The Biden administration is set to move unaccompanied migrant minors to Considered unsafe According to a report released on Monday, case workers The Wall Street Journal.
The news outlet found that the administration “repeatedly ignored the concerns of lower-level staff” and placed children with guardians who had previously rejected them.
In the first eight months of fiscal year 2024, there were more than 83,000 cases of minors leaving the country alone across the country. Customs and Border Protection data.
Two sources told the Journal that under the Biden administration, emergency shelter caseworkers have been instructed to place children in families within 10 to 14 days.
The report said pressure to get children through institutions as quickly as possible resulted in some minors being placed in homes with ties to criminal activity.
According to an internal government memo reviewed by the Journal, one child was moved to a “hostel-like” facility in Florida with three or more adults, despite caseworkers’ advice against it.
“We do not believe it is safe to place minors in a home environment that has not been adequately evaluated,” the caseworker wrote. These concerns were ultimately ignored.
Many of the denial overturns initiated by the Biden administration provided few details about why the guardians were later approved, the news outlet reported.
The Department of Health and Human Services told the Journal that it could not comment on individual cases, but added that “child welfare best practices are clear that children should remain with their families, not in care.”
HHS oversaw a network of shelters that provided care to unaccompanied minors.
A report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General released earlier this year found “deficiencies” in the department’s parental vetting process, Blaze News previously reported.
“In 16 percent of children’s case files, one or more of the mandated parental safety checks had no documentation that the checks had been performed,” the OIG report states. “For 19 percent of children who were released to parents with FBI fingerprint or state child abuse and neglect registry checks pending, the results were never reflected in the child’s case file.”
“While well-intentioned, these sites are unregulated and unsafe,” Neha Desai, senior director of immigration at the National Youth Law Centre, told the news agency.
“The facilities were under tremendous pressure to release the children quickly,” she added.
In one case, caseworkers found different sponsors living at multiple addresses and connected to the same person, the news outlet reported, which inspectors warned could be a sign the sponsor was trafficking children into labor.
“We’re in a very different situation than we were in originally,” a senior HHS official told the Journal.
“We stuck to what we had on day one and unfortunately were not positioned to meet the challenges we faced in 2021,” the official said.
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