Biden has failed thousands of migrant children

OPINION:

With new evidence in, it’s perfectly clear in his fourth year of debacles that President Biden had no real plan for his self-described border “surge” beyond flooding us with millions of illegal aliens hustled into our country by brutal Mexican drug cartels.

Minors, designated as unaccompanied alien children, or UACs, are one of the cartels’ most valuable commodities as their henchmen rake in billions of dollars in smuggling fees. UACs are trafficked for sex and labor, used as barter to get fake parents inside America and pose as supposed minors to hide their real trade: gang membership.

No government leader who took an oath to defend the United States would ever de facto deputize the Mexican drug cartels as our cross-border agents. But Mr. Biden did, in collusion with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Mr. Biden announced to the world he wanted a “surge” at the southwestern border, then stripped away all of former President Donald Trump’s edicts that made us safer. Mr. Biden then issued decrees and orders, despite federal immigration laws, to transform the Border Patrol into paper processors.

The lack of any real forethought is starkly revealed in official reports and testimony about how foreign minors face horrors before and after they get here.

Bungling by the Office of Refugee Resettlement spans several administrations. But what is new is the record number of children, now topping 400,000, since Mr. Biden took office. A New York Times investigation found that the Biden team lost track of 85,000 migrant children over a two-year period.

“This administration has separated 400,000 children from their parents by not sending them back to their parents in their home countries,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark E. Green, Tennessee Republican.

2023 was a busy time for Mr. Green’s committee, as well as other investigative bodies, to pin down and categorize Mr. Biden’s border failures.

The UAC narrative is the worst.

“Biden and Mayorkas’ policies are undoubtedly contributing to the massive increase in the trafficking of children across the Southwest border, and their ongoing exploitation by the cartels and evil individuals posing as ‘sponsors’ here in the United States,” said a committee Republican investigative report.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was so alarmed at the sheer number of foreign children the Biden-Mayorkas team was randomly dumping on his state that he asked the state Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate, which it did.

The jury’s 46-page report said, “If any resident of Florida exposed U.S.-born children to this process, they would be justifiably arrested for child neglect or worse.”

The panel singled out the Office of Refugee Resettlement, known as the ORR, which is supposed to find safe accommodation for these children.

“In reality, ORR is facilitating the forced migration, sale, and abuse of foreign children, and some of our fellow Florida residents are (in some cases unwittingly) funding and incentivizing it for primarily economic reasons,” the grand jury said.

It added: “These entities encourage UAC to undertake and/or be subjected to a harrowing trek to our border, ultimately abandoning significant numbers of those who survive the journey to an uncertain fate with persons who are largely unvetted. This process exposes children to horrifying health conditions, constant criminal threat, labor and sex trafficking, robbery, rape, and other experiences not done justice by mere words.”

The grand jury said the ORR stonewalled its request for information.

Elsewhere, the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general investigated the ORR and found it was not prepared for such a large influx of migrant children.

The ORR “had to act quickly to increase the number of shelter beds because additional capacity was needed to manage the increasing numbers of unaccompanied children,” the inspector general said in relatively mild criticism.

The inspector general also found that the ORR was woefully short on completing background checks of shelter employees.

In a spot sample of 229 employees, the ORR skipped 200, even though, in the words of the inspector general, “Background checks are a critical component of the screening process for employees who work with children.”

Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican, said:  “A lot of times these sponsors have maybe 15 different children. And guess what they’re doing? Sex trafficking. They are bringing it now inside the United States of America.”

The House Judiciary Committee also held hearings on the plight of migrant children. Jessica Vaughan, a policymaker at the Center for Immigration Studies, said, “The Biden administration has implemented policies that incentivize the illegal entry of unaccompanied alien children on a massive scale, to the profit of criminal smugglers and traffickers, even with full knowledge of the risks that such policies will endanger the safety and well-being of the migrant children.”

There you have it. Over 10 million illegal aliens entered, many of whom still owe smuggling fees, putting them under the thumb of cartels. Among them are 400,000 children, some lost and abused.

• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.