Smugglers abandoned two migrant children at the southern border in Texas this week, fleeing back to Mexico as Texas authorities came to the little girls’ rescue, amid continued concerns about the numbers of unaccompanied minors coming across the border.
The Texas Department of Public Safety said that its troopers had recovered the two little girls, who are five and nine years old, after the smuggler had abandoned them and fled back to Mexico.
The girls, from El Salvador, carried only a note with an address and phone number, and were then referred to U.S. Border Patrol.
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The incident taps into ongoing concerns about unaccompanied migrant children coming across the border, with numbers increasing significantly during the recent migrant crisis.
There have been a number of incidents of abandoned children being rescued, often with phone numbers or addresses of relatives or others written on paper or stitched into clothing. When children arrive unaccompanied, they are transferred eventually to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and released to sponsors in the U.S.
The issue made headlines earlier this year when the DHS Office of Inspector General sent a report to Congress finding that, over the past five years, more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children [UCs] had not shown up for immigration court hearings, and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement could not account for the location of all of those who did not appear.
“During our ongoing audit to assess ICE’s ability to monitor the location and status of UCs who were released or transferred from the custody of the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), we learned ICE transferred more than 448,000 UCs to HHS from fiscal years 2019 to 2023,” the internal watchdog reported.
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“However, ICE was not able to account for the location of all UCs who were released by HHS and did not appear as scheduled in immigration court. ICE reported more than 32,000 UCs failed to appear for their immigration court hearings from FYs 2019 to 2023,” it said.
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The watchdog also found that approximately 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children have not yet been marked for removal proceedings, because ICE has routinely failed to schedule immigration court dates and serve notices.
ICEs FY 2024 report found that, despite the surge of more than 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children into the U.S. during the Biden administration, just 411 were removed in FY 2024, an increase from the 212 in FY 2023. For comparison, more than 4,000 were removed in FY 2022.
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