Exclusive | HHS chief subpoenaed over tens of thousands of missing migrant kids by House panel probing border crisis

A House committee probing the ongoing border crisis has subpoenaed Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra for information about tens of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who have disappeared inside the US.House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) compelled Becerra, in a Thursday cover letter exclusively obtained by The Post that accompanied the subpoena, to hand over documents related to the “vetting, screening, and monitoring” of migrant sponsors by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).Without proper vetting, migrant kids are at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor and other forms of exploitation, according to a Homeland Security inspector general’s report released last month.HHS officials have stalled for more than a month and a half after the Homeland Security panel initially requested the records on Aug.12.

The subpoena responses are due Oct.3.On Wednesday, the department finally turned over 717 pages of documents — but 400 of them “contain nothing more than publicly available information,” Green told Becerra.“Absurdly, HHS stamped all these publicly available pages with a disclaimer stating, ‘Produced to Homeland Security Committee Pursuant to Oversight Request[;] Do Not Disclose Without Permission from Department of Health and Human Services,'” he added.The rest of the documents reproduced sections of the ORR’s manual on procedures for unaccompanied migrant children, which were not relevant to the committee’s requests.“The available statistics and data regarding [unaccompanied alien children, or UACs] are extremely disconcerting and represents a growing humanitarian crisis,” Green wrote.“Thus far, HHS has denied the Committee access to this vital information, refusing to provide even an indication of the scope of the issue.”The scope was hinted at, however, in an Aug.

19 Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report, which found that as of May 2024, 291,000 unaccomp...