Advocates Push for Finding the Lost Migrant Children

For all the talk about illegal immigration during the recent presidential campaign, one aspect that got little attention was the plight of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children said to have disappeared since crossing the border.

Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, did raise the issue during October’s vice-presidential debate when he claimed the Department of Homeland Security had effectively lost 320,000 migrant children.

“Some of them have been sex trafficked,” he said, “some of them hopefully are at homes with their families; some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules.”

But many media organizations responded swiftly with “fact-checks” that minimized the severity of the situation and suggested Vance’s comment had lacked context.

In one report from The Associated Press, for example, Jonathan Beier, associate director of research and evaluation for the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program, said, “This is not a ‘missing kids’ problem; it’s a ‘missing paperwork’ problem.”

Those seeking to raise awareness about such children beg to differ.

“This is absolutely not a missing-paperwork problem,” Jason Piccolo, a former agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, told the Register. Piccolo, who has written and spoken about what happens to unaccompanied migrant children after they cross the nation’s southwest border, added, “There are simply not enough resources, whether contractors or federal employees to track the hundreds of thousands of children that have entered and remain in the United States.” Unfortunately, he said, that means thousands could have ended up in the hands of sex or labor traffickers.

Continue reading at the National Catholic Register

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