The Biden administration admitted in a letter to Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) that it has lost track of nearly 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children since January 2021.
“Of the 108,981 Safety and Well-Being Calls conducted since January 2021 for children discharged from ORR care, there are 19,726 sponsors who could not be reached,” reads the letter from Acting Assistant Secretary Jennifer Cannistra of Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
And they have no plans to look for them.
“While ORR’s custodial responsibilities end when a child is released from ORR care, ORR provides post-release services for children and sponsors who would benefit from ongoing connections to community services,” the letter sent to Biggs on February 24 reads. “Although ORR has no legal custody after a child is discharged, ORR does follow-up by phone.”
“It took HHS 5 months to respond to my letter and admit that they’ve lost track of nearly 20,000 unaccompanied alien children. More troubling, they don’t seem that worried about it,” Biggs tweeted.
It took HHS 5 months to respond to my letter and admit that they’ve lost track of nearly 20,000 unaccompanied alien children. More troubling, they don’t seem that worried about it. #BidenBorderCrisis pic.twitter.com/L6Ge9F14dN
— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) March 1, 2022
This is particularly concerning because, during the Obama administration, which was also known for having high numbers of migrants illegally crossing the border, thousands of migrant children ended up in the hands of sex traffickers. In January 2016 the Washington Post reported that “The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers.”
Under Obama and Biden, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, “failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations.”
What happened to all the children lost by Biden? Have they been sex trafficked? It’s highly possible that many have, and with the Biden administration feeling no sense of responsibility for the safety of these children, I dare say we’ll never know just how many. But it happened under the Obama-Biden administration, and so it’s safe to say that it’s happening now under the Biden-Harris administration. In fact, journalist Heather Robinson predicted back in April 2021 that Biden’s border policies would increase the sex trafficking of children.
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