Reports began to surface in recent days which alleged that illegal immigrant children had been “lost” by government agencies inside the U.S., which the liberal media reflexively blamed on President Donald Trump.
But it was quickly revealed that the reports and pictures being circulated dated from 2014-2016, squarely within the administration of former President Barack Obama, meaning agencies under his watch “lost” or did worse with the illegal immigrant children.
One such report came from The Washington Post in January 2016, which documented how a Senate investigation had determined that Obama administration agencies had even directly placed some children under the control of human traffickers.
The investigation led by Republican Ohio Sen. Rob Portman began after several teens from Guatemala were found in a run-down trailer home near Marion, Ohio. They were being held captive as forced labor on a nearby egg farm.
The six-month long investigation documented nearly 30 other cases of unaccompanied children released by Obama agencies to the hands of traffickers or into situations with “serious trafficking indicators.”
It was determined that the agencies tasked with resettling the roughly 125,000 unaccompanied children who entered the country illegally over the Obama years had failed to conduct proper background checks on potential sponsors, allowed sponsors to take in multiple unrelated children and placed them in homes without first checking them.
In some cases, sponsors refused to allow caseworkers to conduct follow-up checks on the children placed in their custody.
“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” stated Portman at the time.
“What makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers,” he added.
The Senate report ultimately determined that Obama administration “policies and procedures were inadequate to protect the children in the agency’s care.”
“HHS places children with individuals about whom it knows relatively little and without verifying the limited information provided by sponsors about their alleged relationship with the child,” the report added.
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This appears to be yet another scandalous failure on the part of the prior Obama administration, one liberals will be hard-pressed to try and pin on Trump.