Sen. Josh Hawley is demanding answers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the nearly 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children it ‘may have lost track of’ within the U.S.
The agency’s internal watchdog warned of an ‘urgent issue’ with how immigration officials have been handling the cases of migrant minors and found that more than 32,000 children had failed to show up for immigration summonses and ICE was ‘not able to account’ for their locations.
For more than 291,000 unaccompanied immigrant minors, ICE had not bothered to serve them court dates, according to the watchdog, two-thirds of the migrant children who have made their way into the U.S.
‘Unaccompanied migrant children are some of the most vulnerable individuals in America. They are routinely trafficked for sex, forced into illegal labor, burned with chemicals, and subjected to countless other atrocities by cartels,’ Hawley, R-Mo., wrote.
Sen. Josh Hawley is demanding answers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the nearly 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children it ‘may have lost track of’ within the U.S.
‘Not only did your agency lose track of these children, it didn’t even bother to tell anyone. That is unconscionable.’
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is responsible for placing the immigrant children with sponsors, but has lost track of tens of thousands of them after the children and their sponsors stopped responding. ICE, which is responsible for putting the children through to immigration hearings, did not follow up with them either.
‘ICE must take immediate action to ensure the safety of UCs residing in the United States,’ Inspector General Joseph Cuffari said in an alert. ‘Based on our audit work and according to ICE officials, UCs who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation or forced labor.’
‘By not issuing NTAs to all UCs, ICE limits its chances of having contact with UCs when they are released from HHS’s custody, which reduces opportunities to verify their safety,’ Cuffari added.
Without the capacity to monitor the children, there is ‘no assurance that they are safe from trafficking, exploitation, and forced labor.’
Hawley called to mind testimony Mayorkas gave the Senate in October 2023 when he claimed, ‘we have actually prioritized the rescue of children who have been trafficked.’
‘But according to your Inspector General, your policies are wholly exacerbating that same trafficking risk to migrant children,’ Hawley wrote.
He demanded Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas provide answers on where his agency believes these children are, why they were not given court notices, what his agency is doing to track them down and what led to the failed communication between HHS and DHS.
ICE does not alert HHS when a child fails to show up and has not procedural code for following up on those cases. HHS created an email inbox for ICE to notify them when a child is a no-show at a deportation hearing. But ICE officials could not tell the inspector general how often, if ever, deportation officers used it.
In response to the report, ICE said it would send an alert telling officers to start using it.
Mexican migrant Veronica Marquez, 36, comforts her son Mariano, 5, while waiting to be apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border protection officers after crossing over into the U.S. on June 25, 2024
These immigrant children are often sent with traffickers to travel north in hopes they have a better shot at not being turned away at the border without their parents.
Roughly 68,000 were caught and released in fiscal 2019, and just 15,128 were caught and released in 2020, the last full year under President Trump. Nearly 366,000 were caught and went to HHS during Biden’s first three years.
For ICE, children are just the tip of the ice berg of the agency’s issues with tracking migrants.
ICE’s docket has more than 7 million migrants at large and are not being tracked by a monitoring device.
Children who do show up and go through the immigration court process have little chance of being deported.
Of those who arrived in 2018, nearly a quarter were granted some sort of legal status within three years and only 5 percent were sent back to their home countries. Some 14 percent were supposed to leave but defied those orders and the rest, 57 percent, had no progress on their legal status three years later.
