These cases highlight the challenges facing US President Joe Biden’s administration as it faces a record number of unaccompanied children arriving at the southwestern border that must be released safely and swiftly to US sponsors.
Earlier this summer, a Houston police investigator alerted the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) after discovering what looked like a pattern of missing immigrant children from the homes of their American sponsors, according to a HHS official, who declined to be identified. Reuters reports.
HHS is the federal agency that oversees custody and release of children after they cross the US-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian.
In August, in a rare move, HHS’s refugee office implemented an emergency supervisory review of releases of unaccompanied children to non-parent sponsors in the Houston area, according to an HHS official and an internal email seen by Reuters.
The agency found that since late last year, 57 unaccompanied migrant children have been reported missing in Houston, according to a HHS official, and additional sources familiar with the situation. The official said the number included nine children who escaped from HHS shelters in the Houston area.
As of August 26, the official said, 46 of them had been confirmed safe. So far, authorities say they have found no evidence of sex or labor trafficking.
Some of the missing children who have now been located are 18 or older. A handful have left the homes of relatives acting as sponsors to join the parents who were in the US, the official said, adding that the number of cases being reviewed is small compared to the scale of the overall releases in the area.
Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located, is the #1 destination for unaccompanied minors releases, with more than 6,300 released between October 2021, when this fiscal year began, through June 2022.
More than 200,000 non-Mexican minors — who cannot be quickly recovered at the border — have been caught crossing alone since Biden took office in January 2021.
Early in Biden’s presidency, a rise in the number of unaccompanied minors flooded border guard posts, leaving children stranded in cramped conditions beyond the legal 72-hour limit.
Biden officials have taken steps to expand emergency shelters and simplify the release of children to caregivers — usually parents or relatives — in the United States, while at the same time seeking to ensure they are not sent to homes where they might face danger or abuse.
In some cases — about 15% of all releases in fiscal year 2022 so far — children are released to distant relatives or unrelated adults screened, according to HHS data.
An official with the HHS Office of Inspector General has not seen this volume of unaccompanied children reported missing in one area, but said it was not clear if this trend was new or recently disclosed by the Houston Police Department.
The city’s police department said it was “currently investigating reports of missing and unaccompanied incidents” but declined to answer additional questions.
Watch the red flags
In some cases, sponsor relationships can break down after the honeymoon period after reunification, said Mario Prozon, senior policy advisor at the Women’s Refugee Commission, which advocates for unaccompanied children.
He said children may face struggles and flee because of the trauma they experienced in their home countries or on their way to the United States. He said that defectors tend to be “an unfortunate part of the working world of childcare”.
“There is a real tension here in terms of how we are going to issue,” Prozzoni said. “For reasons of childcare, we want to make sure they can get to homes as quickly as possible, while also doing the necessary screening to make sure the homes they’re going to are safe and stable.”
While reviewing Houston-area cases, HHS discovered that dozens of children were released at similar addresses, which could be a red flag for potential trafficking, according to a HHS official and another source. The HHS official said the agency determined that the addresses were in apartment complexes where many immigrant families live and is not a significant cause for concern.
The official said about 60 released cases have undergone additional review and of those 53 cases have been approved as of August 26.
Last year, releases from HHS custody in and around the South Alabama city of Enterprise were halted. Three sources familiar with the investigations said that an investigation by the Ministry of Health at the time focused on whether minors were victims of traffickers who exploited them.
While investigators have found no evidence of child trafficking and found “exploitative” working conditions for some migrants living in the area, Reuters has revealed cases of children working in industrial settings in the state.