Higgins Leads Roundtable on Addressing Unaccompanied Alien Children Crisis
WASHINGTON—Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement Chairman Clay Higgins (R-La.) delivered opening remarks at today’s roundtable on “Catch and Release, Lose and Forget: Addressing the Crisis of Unaccompanied Alien Children—Part II.” In his statement, Subcommittee Chairman Higgins underscored how the Biden Administration’s permissive immigration policies created a humanitarian crisis that left hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to exploitation, many of whom remain missing today. He also emphasized that Congress is ready to boost the Trump Administration’s efforts to recover migrant children and end the crisis.
Below are Subcommittee Chairman Higgins’s opening remarks as prepared for delivery:
Today, the Subcommittee convenes to continue its oversight of an underreported – but critically important – issue facing our nation’s immigration enforcement agencies.
I speak of the crisis of unaccompanied alien children, or UACs, who became lost in our nation’s immigration system due to the liberal, open-border immigration policies of the previous administration.
The Biden Administration’s immigration policies created a humanitarian crisis that left around 300,000 UACs without proper legal oversight and vulnerable to exploitation.
Our southern border became an enormous national security liability during the Biden years, becoming a highway for organized crime – including widespread child trafficking – into the United States.
Further, the Biden Administration prevented the effective processing and monitoring of UACs – monitoring that was meant to prevent these children from falling into further abuse.
Last July, the Subcommittee held a hearing addressing the UAC issue. There, we examined a devastating report by the DHS Office of Inspector General which exposed the previous administration’s shocking conduct toward UACs.
This report revealed that ICE did not effectively oversee UACs’ processing upon placement with sponsor families, failing to maintain contact with hundreds of thousands of immigrant children.
Crucially, the Biden Administration denied HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, or O-R-R – the agency charged with matching these children with sponsors – the ability to share its UAC data with ICE, fueling a cascading crisis of unaccountability.
As a result, the full extent of the Biden Administration’s failure to protect and monitor UACs is still coming to light.
A subsequent audit by HHS OIG – released just this month – found that during the Biden Administration, ORR conducted required monitoring of UAC care facilities in Texas and Florida only 69% of the time.
ORR created numerous opportunities for facility staff to be onboarded without undergoing background check, creating countless opportunities for traffickers and predators to gain access to migrant children.
Upon taking office, the Trump Administration immediately took measures to reverse President Biden’s harmful policies.
Under its new leadership, ORR promptly restored responsible, strict, sponsor-vetting requirements that the Biden Administration dismantled.
President Trump also restored ICE access to the ORR database that contains information about UACs and their sponsors, finally allowing for proper monitoring of these vulnerable children.
These and other enforcement efforts have seen results. The Trump Administration has recovered 146,000 UACs since taking office.
However, Biden-era immigration policies have had lasting effects. Countless thousands of UACs remain unaccounted for in our country. Tragically, many of these children have been subject to assault, forced labor, and worse.
DOJ continues to announce indictments against illegal aliens who trafficked children into our country.
By taking advantage of loopholes that existed during the Biden Administration, child traffickers abused the UAC sponsorship process to falsely claim family connections to migrant children.
The extent of abuse endured by some of these children is disgusting. Each trauma they experience represents a preventable tragedy born from the policies of the Biden Administration.
More must be done to undo the damage wrought by the Biden Administration, literally generational trauma forced upon our nation. Congress is ready to partner with President Trump to provide our Federal Law Enforcement agencies with the tools they need to rescue these children and bring criminal child traffickers to justice.
Today, we have assembled a panel of expert professionals to shed light on the nature of the problem from the ground level.
I look forward to today’s discussion and the insights our attendees can share.