Whew!  This is some incredible bit of news about Unaccompanied Alien Children who might have been trafficked with the help of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency charged with keeping them safe.

From the Columbus Dispatch (hat tip: Julie):

A federal indictment that charged four people with illegally smuggling Guatemalan teenagers into the United States and forcing them to work at Ohio egg farms indicates that some of the teens had gone through an immigration process that might have put them directly into the hands of the traffickers.

Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and co-chairman of the Senate Caucus to End Human Trafficking, said that’s alarming.

He sent a letter on Monday demanding answers from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the process for unaccompanied minors who come into this country and are then apprehended by immigration officials.

According to the charges against those accused of running the forced-labor ring, at least five of the victims had been through a process involving the Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in which unaccompanied immigrant children are placed under the care and custody of the ORR office.

Federal law requires that that office be responsible for all aspects of their care until a sponsor comes forward and seeks custody. ORR’s website refers to its “strong policies” in place because “these children may have histories of abuse or may be seeking safety from threats of violence. They may have been trafficked or smuggled.”

The government’s website says that sponsors are generally family members, must have passed a background check and must agree that they will adequately care for the children, keep them safe from abuse and cooperate with the immigration process.

In this case, the indictment said the traffickers recruited vulnerable Guatemalan juveniles and brought them to the U.S., then arranged to “have an associate falsely represent himself to immigration officials as the victim’s family friend and submit fraudulent Family Reunification Applications to ORR.”

Over the years we have written often about the Unaccompanied Alien Children which were previously referred to as Unaccompanied Minors. So all of our posts are archived under that second term—Unaccompanied Minors.