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Original Date Announced
July 6, 2026The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) rewrote Section 5.4 of the Unaccompanied Alien Children Bureau Policy Guide, which governs communication and interaction with foreign embassies and consulates.
The revisions add procedures for notification to embassies or consulates (§ 5.4.1), including by clarifying the permissible contents of notification and the process for when a child requests notification. For embassy and consular visits, the revisions add a requirement that care providers must notify ORR and, if applicable, the child's attorney, prior to any meeting between a child and an embassy or consulate (§ 5.4.3). They remove the prior requirement that a child from a mandatory-notification country meet with consular officials regardless of the child's wishes, providing instead that the child may decline. For countries not requiring mandatory notification, the revisions eliminate the prior rule under which a visit was presumed authorized if a parent or legal guardian did not respond within 72 hours, replacing it with an age-tiered consent structure.
The revisions further delete former Section 5.4.4, which required care providers to furnish a private space for consular visits and to apply general time, place, and manner restrictions to those visits, without a successor provision. They also replace the standard governing consular information requests—under which ORR exercised discretion and, as a general policy, did not release medical or mental health records absent the child's consent—with a cross-reference to the Authorization for Release of Records process (§ 5.10.1.1), which contains its own set of requirements (§ 5.4.5).
Trump 2.0 [ID #2366]
2026.07.06 ORR - Revised Policies on Communication and Interaction with Foreign Embassies and ConsulatesEffective Date
July 6, 2026Current Status
NoneOriginal Trump Policy Status
Status: Final/ActualSubject Matter: MinorsAgencies Affected: ORRAssociated or Derivative Policies
Pre Trump-Era Policies
- September 18, 2023 2023.09.18 ORR - Unaccompanied Children Bureau Policy Guide: Section 5
Documents
Trump-Era Policy Documents
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