Former US President Donald Trump blamed Vice President Kamala Harris during a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on Friday, accusing her of being responsible for the fate of thousands of children who entered the US illegally and getting sidetracked here.
Trump alleged that many of these children are now missing, dead, or being exploited as sex slaves, and all because of the Biden administration and Harris.
Speaking to the rally crowd in the key battleground state, Trump claimed that approximately 325,000 minors who crossed the border illegally are now unaccounted for by federal officials. “Think of the number—325,000 children are missing. Many are dead. Many are involved in sex operations. Many are working as slaves in different parts of probably this country,” Trump said.
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“She was the border czar. Now she says, ‘I wasn’t the border czar,’ but she was. It was headlines—‘border czar,’ ‘border czar’—but now she doesn’t want that term. But whether she was border czar or not, she was in charge of the border. 325,000 children are missing.”
Thousands of migrant children missing after failing to appear in court
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general revealed that 323,000 migrant children under the age of 18 have either failed to appear for immigration court hearings or were released from custody but have not been contacted for further proceedings.
The controversy surrounding unaccompanied migrant children began shortly after President Joe Biden took office when his administration allowed them to remain in the US rather than being deported under a COVID-19-era health policy that had been in place under Trump. Biden’s aides described this approach as more humane, but critics argued that it incentivized greater numbers of unaccompanied minors—many of them in their late teens—to cross the border.
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Investigative reports later uncovered troubling details about the fate of many of these children. Some were placed by the Department of Health and Human Services with individuals who treated them as indentured servants, forcing them to work instead of attending school. Disturbingly, some of these minors were made to clean sharp equipment in slaughterhouses for overnight shifts.
