Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, revealed last month that the Biden administration is unaware of the current location of roughly 80% of undocumented migrants that received a notice to appear (NTA) in court in 2021.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security could not reportedly locate 40,348 of the 50,683 migrants that were issued NTAs between March 21,2021 and December 5, 2021. An additional 50,000 did not report to their deportation proceedings over the same time period.
Similarly, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently stated that by the end of 2021, 45,000 of the 107,000 unaccompanied minors who entered the U.S. could not be located by the Federal Government.
Yet this number does not reveal the whole truth.
As nearly 1.6 million of the more than 2 million unauthorized migrant cases are currently backlogged in the courts, some elected U.S. officials believe the true figures of undocumented migrants that have gone off the legal radar is surely much higher.
Many politicians like Gov. DeSantis have viewed the border crisis as a security issue, focusing mostly on the rule of law.
“We have a responsibility to stand up for the rule of law, we have a responsibility to the Constitution, and we have a responsibility to stand up against an administration that has decided they don’t want to have a secure border,” DeSantis recently said. “The laws of our country require us to enforce the law and that is what needs to be done.”
Some of those trafficked become victims of crimes.
According to the Child Welfare League of America, families often pay traffickers thousands of dollars to smuggle their children to the United States in search for a better life, but “children may then find their way into forced labor or sex trafficking once they arrive.”
In August of last year, the U.S. Justice Department’s Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit warned some migrant children may have been released to labor traffickers and put to work in poultry plants and agricultural processing facilities, Bloomberg Law reported.
“Some of these situations appear to involve dozens of unaccompanied minors all being released to the same sponsor and then exploited for labor in poultry processing or similar industries without access to education,” wrote DOJ’s Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit Director Hilary Axam.
Former border control agents have suggested policies similar to Biden’s incentivize criminals to bring children into the country for much more nefarious purposes, too.
Authored by Johannes Schmidt via ADN America
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