A House committee probing the ongoing border crisis has subpoenaed Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra for information about tens of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who have disappeared inside the US.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) compelled Becerra, in a Thursday cover letter exclusively obtained by The Post that accompanied the subpoena, to hand over documents related to the “vetting, screening, and monitoring” of migrant sponsors by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
Without proper vetting, migrant kids are at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor and other forms of exploitation, according to a Homeland Security inspector general’s report released last month.
HHS officials have stalled for more than a month and a half after the Homeland Security panel initially requested the records on Aug. 12.
Another 32,000 children whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities released into the US failed to show up at courts even when given a date to appear, the 14-page report also shows.
The rest of the documents reproduced sections of the ORR’s manual on procedures for unaccompanied migrant children, which were not relevant to the committee’s requests.
On Wednesday, the department finally turned over 717 pages of documents — but 400 of them “contain nothing more than publicly available information,” Green told Becerra.
In 2022, Becerra pressured staff to release migrant children to sponsors as quickly as possible, likening the ideal turnover rate to an “assembly line,” the Times reported.
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