Memo starkly warned Mayorkas in 2021 about migrant kids, long before crisis that alarmed Congress
Internal warnings about gaps in resources to address unaccompanied migrant children emerged very early in the Biden administration, new documents show.
By John Solomon and Steven Richards
Published: December 9, 2024 11:00pm
Updated: December 10, 2024 8:12am
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Long before Congress became alarmed over as many as 320,000 unaccompanied minor children from the border crisis, the Department of Homeland Security prepared a briefing memo in summer 2021 starkly warning Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that federal authorities were ill-equipped to deal with a surge of young immigrants or reunite them with their parents, according to a copy of the memo reviewed by Just the News.
“[The] Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not have the necessary government authorities or resources for all that needs to be accomplished to reunify families within the scope of the Family Reunification Task Force,” Anna Hinken, an official in Homeland’s partnerships outreach office, wrote in the July 22, 2021 memo she prepared for Mayorkas as part of a planned call with a person whose name was redacted from the memo.
The memo, obtained by the nonpartisan watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust under the Freedom of Information Act, provides one of the earliest clues as to how the Biden administration failed to reunite children with their parents and eventually lost track of large numbers of them, a failure that has embarrassed the administration with Congress.
The memo warned that as the Biden-era migration surge began, DHS was paying for airfare, domestic travel and other needs to reunify parents with children already trafficked through the southern U.S. border, but the project suffered from a serious flaw: Immigrant families weren’t willing to join their children because the government couldn’t pay for additional family members to travel.
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/memo-starkly-warned-mayorkas-2021-about-migrant-kids-long-crisis
