Analysis: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris lost 300,000 migrant children

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by Bradley Devlin

In 2014, Vice President Joe Biden was sent to Guatemala by President Barack Obama to call on Latin American countries and their citizens to stop smuggling unaccompanied children into the United States.

“These traffickers routinely engage in physical and sexual abuse and extortion against these innocent young women and men,” Biden said in a speech in Guatemala City.

Three months into his presidency, in March 2021, Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris to Guatemala to deliver a similar message: “Don’t come.”

Ten years after Biden’s speech in Guatemala City, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General has released a report showing that the Biden-Harris administration has changed the track of 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 on Oct. 1, 2018, and ended on Sept. 30, 2019, with Donald Trump as president; fiscal year 2023 began on Oct. 1, 2022, and ended on Sept. 30, 2023, with Biden as president.)

While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) remains responsible for processing immigration cases for minor immigrants through the system, the Office of Refugee Resettlement is responsible for the care and custody of the children while their cases are being processed.

“However, ICE was unable to determine the location of all UCs (unaccompanied children) released by HHS (Health and Human Services) who did not appear in immigration court as scheduled,” the inspector general’s report said.

In the same period from budget year 2019 to 2023, more than 32,000 unaccompanied children did not appear in court after receiving a summons.

“ICE did not always 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) agents at only one of the eight field offices we visited stated that they attempted to locate the UCs.”

But those 32,000 court appearances were just the tip of the iceberg. The report also found that “as of May 2024, ICE had failed to issue Notices to Appear (NTAs) to more than 291,000” unaccompanied children.

While the updated guidelines attempted to manage the influx of illegal immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General says that despite “visits at four ICE locations,” it “observed no change in local procedures based on the guidelines.”

“At one location we visited, 34,823 (84%) of the 41,638 UCs in the region had not received NTAs to commence immigration proceedings,” the report said.

“The utter incompetence of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to secure our southern border is indistinguishable from federally sponsored human trafficking,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told The Daily Signal.

“Countless children are being harmed by the broken system 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, regardless of who gets hurt.”

Rep. Eli Crane, Republican of Arizona, also had strong words for the Biden-Harris administration following the inspector general’s report.

“This report is a testament to the horrors of the Biden-Harris administration’s open-border policies,” 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 allowing vulnerable children into America only to have them end up with unvetted sponsors who will not guarantee their safety.”

Crane named Biden, Harris and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

“Since taking office, this administration has eroded 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 deliberately orchestrating an invasion that puts both American citizens and unaccompanied children at risk.”

The Homeland Security Act of 2021, the report notes, defines unaccompanied children “as minors who do not have lawful immigration status in the United States, are under 18 years of age, and do not have a parent or legal guardian in the country available to provide care and physical custody.”

These children are “at increased risk of trafficking, exploitation, or 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 a report based on its investigation into the lives of unaccompanied migrant children who recently arrived in the United States. Human trafficking and sexual abuse are more common among migrant children than you might think, and those cases are more extreme than the more commonplace labor exploitation that migrant children can face in the United States.

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, the Times reported, “migrant children, who are entering the United States in record numbers without their parents, are ending up in some of the most grueling jobs in the country.”

Some kids make it as far west as Los Angeles, where they sew “Made in America” labels on T-shirts. Others go even further, across the Pacific to Hawaii, where they harvest coffee.

“These shadow workers are spread across industries in every state, violating child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century,” the Times reported. “Unaccompanied minors have had their legs torn off in factories and their spines crushed 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 under a tractor while working. In Alabama, a 15-year-old died after falling from a roof.

The chaos that characterizes the U.S. immigration system is the result of decades of liberal border policies combined with confusing, convoluted enforcement procedures.

Andrew Arthur, a senior fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Daily Signal that children have long been smuggled into the United States, but the problems surrounding the handling of unaccompanied foreign children have become much greater since the so-called Flores Settlement in 1997.

The agreement set narrow parameters for how the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was disbanded in 2003 as part of the launch of the Department of Homeland Security, could process migrant children. Matters were only complicated when, during the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 that created DHS, Democrats demanded that the new agency send 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 office at HHS. “I really have no idea. They haven’t arrested anyone, they haven’t had any experience, and they’ve never been very good at it.”

While the U.S. immigration system had changed radically, Arthur told The Daily Signal, it wasn’t until 2008, when the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act was passed, that we saw a major increase in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border.

Section 235 of the legislation, passed by a Democratic-led Congress and signed by President George W. Bush, a Republican, requires DHS to send any unaccompanied alien child it comes into contact with to the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement “within 72 hours,” Arthur said.

“But it also does something else that’s weird,” Arthur said. “It divides UACs into two separate groups. The first one, if they’re from neighboring countries, Canada and Mexico, DHS can send them back if they haven’t been trafficked and they don’t have prosecution claims. But if they’re from another country, then those kids have to be sent to HHS, and HHS has to place them with sponsors in the United States.”

The result, he said, has been a huge increase in unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries, particularly the so-called Northern Triangle countries: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Things came to a head in 2014, the fifth year of Obama’s eight-year presidency. Obama sent Vice President Biden to Guatemala City to work with regional governments to slow 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 the Trump-Pence administration in 2019 saw a resurgence. To address the problem and ensure unaccompanied migrant children weren’t being sent to unsafe situations, Arthur told The Daily Signal, “It took HHS 102 days to vet sponsors in 2020.”

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 sue you if you smuggle your kids here.”

While the problems surrounding migrant children crossing the border existed long before the Biden-Harris administration, Arthur argues they have gotten much worse under Biden.

When Biden became president on Jan. 21, 2021, “all of the safeguards that Trump had put into the system to protect those children were gone,” Arthur said.

The immigration system “doesn’t work on this scale,” he said. “They’ve brought so many people into the United States that the people who say the immigration system is broken are the ones who are breaking the immigration system.”

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Bradley Devlin is the political editor for The Daily Signal.

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