Xavier Becerra went to the televisionclaimingthat the Biden administration having lost track of children is mere “MAGA talking points.”

On air, he flippantly air quoted “lost kids,” as if it didn’t even happen. But the reality is, his agency was found to be looking the other way while kids were placed in unsafe conditions — likely with criminals — just to win political points.

Minimizing “lost children” to air quotes is awful. Especially considering that these were real kids. And there were a lot of them.

An Inspector Generalreportindicated that from 2019-2023, 448,000 kids were processed through the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services, which Becerra oversaw during his tenure as the HHS secretary under President Joe Biden. Of those children, most were released to sponsors.

But from that point, major problems emerged. More than 233,000 of those children were never given a court date. More than 43,000 never showed up to court dates. More than 31,000 of the children’s release forms had no contact addresses on them.

The subtitle of the report says it all: “ICE Cannot Effectively Monitor the Location and Status of All Unaccompanied Children After Federal Custody.” Why? One commonly stated reason was the children’s location was not received “from HHS.” Becerra’s HHS, that is.

What was happening to these children? At least 570 of those children’s placements were tied to human, drug, and weapons trafficking. But that figure is likely much larger because, as the inspector general noted, ICE “did not track the number of [children] reported as victims of trafficking or forced labor” and that “this is a continuous concern.”

Other findings were also dismal. One frequent sponsor location contained “bars on the inside of the window,” was “very dangerous, was run by gangs, and high crime rates and daily shootings.” Another frequent location had no doors. Another was a dilapidated motel. These children were being placed into awful situations.

This appears to be the result of the agencies’ intended approach. One officer described the strategy for monitoring the well-being of children as “no news is good news.”

In other words, as immigrants poured into our country, the less heartbreaking stories the public knew about, the better. The narrative was that there was no problem to see here. DHS and HHS made little effort to disprove that narrative.

Source: VidNews » Feed