An HHS official released a statement explaining why the media reporting about 1500 children that are said be to be lost are ‘false and misleading’:
CNN – A top official at the US Department of Health and Human Services on Monday called reports that the agency has lost nearly 1,500 immigrant children false and misleading.
The children are not lost, HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan said in a statement. Their sponsors simply have not responded to follow-up calls from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the HHS department that oversees the care of unaccompanied alien or minor children.
The agency was under no obligation to make the 30-day follow-up calls to ensure that the children and their sponsors needed no additional services, he said. Now, this voluntary action is being used to confuse and spread misinformation, he said.
“This is a classic example of the adage ‘No good deed goes unpunished,'” he said, offering a possible explanation.
“While there are many possible reasons for this, in many cases sponsors cannot be reached because they themselves are illegal aliens and do not want to be reached by federal authorities,” he continued.
“This is the core of this issue: In many cases, HHS has been put in the position of placing illegal aliens with the individuals who helped arrange for them to enter the country illegally. This makes the immediate crisis worse and creates a perverse incentive for further violation of federal immigration law.”
It sounds like the system is screwed up, but what is HHS supposed to do with these UACs? As another HHS official put it:
“It was never intended to be a foster care system with more than 10,000 children in custody at an immediate cost to the federal taxpayer of over one billion dollars per year.”
He also points out that once children are put in the hands of sponsors, ORR is no longer legally responsible for them.
So this idea that they’ve been lost is very much false and misleading. The truth is they don’t know what happened to these children because their sponsors aren’t communicating. One can only hope they weren’t put in the hands of nefarious people wanting to do harm to these children.
But until we stop allowing children to be dumped on us at the border, this problem is sure to continue.