The Washington Times – The government is releasing thousands of illegal immigrant children with latent tuberculosis infections into American communities without assurances of treatment.
Nearly 2,500 children with latent infections were released into 44 states over the past year, according to a court-ordered report on how the Health and Human Services Department is treating the children.
About 126,000 total were released, indicating an infection rate of 1 in 50 migrant children.
The government says it can’t treat the children because they are in custody for a short time and treatment requires three to nine months. HHS releases infected children to sponsors and notifies local health authorities in the hope that they can arrange for treatment before the latent infection becomes active.
Those hopes are often dashed.
Local health officials say the notifications are infrequent and the child has often already arrived when they are told about a case in their jurisdiction.
“We do not know how often the sponsors follow through on treatment,” the Virginia Department of Health told The Washington Times in a statement. “By the time outreach takes place, the child has sometimes moved to another area or state.”
The Times reached out to HHS for this report.
The children in the department’s custody, known in government-speak as unaccompanied alien children, or UACs, are a particularly tricky population.
Under the law, Homeland Security must discharge most children quickly and send them to HHS. The department holds the children in government-contracted shelters while searching for sponsors to take in the children caught at the border without parents.
The system is fraught with problems, including crowded shelters and struggles to find capable and conscientious sponsors. In thousands of cases, the government quickly loses track of the children.
That makes the government’s release of children with latent infections all the more complicated … READ MORE.
