Former acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan on Newsmax on Thursday accused Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra of being "either incompetent or lying to Congress and the American people" during his testimony about the number of missing migrant children in the United States.
Morgan told Newsmax's "Wake Up America" that Becerra denied knowing about numbers that came "from his own department," adding that there are concerns that the unaccompanied migrant children are the victims of child trafficking.
Becerra, when asked about some 85,000 unaccompanied migrant children that have gone after crossing the United States' southern border, testified that he had "never heard of that number of 85,000," and said that he "would say it doesn't sound at all to be realistic."
Morgan said last year that Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., asked HHS the same question, and the department's employees responded that from January 2021 to January 2022, "they had lost track of up to 20% of the unaccompanied minors that flowed into this country illegally."
He added that in the 25 months since President Joe Biden took office, there have been more than 350,000 unaccompanied minors coming across the border, meaning that it's "unconscionable" that Becerra would comment in the manner he did on numbers that came from his own department.
"This is why we've been asking Congress for a very long time to fix a horrific law, TVPRA, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was designed to prevent trafficking," said Morgan.
The law says that unaccompanied minors coming into the United States from Mexico or Canada are to be reunited with family members, and "if you're an unaccompanied minor from the rest of the world, we keep you and put you in the system and treat you as an adult," said Morgan.
But that law "makes no sense, and it's led to more trafficking," he continued. "This is why we've been pleading with Congress, and we're hoping to see something come out of the Judiciary Committee that's going to fix this."
He added that child migrants are released to sponsors once they enter the country, but "there is no vetting" of the people who are taking custody.
"They basically do a criminal wants and warrants check and if they come back and they're not a convicted murderer or a pedophile, they release them to the sponsor," said Morgan. "They're released into a home that they've never visited. They have no idea who else is in the home and their definition of following up is they do a phone call 30 days afterward."
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken also testified on Capitol Hill during a budget hearing in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and while discussing the fentanyl crisis said the issue is also a growing problem in Mexico.
Morgan said that concern about the Mexicans shows how the administration's "whole platform" is not one of America first, but "everybody else."
"That's why we've had millions and millions of illegal aliens enter this country, and that's why we've handed operation control of this border [over] because it's America last, it's everybody else first."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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