Subcommittee Chairman McClintock Opening Remarks Hearing on the Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children

Washington, D.C. – The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement held a hearing today on "The Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children.”  The hearing was held to examine the unprecedented surge of unaccompanied alien children at the southwest border and how open-border policies enable the exploitation of those children.

Subcommittee Chairman McClintock delivered the following opening statement at the hearing:

Opening Statement of
Subcommittee Chairman Tom McClintock
Hearing on the Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children

On Inauguration Day, our Border was secure.  The Remain in Mexico policy had slowed illegal immigration to a trickle, court-ordered deportations were being enforced and the Border Wall was nearing completion.  By the afternoon of that day, Joe Biden had reversed these policies, producing the largest illegal mass migration in history.

In the last 27 months, they have deliberately admitted two million illegal aliens into our country, a population larger than the state of Nebraska.  And while the Border Patrol was overwhelmed, another 1.5 million known gotaways have entered as well. That is an additional illegal population larger than the entire state of Hawaii.

The Trump policies slowed encounters of unaccompanied children to 33,000 – the lowest level in eight years.  In the last fiscal year, a record 152,000 came across.  That’s almost a five fold increase.

Biden had exactly the same tools available to him as Trump.  It should be obvious that this is a deliberate policy that ignores not only the welfare of Americans but that of the migrant children as well.

On a border trip last year, I asked a CBP officer how to stop the trafficking of children into this country.  His answer was immediate: get them safely home.  He said, the cartels charge thousands of dollars to traffic these children and they don’t give refunds.  The moment children are returned home, their business will dry up.  In another border trip, I was shocked to learn that no effort is made to get these children back to their homes, and very little effort is made vetting the so-called sponsors of these children and very little interest in following up on their welfare once they are abandoned to these so-called sponsors.

What happens to them?  The administration’s response is basically, “don’t-know-don’t care.”  But a recent New York Times investigation sheds some light on this question.  After they get to the U.S., many are forced by their so-called sponsors into dangerous jobs with fake identity documents. Earlier this year, a sanitation company employing over 100 illegal alien children in jobs in slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants in the Midwest, paid 1.5 million in civil penalties after a federal court found that these children were using “caustic chemicals to clean razor-sharp saws” and “working overnight shifts.”

In one of the great ironies of bill-titles, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 makes this possible.  While Children from Mexico and Canada are immediately sent safely home, all others are admitted.  That’s a tremendous incentive to send unaccompanied children to the border.

In 2014, even the Obama Administration recognized the danger and asked Congress to provide it with “additional authority to exercise discretion in processing the return and removal of unaccompanied minor children from non-contiguous countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.” The House passed a bill to do just that, but Senate Democrats blocked it.

The Trump Administration was able to staunch the flow with new and strict requirements to ensure the safety of these children once placed with a sponsor, as well as Title 42 expulsion authority.

However, in 2021, the Biden Administration dismantled Trump-era requirements to vet sponsors and perform background checks for individuals in the sponsor household, many of whom are involved in smuggling the children in the first place. And the Biden Administration stopped subjecting them to Title 42.

We now know that the administration has simply lost track of over 85,000 of these children. In September 2022, Axios reported that “roughly one-in-three follow-up calls made to released migrant kids or their sponsors between January and May went unanswered.”

Don’t-know-don’t-care.  According to the New York Times, the cabinet secretary responsible for these children, Xavier Becerra, likened the sponsor placement process to an assembly line that wasn’t moving fast enough.  He complained “if Henry Ford had seen this in his plant, he would have never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line.”

Last week this Committee approved a bill that would help stop this tragedy by returning these children safely home – as we already do for children coming from Mexico or Canada.  No Democrats supported our bill. I am hopeful that after hearing the testimony of our witnesses, our colleagues will rethink their opposition to the long-overdue reform.

And although we are focusing today on young and vulnerable children, we should note that a large portion of so-called unaccompanied children are late teenagers, or young men claiming to be minors.  That’s a subject for another day.

I now recognize the Ranking Member.