Remember 2019? The Trump administration's border policies were causing the Left to lose their minds, and they were fixated on "kids in cages," which was a slur on how the administration housed unaccompanied minors. Rising Democrat star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even went down to the border, all dressed in white, and staged a dramatic show, calling them concentration camps.
In 2020, then-Senator Kamala Harris tweeted about the "outrageous" separation of 545 unaccompanied minors, attaching a link to an NBC article directly blaming the Trump administration. Fast forward to 2024, and under Border Czar Kamala Harris, ICE has now reported that over 290,000 undocumented minors are not only separated from their parent or guardian, but no one in the Biden-Harris administration knows where they are. Not a peep from NBC News, and the few headlines from other news organizations use the generic designation of "The Department of Homeland Security" instead of attaching this gross incompetence to the Biden-Harris administration.
The Department of Homeland Security's internal watchdog says it has uncovered an "urgent issue" with how immigration officials handle cases involving unaccompanied migrant children, warning in a new report that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has been unable to keep track of all unaccompanied minors released from government custody.
The interim report, sent to Congress on Tuesday and obtained by ABC News, said that -- in the past five years -- more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear for their immigration court hearings, and ICE was "not able to account" for all of their locations.
The Office of Inspector General warned in the report,
"Without an ability to monitor the location and status of [unaccompanied migrant children], ICE has no assurance [they] are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor," Inspector General Joseph Cuffari wrote in his interim report.
He urged ICE to "take immediate action to ensure the safety of [unaccompanied children] residing in the United States."
To be fair, this crisis has spanned over both the Trump and the Biden-Harris administrations. However, it has had a massive increase over the last three years. According to conservative commentator Steve Guest, it's a 54,945.9 percent increase. Kamala Harris owns this, and she needs to answer for it.
According to the interim report, from 2019 to 2023 -- a period spanning both the Trump and Biden administrations -- immigration officials transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied migrant children from ICE custody to HHS.
After interviewing more than 100 officials and visiting ten ICE field offices, the inspector general found that immigration officials "cannot always monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children who are released ... and [then] did not appear as scheduled in immigration court."
When unaccompanied migrant children do not show up to court, federal judges will often issue several continuances -- to postpone the hearings for months -- until they are left with no choice but to issue deportation orders.
In a statement Tuesday afternoon, ICE said it "is committed to the protection and well-being of children and works closely with [HHS] and other federal partners to fulfill its obligations under law."