Senators pressed Health and Human Services official Jonathan White on Thursday about the agency’s ability to monitor unaccompanied immigrant children after they are released from government custody into the care of a sponsor.
While senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on investigations argued that HHS had the the authority and the responsibility to keep track of the children after being released from federal care, White insisted that it was outside of the agency’s purview and that HHS did not have sufficient funding to do follow-through with it.
White, who is the commander of the U.S.Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and federal health coordinating official for the 2018 UAC Reunification Effort, told the lawmakers that there are “no lost children.” Furthermore, he stressed that it was not mandatory for sponsors or children to take calls from the Office of Refugee Resettlement 30 days after the children have left federal care with their sponsors. White also claimed that the “custodial relationship” ends with the children once they leave the care of ORR.
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“There are no lost children. There are some families that don’t take our call,” White said. “There’s a big difference.”
“Many immigrant families after the children leave ORR care don’t want anything more to do with us and the systems they have been through,” White added.
But Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, pushed back on White’s comments and said it was inaccurate to say there were no lost children.
“Your blanket statement that there are no lost children is simply inaccurate,” Portman said. “There are lost children. Clearly.”
Portman noted that HHS told Congress in April that after making thousands of calls to sponsors the agency was unable to locate nearly 1, 500 children who were turned over to sponsors during a three-month window in 2017.
“That’s the whole point here,” Portman said. “No one is responsible.”
“You just made the good point that they don’t take the call. Why don’t they have to take the call? What does the sponsor agreement mean if they don’t take the call, at least?” Portman added. “And who enforces that sponsor agreement? And your answer to me is going to be nobody.”
Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., also claimed that it was impossible to determined if someone was lost if the sponsor could not be contacted.
“Let’s be really clear here: if a sponsor isn’t answering a phone call, you don’t know where that child is,” Hassan said. “So you can’t tell us there’s nobody lost if you haven’t had a conversation about whether the sponsor still knows where the child is.”
Portman and Thomas Carper, D-Del., released a report on Wednesday that outlined areas of neglect from the agency regarding oversight of unaccompanied minors. It cited statistics revealed April that showed that after making 7,635 calls to sponsors, HHS was unable to locate 1,475 children who were turned over to sponsors between October to December 2017.
Portman and Carper’s report claimed that the calls revealed a total of 28 children had run away from their sponsors, 52 were living with someone who was not their sponsor, and five were no longer in the U.S. Furthermore, the report blamed the agency for not taking action to determine where the children had gone.
In response, HHS, the Justice Department, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection issued a statement accusing Congress of not taking action.
“The report demonstrates fundamental misunderstandings of law and policy related to the safety and care of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC),” the joint statement said. “The subcommittee does not focus on the real challenges with preventing children from being smuggled and trafficked in the first place, nor does the Subcommittee capture the extensive work done to protect UACs once they arrive here.”
“The Subcommittee initiated this review in 2014 following a surge that occurred under the Obama administration,” the agencies added. “Despite Congress failing to enact any meaningful legislation to address pull factors and close loopholes in current law, the Subcommittee now erroneously indicates that those problems have been exacerbated by the Trump Administration. In fact, the Trump Administration has ensured enforcement of our immigration laws.”
The Trump administration has come under scrutiny this summer due to its zero tolerance policy to prosecute all illegal immigrants, which resulted in thousands of children being separated from their accompanying adults.
Nearly 2,000 children have been reunited with their families or released from government custody, but more than 500 were still separated from their families as of Aug . 9, according to the Washington Post.
