Staff Reports
Missing children are not just a bureaucratic statistic; they represent a serious crisis that the Biden administration seems to be ignoring. The Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has just waved a giant red flag, warning that ICE is utterly overwhelmed and incapable of keeping track of the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors released into the wilds of America. A happy-go-lucky approach to immigration has left these vulnerable kids exposed to trafficking, exploitation, and forced labor.
ICE’s supposed role in monitoring the whereabouts and well-being of these children has been revealed as a farce. According to the Inspector General, the agency can’t even ensure that these kids are safe, let alone recover them once they’ve vanished into the system. Senator Chuck Grassley from Iowa has jumped on this alarming revelation, calling out the lax vetting that places these migrant children in peril. It’s mind-boggling how the administration can ignore the risks while attempting to juggle immigration numbers.
ICE incapable of monitoring unaccompanied minors released into U.S., probe finds https://t.co/MSRzi3nZGa
— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) September 9, 2024
From 2019 to 2023, ICE handed over a staggering 448,000 unaccompanied minors to the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement—but don’t hold your breath for any meaningful oversight. In fact, they neglected to issue mandatory notices to appear in court for about 65% of these children. Grassley pointed out that approximately 366,000 of these transfers happened under the current administration’s watch. The math isn’t hard; that translates to a whole lot of missing kids and a hefty dose of irresponsibility from those in charge.
Compounding the problem, ICE has dropped the ball completely on issuing notices for immigration hearings. The OIG’s report found that over 291,000 kids who should have been placed in removal proceedings went unnoticed while ICE couldn’t even confirm the whereabouts of many of those who had already failed to show up for court. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare—a real-life game of ‘Where’s Waldo,’ except Waldo is a potentially exploited child.
And just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, additional audits reveal a chronic problem with federal agencies failing to schedule immigration court dates. Since January 2021, a staggering 200,000 cases have been dismissed due to missed paperwork deadlines. It’s no wonder that 32,000 unaccompanied minors didn’t bother to show up for their immigration hearings. The system is a chaotic mess, leaving these kids at risk while federal officers seem to be on a permanent coffee break, only occasionally waking up to notice that their responsibilities are being neglected.
Instead of taking decisive actions to remedy this alarming situation, the Biden administration continues to turn a blind eye while the number of missing children swells. Unless a miracle occurs from the top down, it seems that these missing minors will remain statistical collateral damage in a liberal immigration agenda.
