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Biden officials with the Department of Health and Human Services can’t deny that they allowed migrant children to be trafficked. They can’t deny it because they lost a whole bunch of kids and have no idea where they got off to. Some of them ended up cleaning meat factories in the middle of the night. A report from their Inspector General found “serious lapses in how the Department” vetted sponsors.
Children released to anyone
Alejandro Mayorkas and his buddy running Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, didn’t care who took the migrant children off their hands, as long as they kept them moving. You need slaves for hard labor or sex? We can let you have them by the six pack.
A wave of migrant kids swept across the “Mexican border in 2021 without a parent or guardian,” the Hill reports. The workers in charge of finding them new homes were overwhelmed by COVID and the associated crippling precautions. That means the “vetting process” wasn’t real thorough.
The report issued February 15 says “agency officials failed to show they conducted basic sponsor safety checks, such as verifying their address and running a criminal background check, before releasing children to sponsors’ custody.”
A federal watchdog found gaps in how HHS vetted the people that unaccompanied migrant children were sent to live with, according to a new report.
Child advocates have raised concerns that minors could be vulnerable to human trafficking or child labor. https://t.co/znt5Gjp2rs
— NBC News (@NBCNews) February 16, 2024
Once they were gone, officials forgot all about them and “sometimes failed to conduct follow-up safety checks.” The press isn’t divulging the numbers, which means they must be bad.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement belongs to HHS and it’s their responsibility to “shelter” unaccompanied migrant children. According to the IG report, in early 2021, when Joe took office and threw open the floodgates, “their numbers spiked dramatically, at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic led to staffing shortages and restrictions on the number of beds available at agency-licensed shelters.”
HHS had migrant kids coming out their ears and no place to stash them. Those with nefarious purposes were quick to help solve that little problem.
Adults exploited the kids
Even before the report came out, HHS was “under fire for releasing children from government shelters too quickly, and to adults who then exploited the kids by putting them to work in dangerous jobs in violation of child labor laws.”
In the conclusion of the report, investigators “acknowledge that ORR received a surge in referrals of unaccompanied children during our review period in 2021, that created operational constraints and hindered its ability to fulfill its mission.”
The bottom line recommendation is “we need to do better.” Specifically, the administration “needs to be prepared to safely place children with sponsors in the event of future influxes.”
Migrant children were released to sponsors still awaiting an FBI fingerprint check or state child abuse records check.
This is *exactly* why I previously introduced the Stop Human Trafficking of Unaccompanied Migrant Children Act of 2023.https://t.co/ltKdN1oIUJ
— Congressman Morgan Luttrell (@RepLuttrell) February 16, 2024
The invasion is only getting worse. The report did note that the 300 cases they looked at came from more than 16,000 minors who were released to adult sponsors.
The bad news is that “16 percent of unaccompanied children released to sponsors did not carry any documentation that indicated required safety checks were conducted.” in about 100 cases, “the agency did not have legible IDs from sponsors.” Any pimp or meat packer could pick them up.
On top of that “HHS staff are supposed to conduct follow-up phone calls with all children between 30 to 37 days after placement with adult sponsors.” They “delayed” making those calls for months. In one case, it took “nearly a year” to even pick up the phone. “Hi, we’re calling about little Jose. Do you still have him? What do you mean Jose who?“
