Illegal immigration may be at an all-time low, but American taxpayers are still getting stuck with the exorbitant cost of caring for the hundreds of thousands of alien minors that entered the country under the Biden administration. The government calls them Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC), though the overwhelming majority are not really children but rather young adults in their teens and some have criminal histories. Under U.S. law the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is responsible for caring for UAC, which are overwhelmingly males over the age of 14, according to government figures. They come from Guatemala (32%), Honduras (20%), Mexico (20%), El Salvador (8%), and “other” (19%). More than half a million entered the country during the Biden administration and Uncle Sam has spent a fortune to provide them with housing, food, an education, medical care, and recreational activities before and after they are released to sponsors throughout the nation.

The expenses will evidently continue for years to come. This month, HHS announced that it is awarding up to $500 million in grants to provide “high-quality” residential services for UAC throughout the United States. The cash will go to group homes that specialize in caring for specific populations such as teen mothers, shelters that provide a child-friendly setting for kids of all ages and transitional foster care for those under the age of 13, including sibling groups, pregnant or parenting teens and children with specific individualized needs. The UAC will receive educational and clinical services as well as medical care, recreation, and individual counseling. Grant recipients must provide private spaces for meetings with attorneys and a separate bedroom for isolation or quarantine for those infected with a communicable disease. “Ideally, there should be at least one isolation-capable bedroom, for every 25 children, equipped with a door that closes while allowing line-of-sight through a small window,” according to the recently published grant announcement, which describes the “distinct illnesses” of this population to include varicella and influenza.

On a positive note, HHS is requiring that grant recipients properly screen and train staff on sexual harassment and inappropriate sexual behavior as well as procedures for reporting knowledge or suspicion of sexual abuse. That is because sexual and physical abuse at UAC shelters has been a huge problem for years. In fact, back in 2021 Judicial Watch obtained records from HHS documenting 33 incidents of physical and sexual abuse during a one-month period at one UAC shelter. Last summer the Biden administration sued the government’s largest housing provider for illegal immigrant minors, which has received billions of dollars from American taxpayers, for raping, sexually abusing and harassing the children Uncle Sam paid it to shelter. The Texas-based nonprofit that has raked in enormous amounts of public funds is called Southwest Key and it once operated 29 shelters that provided temporary housing for migrants under the age of 18. The Trump administration dropped the lawsuit against Southwest Key, but also said the government would no longer use its services.

The UAC program has also been rocked by another big scandal, the government’s failure to monitor hundreds of thousands of the underage migrants, many of which were placed with dangerous sponsors where they were victims of abuse and forced labor. Tens of thousands of UAC have simply vanished from the government’s radar, according to a federal audit. Earlier this year the Trump administration announced a plan to locate the young migrants to, among other things, prevent them from being trafficked or exploited. The administration has reportedly ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to sort UAC into three groups—risk, public safety, and border security—with officers told to prioritize flight risk minors, which include those with deportation orders for failing to appear in court hearings. Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its components to provide records of communications about the plan, titled “Unaccompanied Alien Children Joint Initiative Field Implementation,” to find UAC who have been released with no follow up by the feds as is required by law.

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