The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on Tuesday morning to talk about President Joe Biden’s policy of importing hundreds of thousands of indebted foreign teenagers to take jobs that would otherwise go to better-paid young Americans.
The main witness is Christi Grimm, the Inspector General at Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services. For more than ten years, the agency has been delivering the so-called “Unaccompanied Alien Children” to labor traffickers nationwide.
The hearing will be chaired by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and by Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA), who runs the committee’s panel on oversight and investigations.
Republicans will likely focus blame for the scandal on Biden’s deputies at the Department of Health and Human Services. They will likely downplay employers’ preference for hiring disposable and cheap migrant workers instead of hiring Americans or investing in labor-saving machines.
So far, Republicans have declined to seek political advantage from the teenage-worker scandal, likely because many companies have benefited from the federal government’s long-standing role in the labor-trafficking racket. This silence has helped Democrats dodge any political fallout from potential public opposition to Biden’s imported workforce of indentured, indebted teenage workers.
Watch here, starting at 10.30 AM:
The scandal was made undeniable by detailed articles in the New York Times, including an April 17 article that said:
Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk. The Labor Department put out news releases noting an increase in child labor. Senior White House aides were shown evidence of exploitation, such as clusters of migrant children who had been found working with industrial equipment or caustic chemicals.
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One [migrant], Marvin Che, said he came to the United States last year, when he was 16, and had been working 12-hour overnight shifts alongside other migrant children packing products at the manufacturer Pactiv Evergreen, including Hefty plastic party cups. “We came alone, so we have to work hard,” Marvin said.
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[In Florida,] a boy working construction said he felt ashamed about not knowing how to read. He, too, was released in 2021 — at age 12 — and was immediately put to work by a man who had sponsored at least five children. At a day-labor pickup site, a 13-year-old released last year to a man he had never met said he wished he could enroll in middle school and start learning English. “People don’t know,” Antonio said, “but there are a lot of kids here living the same life.”
A briefing prepared for the hearing by GOP staffers said:
The number of unaccompanied children referred to ORR has ballooned from 15,381 in fiscal year (FY) 2020 to 122,731 in FY2021 and 128,904 in FY2022. Even as the numbers of unaccompanied children were skyrocketing, HHS’ capacity to care for these children diminished.
To cope with the influx of unaccompanied children, ORR opened Emergency Intake Sites (EIS) in early 2021.
However, HHS OIG reports doubt the efficiency and competency of case managers at EIS facilities, as well as the general health and well-being of the children housed at these locations. OIG found children have experienced emotional distress and instances of self-harm.
Due to overcrowding, unaccompanied children are now released to sponsors without sufficient vetting procedures. As a result, these children are vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation.
There are also concerns about ORR’s ability to track released children—according to recent findings, over the last two years, HHS has “lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children” and “could not reach more than 85,000 children” one month after they were placed with an adult.”
“We’re complicit as a nation in human trafficking,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said at a March 2021 press conference in Texas with 17 other GOP Senators.