HHS Gives Illegal Alien Children to Human Traffickers, Can’t Provide Details About the Location of Some 90,000 Released to ‘Sponsors’
(CNSNews.com) – Following the 2015 federal indictment [1] of four men for human trafficking and a Senate investigation into how unaccompanied alien children (UACs) wound up in the hands of criminals, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Oversight Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said it was the doing of the federal government.
“It is intolerable that human trafficking — really modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard, but it does,” Portman said at a subcommittee hearing on Thursday.
“But what makes the Marion case even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was actually responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of the abusers,” Portman said.
The indictment followed the discovery of victims, including at least six minors from Guatemala, at an egg farm in Marion, Ohio, where the children were living in squalid conditions and working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for about $2 a day.
The subcommittee’s 51-page report states that Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement -- the entity responsible for relocating the children after they are released from government detention centers and while they wait for immigration proceedings -- “failed to run background checks on the adults in the sponsors’ households as well as secondary caregivers, failed to visit any of the sponsors’ homes; and failed to realize that a group of sponsors has accumulated multiple unrelated children.”
The two witnesses at the hearing -- Mark Greenberg, acting assistant secretary for HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, and Robert Carey, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) – did not answer many of the questions posed by lawmakers on the committee and gave answers to some questions that disturbed many on both sides of the aisle.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) asked the witnesses how many of the 90,000 children that have been distributed to parents, other relatives or “family friends” could they locate today.
“Of the 90,000-plus children that are out there – that have been put into care since 2008, if I were to ask you how many of those could you find right now?” Lankford asked. “That we know where they are; how many of those do you think you could find?
“Give me a percentage guess of the 90,000-plus that are out there,” Lankford said. “They were placed in a sponsor’s home either saying this is a parent, or a relative or a non-relative sponsor out there. Of the 90,000-plus, how many of them do you think you would know where they are – if I asked you to give me a phone number, an address you could tell me.”
“Senator, I couldn’t guess on that,” Greenberg said. “I can tell you that we have the information at the time of release,” Greenberg said. “If the child is receiving post-release services we’ll have continued information …”
“But you have no idea how many of them you could still contact today?” Lankford asked again.
“We do not, and again this is based upon our clear understanding of the law and what we are authorized to do under the law,” Greenberg said.
“Our conclusion is that the Department of Health and Human Services’ process for placing unaccompanied children suffers from serious, systemic defects,” Portman said in his prepared remarks. “The horrible trafficking crime that occurred in Marion, Ohio could likely have been prevented if HHS had adopted commonsense measures for screening sponsors and checking in on the well-being of at-risk children — protections that are standard in foster-care systems run by the states, including Ohio.”
Greenberg said in his prepared remarks that HHS is working to improve practices for placing unaccompanied alien children.
“ORR is continuously working to strengthen those policies and procedures and … has in the last year instituted a number of enhancements to pre-release screening of sponsors and post-release services available to both children and their sponsors,” Greenberg said.
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http://cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/hhs-gives-illegal-alien-children-human-traffickers-cant-provide-details 
