WASHINGTON (CN) - Systemic regulatory flaws allowed human traffickers to abduct a number of children who entered the United States without adult supervision, Senate investigators said Thursday, summarizing the findings of their latest report.
The report flags "serious deficiencies" in how the Department of Health and Human Services conducts background checks on people seeking to sponsor minors who entered the United States without guardians, as well as in the department's monitoring of children after placing them with these sponsors.
In some cases discussed by the report, sponsors were allowed to simply refuse attempts by the department to contact children after their placement.
Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican who chairs the Subcommittee on Investigations that produced the report, spoke about the problem of "sponsors for hire" who help human traffickers exploit unaccompanied minors entering the United States.
The report centers on a case from 2014 in which the Department of Health and Human Services released at least six unaccompanied children into the hands of human traffickers in Marion, Ohio.
The traffickers forced the children, some as young as 14, to work 12 hours a day on egg farms in and around Marion, and crammed them into or even under a small, white trailer, investigators found.
In addition to identifying 13 other cases involving the trafficking of unaccompanied minors, the report said 15 more showed "serious trafficking indicators."
More victims of trafficking could be out there, the bipartisan report cautions, noting that HHS does not maintain records tracking human-trafficking cases.
Though it often places children with relatives, the subcommittee's investigation focused on so-called Category III sponsors, those with no close relation to the child. Saying HHS did not do enough to verify the alleged relationships in these scenarios, the report found that it usually just took the word of a person claiming to be the child's family member.
The people vouching for the sponsors were often indebted to them, however, leaving the children vulnerable to exploitation, according to the report.
In the Marion case, for example, investigators said the traffickers who sponsored the children held the deeds on some of the homes of the children's families and would not let the families repay their debts until after it acquired custody of the children.
Unaccompanied minors typically enter the United States seeking to escape violence or other troubles in their home countries, and often use smugglers to get into the United States. But such arrangements leave them vulnerable to fall into human-trafficking rings, according to the report.
When unaccompanied children enter the United States, it is the responsibility of Health and Human Services to find appropriate places to place them. The Office of Refugee Resettlement takes on this task within the department, and attempts to find a person who can care for the children and help them get to their immigration hearings.
But the report found that, once the children are placed with their sponsors, they often sit in limbo, with no agency claiming responsibility for their wellbeing.
"HHS told the subcommittee that its longstanding view has been that once a child is transferred to the care of a sponsor, HHS has no further power or responsibility," the report reads.