by John Solomon and Steven Richards
Long before Congress became alarmed over as many as 320,000 unaccompanied minor children from the border crisis, the Department of Homeland Security prepared a briefing memo in summer 2021 starkly warning Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that federal authorities were ill-equipped to deal with a surge of young immigrants or reunite them with their parents, according to a copy of the memo reviewed by Just the News.
“[The] Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not have the necessary government authorities or resources for all that needs to be accomplished to reunify families within the scope of the Family Reunification Task Force,” Anna Hinken, an official in Homeland’s partnerships outreach office, wrote in the July 22, 2021 memo she prepared for Mayorkas as part of a planned call with a person whose name was redacted from the memo.
The memo, obtained by the nonpartisan watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust under the Freedom of Information Act, provides one of the earliest clues as to how the Biden administration failed to reunite children with their parents and eventually lost track of large numbers of them, a failure that has embarrassed the administration with Congress.
The memo warned that as the Biden-era migration surge began, DHS was paying for airfare, domestic travel and other needs to reunify parents with children already trafficked through the southern U.S. border, but the project suffered from a serious flaw: Immigrant families weren’t willing to join their children because the government couldn’t pay for additional family members to travel.
“[We] are unable to cover the expenses for additional family members,” she wrote.
“[As] we go through these documents, and as we were reading through them, we could just see the seeds of a disaster in the making. It was just evident to our eyes as we went through these conversations and they showed that…that they knew at the time that they weren’t going to be able to carry this out,” Michael Chamberlain, the Director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told the “John Solomon Reports” podcast on Monday.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon.
The 2021 memo also details the challenges the department faces in carrying out family reunifications, including one troubling fact that undermines one of the central justifications for welcoming illegal immigrants.
“DHS has learned that almost half of the families the Task Force has reunified so far are at risk of homelessness or are homeless,” the memo reads.
To address the issue, the staff told the secretary, the department is exploring how to provide similar benefits to illegal immigrants as refugees receive.
“We are looking for a way to establish a model to provide temporary but holistic settlement supports, as we did for refugee resettlement, but face legal challenges,” the memo adds.
“It appears as though they let the crisis take its course, and it’s hard to imagine that they really responded well, even at the time they in the memo that that we have here, it says that the task force, even when they have reunified children with their parents, their and their families, they those families were at great risk of homelessness, or had already become homeless,” Chamberlain said.
He added, “And so they were requiring even greater support from the taxpayers, from the federal government, than even DHS had…had imagined at the time that they had begun this.”
An inspector general report released this year found that the Biden Administration had in fact lost track of upwards of 320,000 migrant children who crossed the southern border unaccompanied by their parents.
The 2024 report was a stark warning at the agency, and specifically to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could not monitor the location and status of all unaccompanied migrant children (UCs) or initiate removal proceedings as needed.”
The number, which includes 291,000 children released without a court date and another 32,000 released with court dates but who failed to appear, may include an unknown number that are now facing risks of sex trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor, according to the DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari.
The Biden administration has faced congressional scrutiny over several aspects of its unaccompanied minor programs and has elicited especially strong reactions from Republicans.
A letter signed by more than 40 Republican lawmakers led by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa highlighted the flaws in the administration’s processing of unaccompanied minors that left them vulnerable to “trafficking and exploitation.” When unaccompanied children arrive at the border, they are transferred to a Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, which releases them to a sponsor.
However, Congress found that the administration cut certain background checks and vetting in order to streamline the process, potentially endangering children in the process. The Biden administration also ended the authorization for Customs and Border Protection to conduct familial DNA testing at the border, which was originally implemented by the Trump administration.
After HHS codified many of these lax practices in a rule this April according to the lawmakers, the Republican senators introduced a bipartisan Congressional Review Act resolution to strike down the rule. They were joined by one Democrat, Joe Manchin, who switched his affiliation to independent later in the year.
President-elect Donald Trump, who is set to take office in January, made reversing the immigration policies of his predecessor a top priority on the campaign trail. The one-time president, now preparing to take on a return to the White House, promised that his administration would initiate one of the largest deportation operations in American history to end the illegal immigration crisis.
As for details, it is unclear how the new administration will tackle the problem of the missing children. Trump’s new border czar, former ICE Director Tom Homan, said the new administration needed to “save” the unaccompanied minors.
“Shame on them,” Homan said in an interview with Fox News, referring to the Biden administration. “They have over 300,000 children that they have released [to] unvetted sponsors that they can’t find.”
“Many are going to be in forced labor. Many forced sex trade,” he said. “We need to save these children.”
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John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and digital media entrepreneur who serves as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief of Just the News. Before founding Just the News, Solomon played key reporting and executive roles at some of America’s most important journalism institutions, such as The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast and The Hill.
Investigative reporter Steven Richards joined Just the News in August 2023 after previously working as a Research Analyst for the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) in Tallahassee, Florida.
Photo “Migrant Caravan” by Todd Bensman / CIS.org.
