As we’ve noted here previously, Unaccompanied Children (UACs) illegally coming across our southern border are not subject to quick removal, through Title 42 or otherwise. Instead, they are turned over to Health and Human Services (HHS) for resettlement with family members or other sponsors already in the U.S., many of whom are here illegally as well.
Most such UACs are teenage boys 15 and older who come to America to work and send remittances back home. Consequently, it is no surprise that, once placed with a sponsor, they often take or are given jobs that may or may not be legal and may or may not be safe for workers so young.
Consider for example the case of a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl named Amelia, whose family last year paid $10,000 to a cartel to drop her off at the border in Arizona. She was released by HHS to a sister in Enterprise, Alabama, and was soon hired by the same chicken processing plant in which her sister worked, both under fake documentation. Alerted to this illegal and dangerous arrangement, HHS suspended resettlements to the Enterprise area.
Yet resettlement of UACs elsewhere has continued. So far during Biden’s tenure, more than 200,000 UACs have been resettled across numerous American communities. One such community that has received a large number of UACs is Houston, Texas, which has taken nearly 6,300 so far this fiscal year. Among these, a pattern has been noted: many are going missing.
Reuters, which initially broke the case involving “Amelia,” is reporting that 57 UACs had disappeared after resettlement in the Houston area. Some had been placed with sponsors, but at least nine had run away from a Houston shelter. A search has located 46 of them, leaving about a dozen still missing, which authorities are frantically trying to find.
No one knows how many of the overall 200,000 have similarly dropped from sight.
Resettling young people in homes or shelters in the U.S., in lieu of returning them to their homes, is doing them no favors. Doing so puts them at risk in dirty and dangerous work conditions and merely completes the human trafficking operation begun by the cartels. Most especially, it further establishes Joe Biden’s title of “Trafficker-in-Chief.”
For more, see Reuters.