A House committee probing the ongoing border crisis has subpoenaed Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra for information about tens of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who have disappeared inside the US.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) compelled Becerra, in a Thursday cover letter exclusively obtained by The Post that accompanied the subpoena, to hand over documents related to the “vetting, screening, and monitoring” of migrant sponsors by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
Without proper vetting, migrant kids are at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor and other forms of exploitation, according to a Homeland Security inspector general’s report released last month.
HHS officials have stalled for more than a month and a half after the Homeland Security panel initially requested the records on Aug. 12. The subpoena responses are due Oct. 3.
On Wednesday, the department finally turned over 717 pages of documents — but 400 of them “contain nothing more than publicly available information,” Green told Becerra.
“Absurdly, HHS stamped all these publicly available pages with a disclaimer stating, ‘Produced to Homeland Security Committee Pursuant to Oversight Request[;] Do Not Disclose Without Permission from Department of Health and Human Services,’” he added.
The rest of the documents reproduced sections of the ORR’s manual on procedures for unaccompanied migrant children, which were not relevant to the committee’s requests.
“The available statistics and data regarding [unaccompanied alien children, or UACs] are extremely disconcerting and represents a growing humanitarian crisis,” Green wrote.
“Thus far, HHS has denied the Committee access to this vital information, refusing to provide even an indication of the scope of the issue.”
The scope was hinted at, however, in an Aug. 19 Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report, which found that as of May 2024, 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children who entered the US had been released without an immigration court date — and no other way to track their location.
Another 32,000 children whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities released into the US failed to show up at courts even when given a date to appear, the 14-page report also shows.
The DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) audited eight ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations offices — and discovered only one had even “attempted to locate” its batch of missing immigrant kids.
At another office, the rate of serving notices to appear in immigration court was as low as 16%.
Between Oct. 1, 2018, and Sept. 30, 2023, ICE moved a total of 448,820 unaccompanied children to HHS’ ORR, which then placed them with sponsors nationwide.
In June 2023, Robin Dunn Marcos, a senior HHS official involved in the program for solo child migrants, testified to the House Judiciary Committee that even though agency officials contact the home countries that the UACs hail from, they do not ask for criminal records.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said last month that HHS losing count of the migrant children was “the equivalent of a modern-day slavery operation” and called for “emergency hearings.”
“The southern border is a national security disaster and a humanitarian catastrophe and Kamala Harris cannot be trusted to fix it,” Johnson told reporters on a call last month.
Republicans in Congress first expressed concerns about the alarming number of missing migrant children following a New York Times report in February 2023, which claimed that HHS had been unable to contact 85,000 unaccompanied minors who had been placed with sponsors after entering the US.
Green, in his Thursday letter, asked HHS to disclose the rate at which would-be sponsors were barred by ORR from taking in migrant kids, how many sponsors the office has been unable to stay in touch with and how many have been convicted or investigated for crimes such as physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect or child abandonment.
The Homeland Security panel also wants to review records about any sponsors who provided fraudulent information, an issue that earlier this summer stalled one of DHS’ parole programs allowing 30,000 migrants per month to fly in from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
In 2022, Becerra pressured staff to release migrant children to sponsors as quickly as possible, likening the ideal turnover rate to an “assembly line,” the Times reported.
“House Republicans have been repeating the false narrative of stonewalling for years at this point as an excuse to send a subpoena,” an HHS spokesperson said in a statement. “As the Committee well knows, HHS prior to the subpoena worked in good faith to provide hundreds of pages of documents while communicating repeatedly to the Committee that it is continuing to work on its request.”
