This week, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody announced she “is fighting back against the Biden administration’s push to lax vetting requirements of sponsors of unaccompanied alien children.”
Moody’s office offered the reasons for her actions.
“Earlier this year, the 21st Florida Statewide Grand Jury released findings that show the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement and the Biden administration facilitated the trafficking of thousands of inadmissible immigrant children. ORR is now requesting public comment on a rule change to make the process for vetting sponsors even more lenient. The grand jury, through several presentments, detailed how ORR previously lost track of more than 20,000 UACs, placing children with unvetted sponsors without background checks and exposed the minors to human trafficking and abuse,” Moody’s office noted.
Moody said, “It is an absolute travesty that thousands of children are suffering due to the Biden administration’s terrible immigration policies—both that mass numbers of inadmissible immigrants are incentivized to enter the country illegally and that many of these unaccompanied alien children are subject to sexual abuse, human trafficking and other terrors at the hands of drug cartels. And now, the administration is even seeking to WEAKEN their vetting policies for UAC sponsors. With the new discoveries by the statewide grand jury, we are fighting back and demanding ORR strengthen, not weaken, the vetting process for sponsors entrusted to care for these children.”
In comments sent to ORR, Moody detailed how the state of Florida has been investigating the federal government’s systematic mistreatment of alien children for the last year and a half.
The letter states: “During the course of that investigation, which was led by my office through Florida’s Statewide Prosecutor, the grand jury issued five presentments. As the third presentment explains, ‘[i]f any resident of Florida exposed U.S.-born children’ to the same conditions that ORR exposes alien children to, ‘they would be justifiably arrested for child neglect or worse.’ This is because alien children supposedly in the care of ORR are being recruited into gangs, abused, and even sold into sex slavery. Meanwhile, as ORR turns a blind eye to these horrors, Mexican drug cartels are funding multi-billion dollar criminal operations with funds made smuggling more and more unaccompanied aliens into the United States.”
The letter highlights that the grand jury asked Moody to file its presentments as public comment on the proposed measure.
The grand jury’s ongoing investigation uncovered that the federal government lost track of tens of thousands of children, background checks were not being conducted on the minors’ sponsors and the children being exposed to human trafficking and abuse.
The grand jury’s fourth presentment found that the “only mandatory requirement [for UAC sponsors] is completion and submission of the sponsorship application.” Additionally, “no other vetting measure is mandated. No finding during the vetting process is automatically disqualifying, a truly disturbing commentary on ORR priorities.”
