Senate Probe Faults Gov’t for Migrant Child Abuse

The report centers on a case from 2014 in which the Department of Health and Human Services released at least six unaccompanied children into the hands of human traffickers in Marion, Ohio.

That could have been prevented had HHS adopted commonsense measures for screening sponsors and checking on the well-being of at-risk children, Portman said.

Many adult sponsors didn’t undergo thorough background checks.

“HHS places children with individuals about whom it knows relatively little and without verifying the limited information provided by sponsors about their alleged relationship with the child”, the report said. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee, said the HHS placement program has “serious, systemic defects”. The report echoed the findings of an Associated Press investigation.

“Somebody’s got to step up as a result of this hearing and take full responsibility”, she said.

The AP’s report also says that it is hard to determine the total number of children exposed to unsafe conditions, because numerous migrants designated for follow-up could not be located when caseworkers tried to contact them.

“We are mindful of our responsibilities to these children and are continually looking for ways to strengthen our safeguards”, it said.

Mark Greenberg, acting assistant secretary for HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, testified at the hearing that the OH case is a “deeply dismaying event” but said he is not able to discuss details due to an ongoing criminal investigation.

Greenberg said that’s “often” the case, but he declined to provide any specific figures or accept McCain’s assessment that the human smugglers also are linked to drug cartels.

Lawmakers argue that the government has weakened its child protection policies in recent years as it dealt with the influx of migrant youths.

He said that unaccompanied children from Hoduras, Guatemala and El Salvador annually detained by the USA had risen from under 4,000 before the DACA declaration in 2011 to more than 50,000 by 2014.

Those were among the responses federal officials offered during a tense Senate hearing Thursday about how nearly a dozen migrant children and young adults ended up in the hands of labor traffickers in Marion, Ohio, and in other troubling situations.

HHS officials did not immediately respond to an email asking about Portman’s allegations. Claire McCaskill (D) of Missouri said the Senate probe demonstrated the seriousness of America’s no-tolerance policy for human trafficking. In the Marion case, for example, investigators said the traffickers who sponsored the children held the deeds on some of the homes of the children’s families and would not let the families repay their debts until after it acquired custody of the children.

HHS says it recently signed a contract to open new shelters, and is strengthening its protection procedures as the number of young migrants is once again rising.

HHS bars releasing children to anyone convicted of child abuse or neglect or violent felonies such as homicide and rape.

He insisted that if there was a fault, it lay with Congress, who needed to rewrite the laws if it wanted his social workers to do more to keep children safe.

You are exclusively responsible for your comments and by using TribLive.com you agree to our Terms of Service. But given the slap-dash efforts to vet sponsors to make sure they are who they say they are, it’s possible that thousands of kids are being sold into virtual slavery. We reserve the right to edit a comment that is quoted or excerpted in an article. A few things we won’t tolerate: personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence, proselytizing and SHOUTING. They are either approved or deleted. In this case, we may fix spelling and punctuation. Instead, corrections will be made in a blog post or in an article.