Trump Official in Charge of Separated Kids Has Been Accused of Violating Ethics Rules
By: Carter Sherman, VICE News, October 18, 2018
In one of his efforts to “drain the swamp,” President Donald Trump forbade his appointees from participating in matters involving their former employers in any professional capacity. But that’s exactly what Scott Lloyd, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, did, according to an ethics complaint filed Thursday by a government watchdog group.
Lloyd runs the agency charged with resettling refugees and caring for unaccompanied children, including those separated from their families as part of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration. He used to work for the Catholic charity group Knights of Columbus.
In June 2017, Lloyd sent one of his staffers an email he’d received in April from an employee at the Knights. That email — whose subject line read “Share with Scott Lloyd” — contained forwarded conversations between a staffer at the Knights of Columbus and a member of a Catholic religious order, the Franciscan Friars’ Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Province, about the possibility of using one of the order’s Wisconsin buildings to house refugees.
“Could you forward this to the appropriate person? It’s in reference to a monastery that wants to house refugees in Wisconsin,” Lloyd wrote in the email, which was obtained by the Campaign for Accountability through a Freedom of Information Act request and viewed by VICE News. The group filed the ethics complaint (in full, below) on Thursday with the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“Sure. I will connect them with the State Coordinator,” the staffer wrote back.