Thousands of illegal alien children have gone missing from sponsors’ homes in the U.S. after being placed there by the federal government, according to a watchdog investigation.
An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and Scripps News focused on the small town of Culpeper, Virginia, where at least 35 mostly Guatemalan children have gone missing since 2017.
They were all deemed unaccompanied minors by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and placed with sponsors under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Once the children were placed into the sponsors’ care, the government no longer had custody authority and stopped tracking their whereabouts.
From WCPO Cincinnati:
Between January 2018 and April 2023, ORR’s National Call Center — a 24-hour phone helpline created to advise and connect unaccompanied minors and their families with local resources during a crisis — received 6,318 calls reporting runaway migrant children, records obtained and analyzed by Public Integrity show.
HHS has declined multiple requests for interviews by Public Integrity and Scripps News. In response to questions about how the department was tracking and investigating these cases, HHS said via email that ORR’s legal custody and authority over an unaccompanied child ends when the child is released to a vetted sponsor.
“ORR has no jurisdiction over where or with whom the child lives after they have been released to a sponsor. If a child moves in with a different individual, they would not be considered a ‘sponsor’ or ‘potential sponsor’ by the ORR program, and ORR does not have a role in vetting such an individual,” the response said.
Sgt. Norma McGuckin, a detective with the Culpeper Police Department assigned to investigate all missing child migrant cases, described how many of the children are placed with “unrelated sponsors”, which make investigating their disappearances difficult because the sponsors don’t have that much information about them.
“Some of these sponsors don’t know anything about these kids because they didn’t know them before ORR sent them here,” said McGuckin.
“It depends who I get on the phone. It’s never the same person. Sometimes they will provide me a date of birth, name. At times they might give me potential or other names of sponsors they were looking at to release this child to. And they may give me a number, but most times, I don’t get much.”
But the missing children in the small town of Culpeper is just a microcosm of the large-scale problem of unaccompanied migrant children going missing in the U.S.
But the missing migrant children reports in Culpeper are not isolated. Following an influx of unaccompanied minors entering the U.S., thousands have disappeared from sponsors’ homes after the federal government placed them there. ORR handled 2,724 reports in 2022 — six times the number it recorded in 2020. But there is no clear local, state or federal government agency taking responsibility for searching for many of these missing children or investigating why a growing number have disappeared, the Center or Public Integrity and Scripps News have found.
According to HHS figures, approximately 85,000 migrant children, all between the ages of 13 and 17, have gone missing in the U.S. since 2022.
Wisconsin Attorney General Alan Wilson, along with 22 other AGs, sent a letter to the Biden administration this week demanding answers on the “trafficking of migrant children” and why the government can’t determine the whereabouts of the 85,000 missing minors.
“Reports show that many of those children have been forced into the labor
market, where they work debilitating hours under dangerous conditions in violation of child-labor laws or are sex trafficked,” the letter states. “Senator Chuck Grassley recognized this problem and asked the Department of Homeland Security for a plan more than three months ago, but no plan has been forthcoming. That is unacceptable.”
“The Department of Health and Human Services must ensure that it is not handing over children to criminals and sex traffickers. It cannot do so if it does not know to whom it is handing these children. Even worse, is that it appears to have no idea where those children are being sent. Missing children must be identified, and potential sponsors must be vetted,” the letter concluded.
Biden’s open border policy has not only resulted in an unprecedented humanitarian and political crisis from the millions of unvetted illegals pouring into cities, but a child trafficking crisis as well.
