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Feds Fly Unaccompanied Minors to Alaska
HOUSTON, Texas--As unaccompanied minors continue to illegally cross the Texas-Mexico border, President Obama's Health and Human Services (HHS) has been quietly releasing them onto U.S. soil. A total of 30,340 unaccompanied minors have already been released from federal custody and placed into foster homes, according to HHS' Office of Refugee and Resettlement (ORR). While many migrants have been released in border states like Texas and California, others have been set free in Alaska.
A spokesman from HHS confirmed to Breitbart Texas that as of July 7, five unaccompanied minors were released in Alaska. "Between January 1 and July 7, 2014, a total of five minors were discharged from the Unaccompanied Alien Children program to sponsors in Alaska," the spokesman said.
The trip from McAllen, Texas--where the current border crisis is occurring--to Anchorage, Alaska is a nine and a half hour flight. This is almost double the time it would take to fly the migrants back to their home countries in Central America; a flight from McAllen to El Salvador takes just over five hours, according to Google Maps.
The federal government's reasons for transporting unaccompanied minors all the way to Alaska are unclear. Some of the minors have also been flown to Hawaii, according to Fox News' Todd Starnes.
Millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars have been spent flying illegal immigrants to locations around the nation. Breitbart Texas recently revealed that a Department of Homeland Security budget for Fiscal Year 2015 includes more than $87 million for the transportation of illegal immigrants, who are most often flown via charter plane from Southern Texas to shelters located in various U.S. cities.
Subsequent to a short stay in federal housing facilities, most of the minors are released from custody. They promise to show up at an immigration court hearing at a future date, but many never do. Foster families, or "sponsors," for children migrants are often located through nonprofit organizations at various locations in the U.S. Breitbart Texas has reported closely on the process of becoming a foster parent of a foreign youth--in some cases, sponsors can receive up to $7,400 per month for housing up to six illegal immigrants at a time. The payments are dispersed by the federal government.
"ORR cares for the children in shelters around the country until they can be released to a sponsor, typically a parent or relative, who can care for the child while their immigration case is processed," an HHS webpage says. "Ensuring that a potential sponsor can safely and appropriately care for the child is a top priority. A background check is conducted on all potential sponsors, and steps are taken to verify a potential sponsor’s identity and relationship to the child. In some cases where concerns are raised, a home study is done. Before children are released to a sponsor, they receive vaccinations and medical screenings. We do not release any children who have a contagious condition."
Mr.H,
If they have no parents alive to go back home to. So you're asking for them to live on the street of some central American hell hole?
“It is intolerable that human trafficking — really modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard, but it does,” Portman said at a subcommittee hearing on Thursday. “But what makes the Marion case even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was actually responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of the abusers,” Portman said. The indictment followed the discovery of victims, including at least six minors from Guatemala, at an egg farm in Marion, Ohio, where the children were living in squalid conditions and working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for about $2 a day.
The subcommittee’s 51-page report states that Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement -- the entity responsible for relocating the children after they are released from government detention centers and while they wait for immigration proceedings -- “failed to run background checks on the adults in the sponsors’ households as well as secondary caregivers, failed to visit any of the sponsors’ homes; and failed to realize that a group of sponsors has accumulated multiple unrelated children.” The two witnesses at the hearing -- Mark Greenberg, acting assistant secretary for HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, and Robert Carey, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) – did not answer many of the questions posed by lawmakers on the committee and gave answers to some questions that disturbed many on both sides of the aisle.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) asked the witnesses how many of the 90,000 children that have been distributed to parents, other relatives or “family friends” could they locate today. “Of the 90,000-plus children that are out there – that have been put into care since 2008, if I were to ask you how many of those could you find right now?” Lankford asked. “That we know where they are; how many of those do you think you could find? “Give me a percentage guess of the 90,000-plus that are out there,” Lankford said. “They were placed in a sponsor’s home either saying this is a parent, or a relative or a non-relative sponsor out there. Of the 90,000-plus, how many of them do you think you would know where they are – if I asked you to give me a phone number, an address you could tell me.”
“Senator, I couldn’t guess on that,” Greenberg said. “I can tell you that we have the information at the time of release,” Greenberg said. “If the child is receiving post-release services we’ll have continued information …” “But you have no idea how many of them you could still contact today?” Lankford asked again. “We do not, and again this is based upon our clear understanding of the law and what we are authorized to do under the law,” Greenberg said. “Our conclusion is that the Department of Health and Human Services’ process for placing unaccompanied children suffers from serious, systemic defects,” Portman said in his prepared remarks. “The horrible trafficking crime that occurred in Marion, Ohio could likely have been prevented if HHS had adopted commonsense measures for screening sponsors and checking in on the well-being of at-risk children — protections that are standard in foster-care systems run by the states, including Ohio.”
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Europol said thousands of vulnerable minors had vanished after registering with state authorities. It warned of children and young people being forced into sexual exploitation and slavery by criminal gangs. Save the Children says some 26,000 child migrants arrived in Europe last year without any family. It is the first time Europol has given a Europe-wide estimate of how many might be missing.
About 26,000 child migrants arrived in Europe last year unaccompanied
Targeting refugees
"It's not unreasonable to say that we're looking at 10,000-plus children," Europol's chief of staff told the Observer newspaper. "Not all of them will be criminally exploited; some might have been passed on to family members. We just don't know where they are, what they're doing or whom they are with." Officials in Italy warned in May 2015 that almost 5,000 children had disappeared from asylum reception centres since the previous summer.
Some migrant boys say they have no choice but to sell sex in order to survive
In October, the authorities in Trelleborg in southern Sweden said about 1,000 unaccompanied refugee children and young adults who arrived in the town in the previous month had since gone missing. Confirming the overall estimate of missing minors, a Europol spokesman said a large proportion may have also disappeared after landing in Greece. The country is the first entry point for most of the 1 million migrants who arrived in Europe by boat in 2015, and authorities have been criticised for failing to register and check the arrivals.
Many Nigerian girls are told they must pay traffickers thousands of euros or their families will be harmed
Criminal gangs known to be involved in human trafficking in Europe are now targeting refugees, Europol said. There are fears unaccompanied children and young people may be dragged into sex work, slavery and other illegal activity. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) spokesman Leonard Doyle told the BBC the figure of 10,000 missing children was "shocking but not surprising". He said it was "to be expected" that many of these would be caught up in exploitation. "Let's hope now the EU puts the resources into finding these children, helping them and reuniting these children with their families."
Exploited and abandoned
