Study faults care of migrant children
WASHINGTON » The government has made only incremental improvements to its troubled efforts to care for thousands of migrant children detained entering the U.S. without their parents, perpetuating a problem the Trump administration has aggravated with its “zero tolerance” immigration crackdown, a bipartisan Senate report said Wednesday.
The 52-page study said no federal agency takes responsibility for making sure children aren’t abused or used in human trafficking once the government places them with sponsors, who sometimes aren’t their parents or close relatives. Immigration judges are ordering the deportation of growing proportions of these children partly because the government does little to ensure they get to court, and officials haven’t provided sufficient mental health services for some of them, the report said.
“Major deficiencies persist that leave the children at significant risk for trafficking and abuse and undermine our immigration system,” said the report by the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s investigations subcommittee. It said a recent attempt at coordination between the departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security “does little to offer hope that federal agencies are working to improve” children’s safety, and it called the situation “untenable.”
The report comes as attention has focused on another set of migrant children: more than 2,000 who were separated from their parents as part of President Donald Trump’s policy of aggressively prosecuting immigrants.
Though most of those children have been reunited with their parents or others, the costs involved “have stretched thin” HHS’ “already limited resources,” the report said. The authors wrote that when they asked that agency to detail its efforts to check on children placed with sponsors, “HHS told the subcommittee that it can either work to reunite families or update data — but not both.”
More than 200,000 unaccompanied children have entered the U.S. without legal status over the past six years, and most problems started under President Barack Obama, the report said.
“This is an incredibly difficult issue and it’s not a partisan one,” said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, the subcommittee chairman.
The panel’s top Democrat, Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, took a more partisan tone, saying, “This administration continues to make an already challenging reality for migrant children even more difficult and more dangerous.”