As if the illegal border crossings of minor children isn’t enough trauma, now we find out via testimony last week that the HHS just let kids go without any follow up. These children are basically lost and who knows where they are now. Sex trafficking of little kids is a huge business and it appears our government unwittingly became a participant in this illegal activity.
SENATOR ROB PORTMAN ASKED IF A SPONSOR HAD EVER BEEN FIRED FOR NOT CARING FOR A CHILD- THE ANSWER WAS NO
Someone should prosecute the feds for human trafficking — of kids.
No joke: Swamped with tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America who crossed the Mexican border in 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services simply skipped key steps meant to ensure the kids were sent to safe places.
HHS spokesman Mark Weber told The Post his agency bypassed procedures only in “very few” cases — numbering “in the hundreds” — and that officials with “years of experience” felt confident the steps weren’t needed.
But the Associated Press reports that HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, wound up placing some kids in “homes where they were sexually assaulted, starved or forced to work for little or no pay.”
The AP found “more than two dozen children” released to adults who subjected them to “labor trafficking or severe abuse or neglect.” Some kids were raped by their sponsors’ associates.
Bottom line: ORR, in effect, funneled kids to abusers. You’d expect prosecutors to arrest non-government workers who did that.
The skipped steps included fingerprinting adults who sought the children as well as requiring would-be sponsors’ birth certificates and “personal and identifying information.” Also dropped: criminal background checks.
No wonder social workers doing follow-up couldn’t even find many of the kids.
In one case, a worker visited an apartment complex where the feds had sent more than a dozen children. The apartments turned up empty.
“We were concerned it could have been a front to have those kids released so that traffickers could get them into the workforce,” AP was told by Hilary Chester — a higher-up at the US Council of Catholic Bishops, which does much of this social work under government contract. Today, Chester notes, “No one knows where the kids are.”
Yes, ORR faced a crisis. From October 2013 to September 2014, some 67,000 children from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico showed up at the border without their families — four times the number just three years earlier.
But that’s no excuse for handing the children over to all comers.
Via: NYP
