Home Committee on Homeland Safety Chair Mark Inexperienced (R-Tenn.) subpoenaed Well being and Human Providers Secretary Xavier Becerra late final week for paperwork on the whereabouts of 1000’s of migrant kids in the USA.
In a letter informing Becerra of the subpoena, Inexperienced wrote he beforehand requested paperwork in August on the “vetting, screening and monitoring” of unaccompanied kids’s sponsors by the Workplace of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) inside HHS.
Since then, Inexperienced wrote, ORR has given the Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) “unsatisfactory responses” to their inquiry.
Final week, HHS lastly responded to DHS’s August request for documentation and despatched the company 717 pages of paperwork, 400 of which contained “nothing greater than publicly out there info,” in accordance with Inexperienced’s letter.
“HHS’ protracted response and wholly inadequate manufacturing represent a clearly deliberate effort to unnecessarily expend Committee employees time, waste restricted authorities sources, and frustrate official congressional oversight,” the letter provides.
The subpoena offers HHS till 12:00 p.m. on Oct. 3 to ship DHS the requested paperwork on unaccompanied minors and their sponsors.
Final yr, Becerra mentioned HHS didn’t know the standing of greater than 85,000 unaccompanied minors getting into the nation who had been launched from the company’s care however mentioned that 85 p.c of them had been positioned with relations in the USA.
A New York Instances evaluation of HHS knowledge helps Becerra’s numbers, displaying that between 2021 and 2023, the company was unable to contact 85,000 unaccompanied minors beneath its care by way of phone.
A DHS report revealed in August claims that the variety of unaccounted for, unaccompanied kids is much decrease than what Becerra mentioned in 2023.
The report states that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) transferred greater than 448,000 unaccompanied kids from the custody of DHS to HHS between 2019 and 2023.
However ICE has been unable to account for the situation of 32,000 unaccompanied minors who didn’t present as much as scheduled immigration court docket appearances throughout these years, the report reads.
“The out there statistics and knowledge concerning UACS are extraordinarily disconcerting and characterize a rising humanitarian disaster,” Inexperienced wrote.
The Division of Well being and Human Providers has but to answer a request for remark from The Hill.
