ICE’s Tracking Failure Raises Major Red Flags

The Biden administration’s handling of unaccompanied alien children (UACs) continues to raise alarm, especially after the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General flagged serious issues in ICE’s ability to monitor and locate these children, as reported by Just The News.

Between 2019 and 2023, over 448,000 UACs were handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. Yet, according to the DHS report, ICE failed to issue Notices to Appear (NTAs) for immigration court hearings to more than 65% of these minors.

In fact, of the children transferred, at least 32,000 skipped their scheduled hearings, disappearing into the shadows.

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Even more concerning, ICE didn’t even bother looking for most of these children. In a disturbing revelation, only one out of eight ICE offices visited by DHS made any attempt to locate the missing children.

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, sounding the alarm, said, “Lax vetting has placed migrant children in grave danger of exploitation and abuse.”

His concerns are not unfounded, as the Inspector General’s report emphasizes the heightened risk of these children falling victim to trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.

Between 2021 and 2023, during the Biden-Harris administration, over 81% of the UACs, or 366,000 children, were allowed into the U.S.

These staggering numbers come on top of ICE’s existing backlog of illegal foreign nationals, many of whom the agency has also failed to track.

For instance, 200,000 immigration cases were dismissed simply because DHS failed to file paperwork on time. In a five-month stretch in 2021, ICE allowed 50,000 illegal aliens to disappear, with no clue where they went.

The DHS report pointed out that ICE lacks any automated system to share information internally and externally. The result is a bureaucratic mess between agencies like ICE, HHS, and the Department of Justice, all of which are supposed to track UACs but fail miserably.

Grassley and other lawmakers are now pushing for reforms to address these systemic failures. He has called for greater oversight of the ORR, following shocking allegations of sexual abuse among UACs and reports that more than 100,000 minors are unaccounted for.

While federal officials scramble to fix this growing problem, states like Texas, Florida, and California are being inundated with record numbers of UACs. In some cases, these states have seen UAC arrivals that dwarf previous years.