Kids go missing as Dems, media turn a blind eye
REPORTS that 103 unaccompanied migrant children were found Sunday in an abandoned trailer in Mexico, coupled with a recent New York Times exposé on migrant child workers in the United States, casts a spotlight on an underreported aspect of the border disaster — the fate of the 325,000-plus alien children Customs and Border Protection officers have encountered at the southwest border since Joe Biden became president.
If they were in the same school district, it would be the sixth largest in America. Yet most in the press have ignored them.
Most came so they (or more often their parents and smugglers) could take advantage of a loophole congressional Democrats created in 2008. That law divides “unaccompanied alien children” the Department of Homeland Security encounters into two groups: those from “contiguous countries” (Mexico and Canada) and those from everywhere else.
DHS can quickly return contiguous children if they haven’t been trafficked and aren’t afraid of return. The rest are sent to Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, most for placement with prescreened “sponsors” (often parents) in the US, regardless of whether they have trafficking or asylum claims.
Some 271,225 unaccompanied kids CBP encountered under Biden have been noncontiguous nationals. Almost all were sent to ORR and have been released.
President Barack Obama unsuccessfully asked Congress to close that loophole in June 2014 because, as The Washington Post’s editorial board later explained, the law “has encouraged thousands of Central American children to try to reach the United States by granting them access to immigration courts that Mexican kids don’t enjoy.”
Migrant children risk unconscionable abuse on their way here, as thenVeep Biden explained in 2014: “These smugglers — and everyone should know it and not turn a blind eye to it — . . . routinely engage in physical and sexual abuse and extortion of these innocent, young women and men by and large.”
Yet as president he’s done nothing to deter children from entering illegally. Worse, his ORR has slashed the time it spends screening potential sponsors before releasing children to them.
‘Screen’ time
In fiscal year 2022, ORR held those children while screening sponsors for just 30 days — half the time it spent screening sponsors under President Donald Trump in fiscal 2018 and 2019 and less than a third of the time that process took (102 days) in fiscal 2020.
If you’re wondering why the Times is now talking about migrant children of tender years working “in some of the most punishing jobs in the country,” including “roofers,” “slaughterhouse workers” and “sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts,” start with ORR’s statistics.
Lost count
Just over a year into the Biden administration, ORR had lost track of nearly 20,000 migrant children. The number now is likely several times that, but when the Trump administration lost fewer than 1,500 unaccompanied kids in 2018, it was headline news on CNN and in The Washington Post. Until the Times article, Biden’s shoddy handling of migrant children received little notice at all.
Not that the paper’s reporting has stirred many out of their somnolence. That’s not a surprise. A September HHS inspector general report blasting ORR’s performance in caring for, tracking and releasing migrant children (it even lost kids in its custody) garnered little notice either.
The prevailing attitude appears to be: If Biden does something involving aliens, it’s OK. Except when it comes to migrant children, it’s plainly not. To quote Joe Biden circa 2014, “everyone should know . . . and not turn a blind eye to” the dangers facing migrant kids. It’s advice worth heeding in 2023.