While the media was largely focused this week on Chicago as Vice President Kamala Harris officially accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, an alarming new Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report should have been the main news story across the country.
The primary takeaway is that the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of approximately 32,000 unaccompanied alien children within the immigration enforcement system after releasing them from federal custody. This alarming finding is unacceptable and contrary to American values.
But you likely have not heard about this because the administration is not confronting the problem head on and the liberal legacy media is largely ignoring the report.
ICE LOST TRACK OF TENS OF THOUSANDS OF MIGRANT KIDS, DHS INSPECTOR GENERAL FINDS
As we have been warning for years, the Biden-Harris administration’s open borders policies and refusal to enforce immigration law created the unprecedented humanitarian and security crisis at the southern border. Of the more than 10 million illegal aliens encountered at the border, more than 500,000 have been trafficked or smuggled vulnerable migrant children.
The physical, mental, and sexual abuse that migrant children are subjected to during the trip to our border has been extensively documented.
Last year, the New York Times published a series of gut-wrenching articles that detailed the life of sex trafficking and forced labor many are subjected to in the U.S. to pay off their smuggling debts. The Times also reported that the administration had lost track of 85,000 unaccompanied alien children, but that shocking revelation was barely covered by the press and no administration officials were dismissed.
HARRIS FAILED TO COMBAT ‘ROOT CAUSES’ OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, FORMER BORDER PATROL UNION CHIEF SAYS
Now we know the severity of the problem is degrees of magnitude worse, but it is doubtful the Biden-Harris administration will be held accountable before Americans go to the polls.
Here is a breakdown of the Biden-Harris administration policies that are responsible for handing over 32,000 vulnerable migrant children back to their traffickers within our borders.
First, it is important to understand that unaccompanied alien children are an extremely difficult population to deal with because of loopholes in the law that impose onerous and misguided restrictions on the government’s ability to quickly return the migrant children to their families in their home countries.
HARRIS-WALZ THINK THEY CAN FOOL US INTO BELIEVING A FANTASY ABOUT THEIR IMMIGRATION POLICIES
The Biden-Harris administration’s day one decision to end the Migrant Protection Protocols and exempt unaccompanied alien children from immediate border expulsion under Title 42 guaranteed that they would be released into American communities.
As a result, transfers of migrant children from Homeland Security custody to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) custody, as required by law, increased from 15,128 in Fiscal Year 2020 during the Trump administration to 120,859 in Fiscal Year 2021 during the Biden-Harris Administration. The numbers have remained high ever since.
Unable to house the growing number of migrant children in HHS facilities, the Biden-Harris administration made the misguided decision to speed up their release to adult sponsors.
BIDEN-HARRIS AIDED ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS AND MADE AMERICANS PAY FOR IT
First, the administration started releasing unaccompanied alien children without issuing them a Notice to Appear, the charging document that places them in removal proceedings. When they still could not keep up with the inflow, they discontinued the Trump administration’s policy of pre-release site visits to inspect where the minors would live and then began handing over migrant children to unvetted adults who showed up to claim them.
So, while the inspector general’s report is alarming, it is entirely predictable. The audit found that nearly 30,000 unaccompanied alien children who received a Notice to Appear failed to show up to immigration court.
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Additionally, 291,000 migrant children who did not receive the necessary paperwork have completely disappeared and the administration has no way of knowing where they are.
As the inspector general put it, "by not issuing NTAs to all [unaccompanied alien children], ICE limits its chances of having contact with [them] when they are released from HHS’ custody, which reduces opportunities to verify their safety."
It goes on to say that "without an ability to monitor the location and status of [migrant children], ICE has no assurance [they] are safe from trafficking, exploitation or forced labor."
The timing of this report should be particularly eye-opening. It was published just one day after the left endorsed its latest policy platform that endorsed amnesty for nearly every illegal alien in the country, including human traffickers.
The Biden-Harris administration campaigned in 2020 on a "compassionate" immigration policy, but the result of their failed strategy over the last three and a half years paints a dramatically different reality.
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Robert Law is the director of the Center for Homeland Security & Immigration at the America First Policy Institute and the former chief of the Office of Policy & Strategy at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Trump administration.
