Health and Human Services delivered over at least six migrant children from Guatemala into the hands of human traffickers without visiting the homes where they would live or verifying any family connection to them, a Senate committee has found.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, a leading crusader fighting to crack down on the trafficking of children in the United States, said the Ohio case is just one of many examples of HHS’s systemic lapses in the way it handles the placement of migrant children out of U.S. detention centers for illegal immigrants.
The findings derived from a case in Marion, Ohio in which six defendants allegedly lured child victims to the United States with the promise of schooling and a better life and instead enslaved them on an egg farm and forced them to work 12 hours a day in squalid conditions with no pay.
A report by the committee found other disturbing examples of HHS delivering minors into the hands of sex traffickers or sexual predators.
“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Portman said at the beginning of a Senate hearing Thursday. “But what makes the Marion case even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.”
“How can this happen in America?” Portman asked.
Under federal law, it is HHS’s responsibility to care for unaccompanied children detained at the border and to try to find and vet a relative or trusted family friend to care for the child until their immigration court date, or else house them in shelters.
Over the past two years, during a surge of migrant children coming to the U.S., HHS has placed 90,000 children, mostly from Central America, with adult sponsors in the United States. In only 4 percent of those cases, the report found, did HHS conduct home visits of the prospective sponsors.
The Senate Government Affairs and Homeland Security Committee’s permanent subcommittee on investigations conducted a six-month investigation of HHS’s process for placing the unaccompanied children with sponsors in the U.S., and uncovered “serious, systemic defects,” Portman said.
Health and Human Services didn’t insist on real verification of any relationship between the sponsor and the child or a home visit of the place where the children would live. One Marion file case, the panel found, contains no explanation of the child’s relationship with the sponsor or his family.
“We learned this kind of lax relationship verification is standard practice” with these placements, he said. “A lost opportunity to protect these and other kids.”
The agency also missed “obvious” indications that the sponsors in the Marion cases were accumulating multiple unrelated children, a sign that should have triggered greater scrutiny for risk of trafficking, he said.
The report found an interconnected web of sponsors of multiple children sharing the same address but “HHS failed to connect any of the dots.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., initiated the investigation with Portman, and said she is shocked by their findings.
She said the children were receiving regular meals and were even enjoying trips to museums while in HHS shelters, but then were handed over to human traffickers to endure unimaginable abuses.
“What is wrong with keeping these children in detention longer so we are not going to place them with people” who would force them into forced labor and sexual acts, she asked. “The priorities here are all out of whack.”
“We can do better in the United States of America because no one stood up and accepted responsibility, that is the reality we are dealing with,” she continued. “We’ve got to fix this and we’ve got to fix this now.”
Mark Greenberg, acting assistant secretary for HHS administration for children and families, described the Marion incident as “deeply dismaying” but could not discuss the specific details of the case because of the “ongoing criminal investigation but will continue to assist the subcommittee in its investigation.”
The number of undocumented migrant children showing up on the U.S. border has grown 10-fold in just a three-year period, he said.
Greenberg said federal laws don’t allow HHS home visits when unaccompanied minors don’t show up for their immigration proceedings, and asked Congress for legislation clarifying the law.
But McCaskill dismissed that claim and scolded Greenberg, a Harvard-educated lawyer, for claiming that the law prevents the agency from conducting home visits and further verification aimed at protecting the children.
Portman pressed Greenberg on whether he thought having home visits would have prevented the Marion case.
“I simply can’t speculate on whether a particular policy would have resulted in a different result,” he said. He added that the agency was examining circumstances under which his agency could expand the use of home studies, that he “expressly” raised the issue with his staff.
The staff then dismissed the idea of home visits, Portman countered.
“I can’t believe you can’t say that this would have helped prevent the Marion case,” Portman said. “It defies commonsense.”
