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UPDATE 5/30: Cecilia Muñoz, former director of the Domestic Policy Council under the Obama administration, pointed out that hoping the federal government would track children might not be in families’ best interests. She clarified to NPR on Tuesday:

This is a federal agency which placed kids, in most cases, with their own families; that doesn’t mean that every placement is terrific. But the most likely case is that these are undocumented families, and they don’t want contact with the federal government. And you don’t necessarily want HHS tracking these families after they’ve placed their kids because, look, in this administration, you can’t necessarily rely upon the authorities not to be using whatever contact they have for purposes of immigration enforcement.

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Additionally, the Department of Health and Human Services (which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement) returned Jezebel’s request for comment. Eric Hargan, deputy secretary of HHS, wrote:

The assertion that unaccompanied alien children (UAC) are ‘lost’ is completely false. This is a classic example of the adage ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is part of the Administration for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), began voluntarily making calls in 2016 as a 30-day follow-up on the release of UAC to make sure that UAC and their sponsors did not require additional services. This additional step, which is not required and was not done previously, is now being used to confuse and spread misinformation.

 These children are not ‘lost’; their sponsors—who are usually parents or family members and in all cases have been vetted for criminality and ability to provide for them—simply did not respond or could not be reached when this voluntary call was made. While there are many possible reasons for this, in many cases sponsors cannot be reached because they themselves are illegal aliens and do not want to be reached by federal authorities. This is the core of this issue: In many cases, HHS has been put in the position of placing illegal aliens with the individuals who helped arrange for them to enter the country illegally. This makes the immediate crisis worse and creates a perverse incentive for further violation of federal immigration law.

The tracking of UAC after release is just one of the recent headlines that focus on the symptoms of our broken immigration system while ignoring its fundamental flaws. President Trump’s administration has been calling on Congress to put an end to dangerous loopholes in U.S. immigration laws like the practice of ‘catch and release,’ in which federal authorities release illegal immigrants to await hearings for which few show up. In the worst cases, these loopholes are being exploited by human traffickers and violent gangs like MS-13. Until these laws are fixed, the American taxpayer is paying the bill for costly programs that aggravate the problem and put children in dangerous situations.

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