According to a study by the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chaired by Rob Portman and Claire McCaskill, “Protecting Unaccompanied Alien Children from Trafficking and Other Abuses”, that evaluated the role of the office of refugee resettlement, the Department of Health and Human Services placed more than a dozen immigrant children in the custody of human traffickers after it failed to conduct background checks.

The study found that HHS had not followed basic practices of child welfare agencies, among them making home visits.

The study followed the discovery by law enforcement officials that at least six children were lured to the United States from Guatemala by a human trafficking ring with the promise of a better life, and then were made to work on egg farms in Marion, Ohio. The children, as young as 14, had been in federal custody before being entrusted to the traffickers.

Besides this instance, further investigation found evidence that 13 other children had been trafficked after officials handed them over to adults who were supposed to care for them during their immigration proceedings.

The report also said that of the approximately 90,000 children the agency had placed in between 2014 and 2016, it is not known how many fell prey to traffickers, including sex traffickers.

Beginning in 2013, thousands of unaccompanied children showed up at the Southern border to escape dire problems like gang violence and poverty in Central America, and faced a risk of abuse by traffickers and detention by law enforcement.  The Department of Health and Human Services began placing children in the custody of sponsors while their immigration cases were reviewed. Many children who did not have relatives in the United States were placed in a type of foster care system.

There had been cases where the background or claim by an adult to be a relative actually was not examined.

This study was completed in 2016.

So this problem of children being placed in the care of human and sex traffickers has been recognized, and more stringent steps should have been put in place to prevent this.

However, a recent report has found that the US Department of Health and Human Services cannot locate 1475 migrant children it placed with American sponsors.

The missing children arrived at the southwestern US border alone, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and, although the Trump administration officials have accused these children of contributing to criminal activity once they get here, in many cases the children being separated from their families are less than 2 years old.

The Trump administration has established a policy that separates migrant families who illegally cross the border.

Per the Trump directives children of families that are separated are assigned to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and then placed in government shelters, but Steven Wagner, an acting assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, told congress last month that they had lost track of 1,475 migrant children who had been placed with sponsors in the US.

From October to December HHS  reached out to 7,635 children and their sponsors, and  it was able to confirm that 6,075 children were still with their sponsors, 28 had run away, five had been removed from the country, and 52 had relocated to live with someone other than the original sponsor, leaving 1475 unaccounted for.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recently unveiled a “zero-tolerance” policy that would separate children from families saying,
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“if you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”

John Kelly dismissed potential concerns about children being separated from their parents by saying,

“The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.”

It is that “whatever” that is a little unsettling.

Donald Trump has been claiming his administration is just following a law for which the Democrats are responsible in spite of there being no such law, just a policy that has been adopted only by members of the Trump administration.

Attempting to lessen the seriousness of the lost children, Rick Santorum came to the defense of the Trump administration by saying that just because the federal government has no idea where these children are, they are not lost.

“We lose people all the time. What happens is these children come into detention. They haven’t had communication with these previously vetted sponsors. Does that mean they’re lost? No, it means there’s a process going on now to find out why these sponsors haven’t checked back in to give us their location.”

His claim that “There is a vetting process of who the children are assigned to” does little to distract from the statistics and cases of trafficking. Santorum, insisted, despite reports of some children having been released into the care of sex traffickers, that it was just a case of the responsible people who were vetted simply “haven’t checked in.”

“So this isn’t what we’ve lost these kids. No, they were placed in vetted homes and for some reason or another these parents are not communicating.”

There are now 1475 young children who may never see their parents again because of the Trump administration policy that ripped them away from their parents and then lost them.

That is 1475 children the administration has equated with potential criminals who will grow with the memory of what had been done to them by this country upon first arriving, and may very well grow up not having a very deep and abiding love for a country that would do that.

This policy has the potential of creating anti-social people who become the criminals they might not have otherwise become, not by choice but because of a mean spirited policy that creates rather than prevents the opposite of its misguided intent.

These children are not lost.

It’s just no one can find them.