House Speaker Mike Johnson slammed the Biden administration after a “stunning” inspector general’s report released Tuesday found nearly 300,000 migrant children have gone missing in the US.
“This administration’s failure to secure our border is facilitating what is the equivalent of a modern day slavery operation,” Johnson told reporters. “The southern border is a national security disaster and a humanitarian catastrophe..”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has failed to locate more than 291,000 unaccompanied children that had been released to domestic sponsors as of May 2024, according to the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General.
Just one of the eight ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations offices audited had even “attempted to locate” the missing immigrant kids, and the rate of serving them with notices to appear in immigration court at one location stood at only 16%.
A total of 448,820 unaccompanied children were shuttled from ICE to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and then to sponsors nationwide between fiscal years 2019 and 2023.
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, amid a surge of illegal entries in 2022, pushed his staff to release the children to sponsors so quickly that he wanted the turnover to resemble an “assembly line”, according to the New York Times.
Should the HHS immediately update the process of releasing migrant children to sponsors, in order to protect the children after they are released?