Federal Incompetence with Refugees

Office of Refugee Resettlement not taking care of the alien “children”, by Ann Corcoran, 1/31/16

Last week a Senate committee held a hearing that raked the Dept. of Health and Human Services over the coals because they did not make sure ‘unaccompanied alien children’ were not placed with human traffickers in the wake of the border invasion of 2014.

Although an assistant secretary at HHS was grilled by the committee, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) should really be the target of the questioning.

Senator Rob Portman should be encouraged to take his investigation deeper and look into the grants and contracts awarded by the ORR for care of the “children.”

For new readers we have an extensive archive filed under the key words ‘unaccompanied minors’ (which several years ago was the term being used to describe the “children” entering the country without parents, or where parents abandoned them upon arrival).

Two refugee resettlement contractors have been getting grants for years to take care of the children—US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

I have often speculated that the Bishops had something to do with lighting the fuse for the invasion as a delegation of Bishops led by their lobbyist, Kevin Appleby, traveled to Central America in mid 2013 and returned to “predict” the coming border rush of the summer of 2014.  (A story for another day!)

What is going on here? Not ever properly explained was the abrupt resignation of the Director of ORR, Eskinder Negash, in December of 2014.  Rumors are that it had a lot to do with something going wrong at ORR with the mostly teenage ‘children.’  Be sure to see this post about the squabbling among contractors getting grants for the children.

US News: WASHINGTON (AP) — Migrant children in the government’s care fell prey to human trafficking after the Health and Human Services Department failed to protect them, according to a bipartisan congressional investigation released Thursday.

Remember the Obama Administration’s decision to quickly (and secretively) distribute the children around the country to hundreds of communities, a decision which probably led to the sloppy handling of the cases.

The six-month inquiry found that the government, overwhelmed by the influx of tens of thousands of children crossing the border to flee violence in Central America, failed to conduct the most basic checks on the adults entrusted with caring for the children.

Many adult sponsors didn’t undergo thorough background checks. Government officials didn’t visit homes and in some cases, had no idea that adult sponsors had several unrelated children, a possible sign of human trafficking.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, chairman of the Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs investigations subcommittee, said the HHS placement program for migrant children suffers from “serious, systemic defects.” The report echoed the findings of an Associated Press investigation.

At a hearing reviewing the program, officials from the department angered Democratic and Republican senators, who dismissed their answers as incomplete or complained that they failed to take full responsibility for the children who were abused or exploited.

Meanwhile in Sweden…..Europe also got its share of ‘unaccompanied alien children’ (surely the invasion here and there was orchestrated by the hard Left Open Borders gang) and now they have big problems.  In this report from the Daily Mail we learn that many of the teenage ‘children’ from Africa have escaped their asylum homes and are loose and forming gangs in Stockholm.

https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2016/01/31/office-of-refugee-resettlement-not-taking-care-of-the-alien-children/