U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find, by Ron Nixon, 9/18/18.
WASHINGTON
— The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of nearly
1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year
and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters, according to
congressional findings released on Tuesday.
The
revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human
Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out
of shelters last year.
In
findings that lawmakers described as troubling, Senate investigators said the
department could not determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,488 out of
11,254 children the agency had placed with sponsors in 2018, based on follow-up
calls from April 1 to June 30.
The
inability to track the whereabouts of migrant children after they have been
released to sponsors has raised concerns that they could end up with human
traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.
Since
2016, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services have called
sponsors to check on children 30 days after they were placed there. But the
department has also said it was not legally responsible for children after they
were released from the custody of its office of refugee resettlement.
Caitlin
Oakley, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, offered
a response to the findings on Tuesday night. “As communicated to members of
Congress multiple times,” she said, “these children are not ‘lost.’ Their
sponsors — who are usually parents or family members and in all cases have been
vetted for criminality and ability to provide for them — simply did not respond
or could not be reached when this voluntary call was made.”
The
findings were accompanied by legislation introduced on Tuesday by Republican
and Democrat senators to clarify the department’s responsibility for ensuring
the safety of migrant children, even when they were no longer in its custody.
The
legislation would require officials at the Department of Health and Human
Services to run background checks before placing children with sponsors. It
also would compel the department to make sure that sponsors provide proper care
for the children in their custody, including making sure they appear at their
immigration court hearings.
Additionally,
the legislation would require department officials to notify state governments
before migrant children are placed with sponsors in those states. And it would
increase the number of immigration court judges to help the Justice Department
process cases more efficiently.
Senator
Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of a Senate Homeland Security
subcommittee on investigations, said the bill “will ensure that we keep track
of unaccompanied minors in our country, which will both help protect them from
trafficking and abuse as well as help ensure they appear for their immigration
court proceedings.”
Senator
Richard Blumenthal Democrat of Connecticut, who also sponsored the legislation,
said, “Children who risk their lives to make a dangerous journey in pursuit of
asylum shouldn’t then have to worry about falling victim to human trafficking
or being handed over to abusive or neglectful adults in the United States.”
In a
report two years ago, the Senate subcommittee detailed how department officials
mistakenly placed eight children with human traffickers who forced them to work
on an egg farm in Marion, Ohio.
The report
found that department officials had failed to establish procedures — including
sufficient background checks and following up with sponsors — to protect the
children who were traveling alone. As a result, the children were turned over
to the traffickers who contracted them out to the egg farm.
Since
October 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services has placed more than
135,000 unaccompanied immigrant children with adult sponsors in the United
States as they wait for their cases to be heard by an immigration judge. Robert
Pear contributed reporting.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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