A far-left progressive Democrat aligned with the "Squad" was caught blatantly lying about the status of thousands of migrant children who have gone missing.
A damning Office of Inspector General report in August found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was unable to find 32,000 migrant children who were released into the care of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is responsible for supervising unaccompanied migrant children.
“[ICE] could not monitor the location and status of all unaccompanied migrant children (UCs) or initiate removal proceedings as needed,” the OIG report stated.
“During our ongoing audit to assess ICE’s ability to monitor the location and status of UCs who were released or transferred from the custody of [DHS] and [HHS], we learned ICE transferred more than 448,000 UCs to HHS from fiscal years 2019 to 2023.”
“However, ICE was not able to account for the location of all UCs who were released by HHS and did not appear as scheduled in immigration court. ICE reported more than 32,000 UCs failed to appear for their immigration court hearings from FYs 2019 to 2023,” it added.
While the children went missing between 2019 and 2023 - a period including both the Trump and Biden administrations - the permissive border policies of the Biden-Harris presidency have exacerbated the issue by enabling human traffickers to exploit children.
During a hearing Wednesday, Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA) dismissed the concern over missing children as a bogus controversy based on right-wing "talking points."
Jayapal bizarrely claimed that "these children are not lost," despite the fact that the government cannot account for their location.
“HHS’ legal authority ceases once an unaccompanied child is reunited with a sponsor, usually a parent or a close relative. While HHS conducts three follow-up calls to ensure that everything is going well between a sponsor and a child, the agency has no ability to force their way into the home. If no one answers these three calls, then HHS is no longer in contact with the child. Now that does not mean that the child is lost,” she added.
In short, Jayapal is carrying water for human traffickers whether she realizes it or not.
While Jayapal claims that most children are reunited with "usually a parent or a close relative," many in fact fall victim to human traffickers who take advantage of poor vetting in the system.
Witnesses on human trafficking testified to Congress this week about this grave and often overlooked side of the border crisis.
“A young girl who arrived at the border in the custody of individuals claiming to be her family was bruised, disoriented and in pain,” human trafficking expert Alicia Hopper said. “Medical examinations revealed that she had been raped, yet she was sent back to her abusers because no verification was done to confirm her guardianship."
President-elect Trump has vowed to crack down on illegal immigration on day one, and he has specifically pledged to enact the death penalty for human traffickers.
