Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is grilling Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over what he calls “catastrophic failures” by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to protect hundreds of thousands of migrant children, released into the United States, from labor trafficking.
“Unaccompanied migrant children are some of the most vulnerable individuals in America,” Hawley writes in a letter to Mayorkas. “They are routinely trafficked for sex, forced into illegal labor, burned with chemicals, and subjected to countless other atrocities by cartels.”
Last week, as Breitbart News reported, the DHS Inspector General (IG) revealed that Biden and Harris’s agencies have released more than 365,000 Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) into the U.S. interior from Fiscal Year 2021 through Fiscal Year 2023.
Hundreds of thousands of those UACs, the IG report suggests, are at risk of “trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor” because DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have failed to keep in touch with them once they are placed with adult sponsors — the majority of whom are not their biological parents — in the United States.
“Your policies are wholly exacerbating … [the] trafficking risk to migrant children,” Hawley writes to Mayorkas. “… not only did your agency lose track of these children, it didn’t even bother to tell anyone. That is unconscionable.”
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Senator Josh Hawley / YouTube
Hawley said he wants answers from Mayorkas immediately, requesting information on where in the United States these at-risk UACs are living, why DHS failed to give court notices to hundreds of thousands of UACs, what the agency is doing to locate such UACs, and what led to the failure to begin with.
In February, HHS IG Christi Grimm published a report revealing that in 22 percent of cases, the agency did not conduct proper and safe follow-up calls to check in with UACs released to adult sponsors in the United States.
In Fiscal Year 2023 the Department of Labor found an 88 percent increase in child labor trafficking compared to Fiscal Year 2019. Last year, nearly 6,000 children, many UACs, were discovered illegally working brutal and often life-threatening jobs.
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Matt Perdie / Breitbart News
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.