According to U.S. government officials and related emails reviewed by Reuters, federal and local officials are scrambling to locate nearly a dozen unaccompanied migrant children after Houston police raised concerns about a trend of migrant children reported missing in the Texas city.
The cases highlight the difficulties confronting US President Joe Biden’s administration, which is dealing with a record number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the southwest border and must safely and quickly release them to sponsors in the United States.
According to an HHS official who declined to be identified, a Houston police detective alerted the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) earlier this summer after discovering what appeared to be a pattern of migrant children missing from the homes of their U.S. sponsors.
HHS is the federal agency in charge of the custody and release of children who have crossed the US-Mexico border without the presence of a parent or legal guardian.
According to the HHS official and an internal email seen by Reuters, the HHS refugee office implemented an emergency supervisory review of unaccompanied children released to non-parent sponsors in the Houston area in August, in a rare step.
According to the HHS official and two other sources familiar with the situation, the agency discovered that 57 unaccompanied migrant children had gone missing in Houston since late last year. The count included nine children who escaped from HHS shelters in the Houston area, according to the official.
According to the official, 46 of them were safe as of Aug. 26. Authorities claim to have found no evidence of sex or labor trafficking thus far.
Some of the missing children who have been found are now 18 years old or older. A few left the homes of relatives acting as sponsors to join parents in the United States, according to the official, who added that the number of cases being reviewed is small in comparison to the overall volume of releases to the area.
Houston’s Harris County, Texas, is the No. 1 destination for unaccompanied minors, with over 6,300 released between October 2021, when this fiscal year began, and June 2022.
Since Biden took office in January 2021, more than 200,000 non-Mexican minors who cannot be quickly turned around at the border have been caught crossing alone.
Early in Biden’s presidency, an increase in unaccompanied minors overwhelmed Border Patrol stations, trapping children in overcrowded conditions for more than 72 hours.
Biden administration officials took steps to expand emergency shelters and streamline the release of children to sponsors – typically parents or relatives – in the United States, while also ensuring that they are not sent to homes where they could face danger or mistreatment.
According to HHS data, children are released to more distant relatives or unrelated adults who have been vetted in some cases (about 15% of all releases in the fiscal year 2022 so far).
Unaccompanied minors released by a United States county
In the fiscal year 2022 through June, Harris County in Texas, where Houston is located, received 6,347 children released from federal custody, more than any other county in the United States.
An official with the HHS inspector general’s office said he had never seen such a large number of unaccompanied minors reported missing in one area, but it was unclear whether the trend was new or had been discovered recently by the Houston Police Department.
The police department stated that it was “currently conducting investigations into reports of missing, unaccompanied juveniles,” but declined to answer further questions.
WATCHING FOR RED FLAGS
According to Mario Bruzzone, a senior policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission, which advocates for unaccompanied minors, sponsor relationships can fall apart after a honeymoon period following reunification.
According to him, children may have conflicts and flee due to trauma experienced in their home countries or en route to the United States. He described runaways as “an unfortunate part of this world of child welfare work.”
“There’s a lot of tension here about how we do releases,” Bruzzone said. “We want to make sure that they can get to homes as soon as possible for child welfare reasons, while also doing the screening necessary to ensure that the homes they are going to are safe and stable.”
According to the HHS official and another source, during the review of Houston area cases, HHS discovered dozens of children had been released to similar addresses, which can be a red flag for possible trafficking. According to the HHS official, the addresses were in apartment complexes where many immigrant families live and were not a significant cause for concern.
According to the official, approximately 60 cases for release had been subjected to additional review, with 53 of those cases cleared for release as of Aug. 26.
Releases from HHS custody were halted last year in and around the southern Alabama town of Enterprise. According to three sources familiar with the investigations, an HHS investigation at the time was focused on whether minors were being exploited for labor by traffickers.
While there was no evidence of child trafficking, investigators discovered “exploitative” working conditions for some migrants in the area, and Reuters discovered cases of children working in industrial settings in the state.
