention. The DOJ's April and May 2025 motions to terminate Flores, now blocked by amicus challenges including a January 2026 California Attorney General brief, are part of a deliberate effort to remove these protections.
The Flores termination would directly enable family detention without time limits, reversing decades of settled law. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 codified ORR's role in caring for unaccompanied children; reassigning those duties to DHS would require congressional amendment, which has not occurred. The Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act (S.3344) remains unpassed in the 118th Congress, but its goal—allowing faith-based refusals in child placements—shows the broader agenda: strip oversight, privatize care, and normalize detention as child welfare policy. The human consequence is already documented: family separation causes measurable trauma, and mandatory detention without review violates constitutional due process. A humane alternative is simple: fund more immigration judges and custody review hearings, enforce Flores as written, and create a statutory framework for community-based supervision that keeps families together while they pursue legal status.
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.
Reversing it is step one. The forward agenda — what we build so it can’t recur — is in Answers to this entry →
Grounded in
- DOJ moves to terminate the Flores Settlement Agreement
- Trump Administration Moves to End Settlement that Protects Immigrant Children
- Family Detention Under the Second Trump Administration
- Case: 25-6308, 01/28/2026, DktEntry: 28.1, Page 1 of 39
- S.3344 - Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act of 2023
- S.3344 - Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act of 2023 (Congress.gov overview)
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…"