Here's How the Government Managed to Lose Track of 1,500 Migrant Children

[kcr]

Last edited Mon May 28, 2018, 04:38 PM - Edit history (1)

I found this article while researching for another thread I was participating in and thought I'd give it its own thread. Keep sharing that 1,500 number in the context of Trump. It's so important.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/05/heres-how-the-government-managed-to-lose-track-of-1500-migrant-children/

At a Senate hearing last month, Steven Wagner told legislators that the refugee resettlement office he oversees had lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children. In Wagner’s words, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) was “unable to determine with certainty the whereabouts” of 1,475 children between October and December. The admission raised an obvious question: How do you lose 1,500 kids?

The answer to that question is even more important now that the Trump administration is seeking to criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the US-Mexico border, including parents. The policy is likely to separate thousands of families who arrive at the border by placing parents into the criminal justice system. Without their parents, children will be placed into the custody of ORR.

snip

What does it mean when ORR loses track of a child?

The short answer to that is that we don’t know. Once a child is released to a parent or a sponsor—and very often a sponsor is somebody who is not in any way related to the child—ORR does very little to no follow-up. ORR’s position is that they no longer have any responsibility for that child. In most cases, they will do a follow-up phone call to check in. If there is no answer or if there is a problem that is uncovered by that phone call, I think they said [at the hearing] they may call child protective services. But other than that they don’t do anything. As a result, they have numerous cases where they have identified that that child is either no longer in that house or not reachable, but they have done nothing to follow up.

Children may have moved—they may have gone to live with another family member—and things may be OK. Or there have been cases where these children end up in the hands of traffickers. So it is possible that some of those [children] could be in very dangerous and vulnerable situations.

Now that we have this new population of children who have been separated from their parents, it’s even more disturbing. [White House Chief of Staff John] Kelly made a comment that it was no big deal because the kids go to “foster care or whatever.” But the “whatever” is really a problem. If you’re separating a child from their parent and then you’re just losing them, that is extremely problematic. If you’re a parent who has been separated from your child at the border, you may not be able to find them again.

[kcr]

1. Because of the misinformation being spread

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/27/the-u-s-lost-track-of-1500-immigrant-children-last-year-heres-why-people-are-outraged-now/?utm_term=.0d5f125d27f4

St. John noted her group also was seeing increasingly younger children being taken into custody by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, as opposed to the migrant teenagers who had previously crossed the border themselves.

“Just last week we saw a 53-week-old infant in court without a parent,” St. John told Hayes. “What we’re seeing now is that, because the government is separating the children from the parents, the government is actually rendering these children as unaccompanied minors and bringing them to the shelters.”

On the same program, Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrants’ rights project, told Hayes that the number of separations his group has seen was “unprecedented.”