Flashback: Obama Administration placed border children with human smugglers

OPINION:

With all the histrionics from the media and the Democrats over the plight of children illegally crossing the US border, you’d think you would have heard something from them almost two years ago when the Obama Administration was discovered to have facilitated horrible abuses against these same children. 

The Washington Post reported on the story in January 2016: 

The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.

And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.

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The report gives several harrowing examples of abuse and exploitation of children under the care of the federal government during Obama’s watch:

For example, one Guatemalan boy planned to live with his uncle in Virginia. But when the uncle refused to take the boy, he ended up with another sponsor, who forced him to work nearly 12 hours a day to repay a $6,500 smuggling debt, which the sponsor later increased to $10,900, the report said.

A boy from El Salvador was released to his father even though he told a caseworker that his father had a history of beating him, including hitting him with an electrical cord. In September, the boy alerted authorities that his father was forcing him to work for little or no pay, the report said; a post-release service worker later found the boy was being kept in a basement and given little food.

Read the entire article here. Given the horrible plight of a child released to the care of human smugglers, and given the identity of some “parents” who are bringing children across the border can’t always be verified. Perhaps the media would be a bit more circumspect when reporting on a story that is far more complex than simply “children are being ripped from their parents by the Trump Administration” narrative we’ve been getting.