(NewsNation) — A report released by a Republican Senator Tuesday claims that “failures” by President Joe Biden’s administration have led to the “exploitation and abuse of migrant children.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, launched a formal investigation more than a year and a half ago into the administration’s policies on the treatment and care of unaccompanied children after he said he noticed an alarming rise in illegal child labor.
The results of that report allege that “top administration officials knew about the dramatic increase in illegal child labor, but took no meaningful steps to prevent its occurrence” and “prioritized speed over safety when releasing [unaccompanied children] to adult sponsors for political gain due to their failed immigration policies and the crisis at the southern border.”
Cassidy, who will likely serve as the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, called out Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for not doing more to protect migrant children.
“The exploitation of unaccompanied children has been documented for years. The Biden-Harris administration should have fixed its policies to protect these children, but instead it subverted Congress and states to cover up its mistakes,” Cassidy said in a statement. “This lack of transparency to the American people is reprehensible. It is hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to shield the Biden-Harris administration from accountability.”
The more than 170 page report alleges several overarching “failures” including that the administration weakened the sponsor vetting process that allowed children to get into the country without proper oversight.
It also states that the Office of Refugee Resettlement decided to overhaul the sponsor vetting process by relying on a single third-party contractor, The Providencia Group, to conduct all sponsor vetting for the agency despite having an “abysmal record providing similar services to ORR in the past.”
Another failure highlighted by the report is that the administration was more focused on fixing child labor violations that already occurred versus preventing them, which led child labor violations to remain at record highs.
Lastly, it states that the administration was obstructing congressional and state investigations into the exploitation and trafficking of unaccompanied children because federal agencies would not “cooperate” with oversight investigations.
About 250,000 children have crossed into the U.S. without their parents in the last two years, and a majority of are working full-time jobs, reported The New York Times in 2023.
Child labor laws at both the federal and state level restrict children from working full-time jobs, but an increase in the number of unaccompanied minors entering the country has led to a rise in unlawful child labor practices, research shows.
Read the full report HERE.
