The Trump administration again lost track of around 1,500 immigrant minors released from U.S. custody over a three-month period. It was the second time in a year that it couldn’t determine where these undocumented children were.
The information was released by a bipartisan group of senators working on legislation to make the administration responsible for these minors even after they are released, CNN informs.
“This bill will ensure that we keep track of unaccompanied minors in our country, which will both help protect them from trafficking and abuse as well as help ensure they appear for their immigration court proceedings,” said the subcommittee’s chairman, Senator Rob Portman.
However, the news outlet adds that the uncertainty about the children’s whereabouts could mean no one in the home picked up the phone when Health and Human Services called or they did not respond to a message. This could be so as some of the families, being undocumented, try to avoid the government, or in a worse case scenario, the children could have fallen prey to human traffickers or to someone intending to harm them.
According to the findings released by the Senate homeland committee’s investigation subcommittee, HHS made follow-up calls to over 11,000 immigrant children in the period between April 1 and June 30. However, it failed to determine where 1,488, or 13% of them were. Twenty-five of the children had run away from the adults they had been placed with.
Similar findings were released earlier by the committee which showed that out of 7,635 children, 1,475 were unaccounted for between October and December.
“As communicated to members of Congress multiple times, these children are not ‘lost’,” said HHS spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley. “Their sponsors – who are usually parents or family members and, in all cases, have been vetted for criminality and ability to provide for them – simply did not respond or could not be reached when this voluntary call was made.”
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