Contending for migrant children

NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything In It, protecting migrant children from trafficking.

When children cross the border with neither parent nor legal guardian, it’s Border Patrol that’ll pick them up. Then it will hand them over to the Department of Health and Human Services. At that point, the children are placed in federally funded shelters, while HHS tries to find an eligible sponsor to take them in.

But critics say the system is susceptible to fraud, and often it's  rushed—and that puts these children at greater risk.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Addie Offereins reported this story for WORLD. I’ll place a link in the transcript for you to read more about this tighter vetting process under the Trump administration. Addie joins us now to talk abou tit. Good morning. Talk about the changes he put in place.

ADDIE OFFEREINS: The Trump administration’s new guidelines now require the fingerprinting of all sponsors, adult caregivers, and household members ages 18 and older.

REICHARD: So, fingerprints for one thing. Anything else new in these rules?

OFFEREINS: Yes, sponsors have to give clear, unexpired, high-quality copies of their ID, front and back, before a child can be released to them. Then when they show up for fingerprinting, they have to bring the original ID with them.

I spoke to an expert that pointed out a real worry: the fact that these rules had to be spelled out in the first place. That suggests a lot of this wasn’t happening before, at least not consistently.

REICHARD: Well, Addie, thanks for keeping an eye on this story for us.

OFFEREINS: You bet.

EICHER: WORLD’s Mary Muncy takes it from here.

MARY MUNCY: Attorney Jennifer Podkul represented unaccompanied children in immigration court for five years.

PODKUL: There were kids who had been forced to work on farms. There had been kids that I worked with who had been victims of sex trafficking. There had been kids who had been forced to do domestic labor by a family member.

Podkul was the first person some of the children ever told about their situation. And because they told her, in some cases, law enforcement was able to prosecute the trafficker.

PODKUL: I had built rapport with them. We had trust with each other. They understood that we had attorney-client relationships, so I couldn't tell anybody anything without their permission first. That's when some of the kids finally opened up, and I realized what was going on, and was able to get them help.

Podkul now serves as the chief of global policy and advocacy at Kids in Need of Defense, or KIND. It’s an organization that receives government money to provide migrant children with legal representation. Unaccompanied children with no legal status are usually put into deportation proceedings, but many of them claim asylum in a bid to stay.

She said the organization currently manages more than 5,000 cases.

PODKUL: This isn't theoretical. This is real. You know, I imagine the kids' faces as I tell these stories.

About 450,000 unaccompanied migrant children arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border under the Biden administration. That’s more than half of the nearly 750,000 unaccompanied children placed with sponsors since 2012.

VAUGHAN: Under the Biden administration, the numbers went to historic heights.

Jessica Vaughan is the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies.

VAUGHAN: They relaxed the vetting of sponsors in order to keep up with these huge numbers and deliberately adopted policies that would release minors as quickly as possible, either to their parents or another relative, or almost anyone asking to sponsor the minors without the standards of vetting that are commonplace or routine for child welfare agencies. For example, in foster care placements.

Once HHS releases the children to sponsors, government officials are required to follow up with the children 30 days later. Last year, whistleblowers told Congress that the agency had failed to maintain contact with over 300,000 children.

Tara Rodas directed a federal case management team at an emergency intake site. Here’s Rodas testifying before Congress in November:

RODAS: Migrant children are working overnight shifts in slaughterhouses and factories, and some may die today because they don’t have the knowledge or skills to do the job that they’re supposed to be doing. But they’re doing it to repay debts to their smugglers and traffickers.

And in August, the inspector general’s office for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security found Immigration and Customs Enforcement had not provided almost 300,000 children with a date or time to appear in immigration court.

Immigrant advocates agree that some of the Trump administration’s extra vetting measures are essential for shielding children from exploitation and ensuring they end up in stable homes. But others argue authorities should prioritize increasing post-release services and following up with more than just a phone call.

PODKUL: I don't think one phone call where someone just hopes somebody answers, there’s not enough that you can tell what’s really happening through that one phone call.

Podkul with KIND, says in addition to presenting children’s cases, lawyers also act as another pair of eyes ensuring a child’s overall safety.

PODKUL: Those touches from the attorneys and social workers that provide the post release services are crucial, because they're the ones who are going to know, ‘ uh oh, this kid is working in a dangerous place,’ or ‘the sponsor is charging rent to this child.’

She worries that supervision is in jeopardy because the Trump administration halted a significant portion of funding for KIND… and other legal representation organizations on Friday

Podkul also worries that many of the children KIND defends are at risk of being sent back to dangerous situations in their home countries.

Reuters obtained an internal ICE memo last month, showing the agency is launching new efforts to ensure unaccompanied immigrant children with no legal status are put in removal proceedings, and those with final orders of removal are deported.

Vaughan with the Center for Immigration Studies noted that deporting individuals who crossed the border as older teenagers and are now adults will be relatively simple.

VAUGHAN: The ones who are still minors, you know, there's going to have to be a little bit more of a process. For one thing, we've got to identify their parents, whether they're here or in their home country, and reunite them with their parents.

She argued that while increased vetting procedures are essential, Trump’s executive orders shutting down the border will make the most difference in the long run.

VAUGHAN: These parents and families are no longer being enticed to send their kids with criminal smuggling organizations into the United States thinking that they're going to go to school or get a job and be able to help the family, when in fact, they ended up being trafficked into labor arrangements. So that risk has just been eliminated now with the move to secure the border.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.