{"id":3107,"date":"2023-05-28T21:18:39","date_gmt":"2023-05-28T21:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=3107"},"modified":"2023-05-28T22:02:31","modified_gmt":"2023-05-28T22:02:31","slug":"bidens-border-crisis-85000-migrant-children-go-missing-under-biden-administration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=3107","title":{"rendered":"Biden\u2019s Border Crisis: 85,000 Migrant Children Go Missing Under Biden Administration"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.wisconsinrightnow.com\/missing-migrant-children-biden\/<\/a><\/p>\n

\"missing<\/p>\n

Why aren\u2019t more people concerned about the missing migrant children under the Biden administration?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

By Victor Huyke
\nConquistador News editor, special to Wisconsin Right Now<\/em><\/p>\n

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation\u2019s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) in the United States, an estimated 460,000 children are reported missing yearly.<\/p>\n

However, this is only a tiny snapshot of the problem. In many countries, statistics on missing children are not even available, and, unfortunately, even available statistics may not be accurate due to: under-reporting, under-recognition, incorrect data entry on case information, and deletion of records once a case is closed. Making it hard to create profiles to identify likely suspects in missing children cases.<\/p>\n

But what if the suspect is the US Government? Who do you turn to for help?<\/p>\n

More than 85,000 children have been reported missing at the US border for more than two years. Many of these children were held in Immigration Detention Centers. Yet somehow, these children made their way out of these detention centers and into third-shift jobs in 20 different US States, including Wisconsin.<\/p>\n

Children as young as 12 years old were found working in dangerous jobs.<\/p>\n

The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is a program of the Administration for Children and Families, an office within the United States Department of Health and Human Services, created with the passing of the United States Refugee Act of 1980.<\/p>\n

ORR offers support for refugees seeking haven in the United States, including victims of human trafficking, those seeking asylum from persecution, survivors of torture and war, and unaccompanied children.<\/p>\n

ORR was tasked with finding sponsors for immigrant children entering the US. \u201cI thought I was going to help place children in loving homes. Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with being recruited in [their] home country, smuggled to the US border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to a Sponsors,\u201d said Tara Lee Rodas, a Federal Employee for Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement. \u201cSome sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations. Some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income \u2013 this is why we are witnessing an explosion of labor trafficking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rodas was invited to testify at \u201cThe Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children,\u201d held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement on April 26, 2023. Rodas worked as a Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement at the California Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake Site. Her job was to unite the unaccompanied children with their \u201csponsors\u201d on the US side of the border.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve witnessed firsthand the horrors of child trafficking and exploitation. My life will never be the same. But I have hope. I\u2019m counting on you. It\u2019s my hope you\u2019ll take action to end this crisis and safeguard the lives of these vulnerable children,\u201d said Rodas.<\/p>\n

Rodas said she saw children who spoke only Mayan united with sponsors who spoke only Spanish. She saw single apartment buildings that had taken in up to 50 children. She saw single sponsors collecting children from different sites using several addresses.
\n\u201cWhether intentional or not, it can be argued that the US Government has become the middleman in a large scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

A recent New York Times investigation reported that many of these children when they get to the US, are forced by their so-called \u201csponsors\u201d into dangerous jobs with fake identifications.<\/p>\n

The article titled \u201cAlone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the US.\u201d stated that \u201cArriving in record numbers, they\u2019re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws \u2014 including in factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hannah Dreier of the Times traveled to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia and spoke to more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states.<\/p>\n

Dreier wrote in the article, \u201cThese workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country. \u201cThis shadow workforce extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi, and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Wisconsin, a Wisconsin-based cleaning service, Packers Sanitation Services (PSSI), was fined $1.5 million after hiring minors in 13 meatpacking plants. According to Steve Karnowski from the Associated Press, \u201cThe US Department of Labor says one of the county\u2019s largest cleaning services for food processing companies \u2014 based in southwestern Wisconsin \u2014 employed more than 100 children in dangerous jobs at 13 meatpacking plants in eight states.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this is not the first time PSSI has been fined or accused of violating child labor laws.<\/p>\n

Back in November of 2022, an article written by Karl Ebert from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, states \u201cAccording to a civil complaint filed by the US Labor Department in the US District Court of Nebraska, Packers Sanitation Services Inc. employed more than 30 children, ages 13 to 17, as cleaners in JBS USA meatpacking plants in Grand Island, Nebraska, and Worthington, Minnesota, and at Turkey Valley Farms in Marshall, Minnesota. Federal labor law prohibits the use of workers under age 18 on killing floors or on mechanized processing equipment because the work is a federally-designated \u201chazardous occupation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement, PSSI said it has an \u201cabsolute company-wide prohibition against the employment of anyone under the age of 18 and zero tolerance for any violation of that policy \u2014 period.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company believes underage workers may have misrepresented their ages for employment.<\/p>\n

PSSI paid $1.5 million in civil money penalties.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was shocked to learn that no effort is made to get these children back to their homes, and very little effort is made vetting the so-called sponsors of these children and very little interest in following up on their welfare once they are abandoned to these so-called sponsors,\u201d said Subcommittee Chairman, Congressman Tom McClintock during his opening statement of the Biden Border Crisis subcommittee hearing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe now know that the administration has simply lost track of over 85,000 of these children. In September 2022, Axios reported that \u201croughly one-in-three follow-up calls made to released migrant kids or their sponsors between January and May went unanswered,\u201d said Congressman McClintock.<\/p>\n

US Senator Josh Hawley sent a letter to Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray, demanding a full-scale investigation to locate the 85,000 migrant children that have gone missing under the Biden administration while also bringing any child labor criminals holding them in modern-day slavery to justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cAccording to statistics kept by Customs and Border Protection, some 345,000 children have come across the border unaccompanied since early 2021. We now know tens of thousands of these children have been caught up in massive child smuggling and child labor operations,\u201d wrote Senator Hawley. \u201cI am sure you have seen recent reports in the New York Times that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has lost touch with as many as 85,000 migrant children. Thousands of these children are now the prey of child labor criminals.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.wisconsinrightnow.com\/missing-migrant-children-biden\/ Why aren\u2019t more people concerned about the missing migrant…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":3109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wi-right-now"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3107"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3110,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107\/revisions\/3110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}