by Bradley Devlin
In 2014, Vice President Joe Biden was sent to Guatemala by President Barack Obama to urge Latin American countries and their citizens to stop smuggling unaccompanied children to the United States.
“These smugglers routinely physically and sexually abuse and extort ransom from these innocent young women and men, generally speaking.” Biden said in a speech given in Guatemala City.
Three months after taking office, in March 2021, Biden sent a message to his vice president, Kamala Harristo Guatemala to deliver a similar message: “Don’t come.”
Ten years after Biden’s Guatemala speech, U.S. Department of Homeland Security The Office of the Inspector General published a report that the Biden-Harris administration has lost contact with approximately 300,000 migrant children.
From fiscal year 2019 through fiscal year 2023, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred nearly 450,000 unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. (Fiscal year 2019 began October 1, 2018, and ended September 30, 2019, when Donald Trump was president; fiscal year 2023 began on October 1, 2022, and ended on September 30, 2023, and Biden was president.)
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) remains responsible for managing migrant children, immigration matters Through this system, the Office for Refugee Resettlement provides care and custody of the children during court proceedings.
“However, ICE was unable to provide the exact location of all UCs [unaccompanied children] who were fired by HHS [Health and Human Services] and failed to appear in immigration court as scheduled,” the inspector general’s report says.
During the same period from fiscal year 2019 to 2023, more than 32,000 unaccompanied children failed to appear in court after receiving a summons to appear.
“ICE did not consistently notify HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) when UCs failed to appear in immigration court after being released from HHS custody,” the inspector general’s report said. “ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers in only one of the eight field offices we visited indicated that they had attempted to locate UCs.”
But those 32,000 court failures were just the tip of the iceberg. The report also found that “as of May 2024, ICE had not served NTAs [Notices to Appear] over 291,000” unaccompanied children.
While the updated guidelines were aimed at containing the escalate illegal immigrantsThe Office of Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security states that despite “on-site visits to four ICE locations,” “no changes in local procedures based on the guidelines were observed.”
“In one of the centres we visited, 34,823 (84%) of the 41,638 local UC centres had not received NTA orders to commence immigration proceedings,” the report added.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ complete incompetence in securing our southern border is indistinguishable from federally funded human trafficking,” said Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican. he told The Daily Signal.
“There are countless children who are suffering because of a broken system that is perpetuated and celebrated by the Democratic Party,” Lee said. “They simply don’t care because their mission is to undermine the sovereignty and voting rights of American citizens, no matter who gets hurt.”
Representative Eli Crane, Republican of Arizona, also had a few words on the issue. Biden-Harris Administration according to the report of the inspector general.
“This report is a testament to the horrors of the Biden-Harris administration’s open borders policy,” Crane, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told The Daily Signal. “They have directly fueled human trafficking, child exploitation and the enrichment of murderous cartels. There is nothing humane about welcoming vulnerable children into America only to be placed with unverified sponsors who do not keep them safe.”
Crane criticized Biden, Harris and Homeland Security Secretary Alexander Mayorkas by name.
“Since taking office, this administration has gutted effective Trump-era policies and transformed CBP into a concierge service for criminal aliens,” Crane said, referring to Customs and Border Protection. “Biden, Harris and Mayorkas have blood on their hands for intentionally orchestrating an invasion that endangers both American citizens and unaccompanied children.”
Why the “border tsar” @KamalaHarris support leaving 320,000 immigrant children in the hands of human traffickers, drug dealers and criminals? https://t.co/tC2m3CtAAx
— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) August 20, 2024
The report noted that the Homeland Security Act of 2021 defines unaccompanied children “as minors who do not have lawful immigration status in the United States, are under 18 years of age, and have no parent or legal guardian in the country who could provide them with care and the right to physical custody.”
These children “are at greater risk of being trafficked, exploited, or subjected to forced labor” because of the Biden-Harris administration’s failure to enforce immigration laws, the inspector general’s report said.
In February 2023 The New York Times published: report based on an investigation into the lives of unaccompanied migrant children who recently arrived in the United States. Human trafficking and sexual exploitation affect migrant children more often than one might assume, and the cases are more extreme than the more common labor exploitation to which migrant children may be subjected in the United States.
As the Times reports, from 15-year-olds packing cereal in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to 12-year-old construction workers and roofers in Florida and Texas, to slaughterhouses in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina, “immigrant children, who are arriving in the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up working some of the most backbreaking jobs in the country.”
Some children have made it as far west as Los Angeles, where they sew “Made in America” labels onto their T-shirts. Others have traveled even further, across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, where they harvest coffee.
“This shadow workforce extends to every industry in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for almost a century,” the Times reports. “Unaccompanied minors have had their legs torn off in factories and their spines broken on construction sites, but most of these injuries go uncounted.”
The pattern of exploitation sometimes turns deadly. In Brooklyn, a 14-year-old was struck and killed by a car while delivering food on his bike. In Atlanta, a 16-year-old was crushed by a tractor while working. In Alabama, a 15-year-old died after falling from a roof.
The chaos that defines America immigration system is the result of decades of permissive border policies combined with unclear, convoluted law enforcement procedures.
Andrew Arthur, regular contributor Center for Immigration Studiestold The Daily Signal that while children have long been smuggled into the United States, issues surrounding unaccompanied alien children became much more arduous after the 1997 Flores Agreement.
The agreement imposed narrow parameters on how the aged Immigration and Naturalization Service (disbanded in 2003 as part of the launch of the Department of Homeland Security) could process applications for migrant children. Things got even more complicated when the Homeland Security Act of 2002 was passed. Creation of DHSDemocrats have demanded that the up-to-date agency refer unaccompanied children directly to HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, Arthur said.
“Don’t ask me why they chose ORR,” Arthur said of Democratic lawmakers and the HHS office. “I literally have no idea. They hadn’t stopped anyone before this point, they had no experience and they’ve never been good at it.”
As Arthur told The Daily Signal, even though the U.S. immigration system has undergone radical changes, it wasn’t until 2008, following the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, that there was a significant escalate in the number of unaccompanied immigrant minors crossing the border.
Section 235 of the law, passed by the Democratic-majority Congress and signed by President George W. Bush, a Republican, requires DHS to send any unaccompanied alien child it comes into contact with to HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement “within 72 hours,” Arthur said.
“But it also does something else strange,” Arthur said. “It separates the UAC into two separate groups. One, if they come from neighboring countries, Canada and Mexico, DHS can send them back if they’re not trafficked and they don’t have any claims of persecution. But if they come from another country, those kids have to be sent to HHS, and HHS then has to place them with sponsors in the United States.”
As a result, he said, there has been a edged escalate in the number of unaccompanied children coming from non-bordering countries, especially the so-called Northern Triangle countries: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
The situation came to a head in 2014, the fifth year of Obama’s eight-year presidency. Obama sent his vice president, Biden, to Guatemala to work with regional governments to leisurely the flow of migrant children into the United States.
The Obama-Biden administration eventually reduced the number of unaccompanied children showing up at the southern border, but another escalate occurred under the Trump-Pence administration in 2019. To address the problem and ensure unaccompanied migrant children were not being sent into hazardous situations, Arthur told The Daily Signal that “HHS took 102 days into 2020 to vet sponsors.”
The goal, he said, was to “let parents know, look, … we’re really going to look at you. And if you’re here illegally, we can take action against you if you smuggle your children here.”
While the problems surrounding migrant children crossing the border existed long before the Biden-Harris administration, Arthur says they have become much more sedate. under Biden’s supervision.
When Biden became president on Jan. 21, 2021, “all the safeguards that Trump put in the system to protect these kids went away,” Arthur said.
The immigration system “is broken on this scale,” he said. “They’ve brought so many people into the United States that the same people who say the immigration system is broken are the ones who are breaking it.”
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Bradley Devlin is the politics editor at The Daily Signal.
