House committee investigating ongoing border crisis subpoenas Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra for information on tens of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who have gone missing in the United States did.
In a cover letter Thursday accompanying the subpoena and obtained exclusively by the Post, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Greene (R-Tenn.) asked Mr. Becerra to cite his immigration sponsors. It forced them to hand over documents related to “scrutiny, examination, and monitoring.” Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
A Homeland Security Inspector General report released last month said that without proper vetting, migrant children are at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor and other exploitation.
HHS officials have stalled for more than a month and a half since the Homeland Security Committee first requested the records on Aug. 12. A response to the subpoena is scheduled for October 3rd.
On Wednesday, the department ultimately released 717 pages of documents, 400 of which “contain nothing but publicly available information,” Green told Becerra.
“Absurdly, HHS has placed a disclaimer on all of these publicly available pages that reads, “Submitted to the Committee on Homeland Security pursuant to an oversight request.''[;] Do not publish without permission from the Department of Health and Human Services,” he added.
The remaining documents reproduced sections of the ORR manual on procedures for unaccompanied migrant children and were unrelated to the Commission's request.
“Available statistics and data are [unaccompanied alien children, or UACs] “This is deeply disconcerting and represents a growing humanitarian crisis,” Green wrote.
“So far, HHS has denied the committee access to this important information and has refused to even indicate the scope of the problem.”
But that scope was hinted at in an Aug. 19 report from the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, which found that as of May 2024, 291,000 people who entered the U.S. It turns out that unaccompanied immigrant children have no immigration court dates or are otherwise being released. to track their location.
An additional 32,000 children released into the United States by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have reportedly failed to appear in court even after being given a court date. 14 page report is also shown.
The DHS Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) audited eight ICE removal offices and found that only one office “even attempted to locate” groups of missing immigrant children. did.
In another office, the service rate for notices to appear in immigration court was as low as 16%.
From October 1, 2018 to September 30, 2023, ICE transferred a total of 448,820 unaccompanied children to HHS ORR and placed them with sponsors across the country.
In June 2023, Robin Dunn Marcos, a senior HHS official involved in the Unaccompanied Child Arrival Program, told the House Judiciary Committee that even when agency officials contact the country of origin of an unaccompanied alien child (UAC), They testified that they never asked. For criminal records.
Last month, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) called for an “emergency hearing”, calling HHS's loss of immigrant children “amounting to modern-day slavery.”
“The southern border is a national security disaster, a humanitarian catastrophe, and we cannot trust Kamala Harris to solve it,” Johnson told reporters on a conference call last month.
Congressional Republicans first expressed concern about the alarming number of missing migrant children following a February 2023 New York Times report. According to reports, HHS was unable to contact 85,000 unaccompanied minors who were placed with sponsors after entering the United States.
In a letter Thursday, Greene asked HHS to determine the percentage of prospective sponsors who are prohibited from taking in immigrant children under ORR, how many sponsors have been lost contact with, and how many have been convicted or are under investigation. He asked them to clarify whether they had done so. Crimes such as physical abuse, sexual abuse, child neglect, and neglect.
The Homeland Security Committee also wants to scrutinize records on sponsors who provided fraudulent information and earlier this summer allowed 30,000 immigrants a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela into the country. One of the DHS's parole programs has been stalled due to this problem.
In 2022, Becerra compared ideal turnover to an “assembly line” and pressured staff to release immigrant children to sponsors as quickly as possible, the Times reported.
