According to a new report, the Biden administration sent unsupervised illegal immigrant children with unlicensed U.S. guardians and sponsors who planned to use the children for legal purposes, including work trafficking.
Government officials repeatedly ignored issues by government staff regarding the placement of alone illegal immigrant children in potentially unsafe homes, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the problems were left out in an effort to prevent the packed detention facilities at the southern border from a large number of illegal immigrants.
The Department of Health and Human Services acknowledged that it was not sufficiently prepared to deal with the large number of stakeholder house calls, but it maintained that the plan had been improved and that potential guardians had been screened more carefully.
In a statement to The Wall Street Journal, the department said,” Child welfare best-practices are clear that children belong with family and not in shelters”.
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Up to 18, 700 unaccompanied illegal immigrant children crossed the border each month in 2021, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. In response, the Department of Health and Human Services established 14 makeshift shelters to provide children with temporary housing. The shelters ‘ employees were not properly trained in placing the children into secure homes, according to the report.
” Following an internal investigation, the inspector general for the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw a network of shelters caring for unaccompanied minors, found gaps in the process to screen temporary guardians”, The Wall Street Journal’s report stated. It stated in February that there was no evidence that a safety check was necessary when 16 % of child records for those who were released to sponsors in March and April 2021 were held.
According to the report, an employee in one instance placed a child in a Florida home while stating that” It does not appear safe for the minor to be released to a home environment that was not fully assessed.” However, a government official later rebutted the concern, according to documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
In another instance, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy was placed in the care of an unknown uncle. Just three months prior to the placement, the man had been charged with a felony for domestic violence. The initial decision to place the unaccompanied minor in the suspect’s home was overturned just days later, even though a Health and Human Services case coordinator initially declined. Additionally, additional records indicate that the 16-year-old was not related to the alleged uncle of the boy.
