The publication is reproduced in full below:
RECOGNIZING JUNE AS NATIONAL FAMILY REUNIFICATION MONTH
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HON. RAUL M. GRIJALVA
of arizona
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Mr. GRIJALVA. Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize June as National Reunification Month, and to honor the tremendous reunifications efforts of individuals across the country who work tirelessly to ensure that safe, timely, and healthy reunification continues to be prioritized for the 400,000 youth in the U.S. foster care system. Each June, states and jurisdictions celebrate these efforts and extend their commitments to working to strengthen pathways to ensuring thriving, supportive families, and communities.
Federal initiatives including Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act, the Family First Prevention Services Act, Victims of Child Abuse Act Reauthorization of 2018 and the Supporting Foster Youth and Families through the Pandemic Act, have improved services and reunification for children and families in the foster care system, but there is more to be done.
Since 2020, four National partners of the U.S. Children's Bureau, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Prevent Child Abuse America, Casey Family Programs and now recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have joined the Thriving Families, Safer Children Movement within the child welfare community to bring a first-of-its-kind national, multiyear effort that spans the public, private and philanthropic sectors. It will create and enhance networks of community-based programming while also aligning government resources to offer a full continuum of prevention supports and services. Beyond building stronger families and communities, the movement seeks to end the harmful practice of family separation in child welfare systems. This work involves closely collaborating with children and families within the child welfare system and leveraging resources to create a more just, equitable, and humane well-being system. Twenty-two states and jurisdictions have committed to moving this work forward, including Arizona.
With that in mind, I want to thank all those involved for making this much-needed investment into our youth and families' futures including: biological and kinship parents, family members, social workers, foster parents, service providers, attorneys, courts, court appointed special advocates (CASAs), advocates, public child welfare professionals and the greater child welfare community at large.
And when honoring National Reunification Month, we must push to further assist migrant families that were separated at our southern border due to cruel and inhumane border policies denying them their right to seek asylum. I commend the Biden-Harris administration for fully repealing the Trump-era ``zero tolerance'' policy and establishing the President's Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families aimed at bringing families back together. Thousands of children were cruelly separated from their families, and I applaud the work of the President's Taskforce who is working to reunite hundreds of children that remain separated from their families to this day. More must be done to ensure all migrant families are reunited and no more families are separated at the southern border. Their safety, well-being and reunification must be an uttermost urgency for the Biden-Harris administration and its officials.
It is time as a Nation to commit to providing the resources and programs necessary for the reunification of families, both for children in our domestic foster care system and for those who entered our country for refuge.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 168, No. 119(1), Congressional Record Vol. 168, No. 119(2)
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