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As the carnage wrought by the Biden-Harris open borders policies and it’s real-world cost to Americans continues to unravel, the news cycle continues to grow more fraught and more frustrating. As RedState reported, the illegal immigrant who raped and murdered Athens, Georgia nursing student Laken Riley was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole. 

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While justice was done, the fact that had it not been for the deliberate opening of our borders to unvetted evildoers like Jose Ibarra, Laken Riley, and others would be alive today.

Congress is seeking further reckoning, particularly in the case of the over 320,000 unaccompanied minors outlined in an Inspector General report, who came through the Southern border under Vice President and Border Czar Kamala Harris’ watch but have since disappeared. HHS has no idea where they may have ended up.

On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra appeared before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement to give testimony on this. The Refugee Resettlement Office, which is under the aegis of HHS and which he supposedly manages, was responsible for these missing children. Becerra is as stupid as he is craven and has spent a good part of the last year fundraising in California for his potential gubernatorial run. So, of course, his canned and practiced responses were made to dodge accountability rather than illuminate what went wrong.  

That is until Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) questioned him. 

Roy decimated Becerra on the horrific record of the Refugee Resettlement Office’s failure to actually do background and FBI criminal background checks, which allowed gang members and murderers to slip through the cracks along with those children who are now missing. 

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“Mr. Secretary, how can you credibly claim that HHS is working to protect these children? …A ‘vetted sponsor’ that rapes and murders the people that they’re entrusted to? …That’s what you think is appropriate care for these children?”

In response to earlier testimony by Becerra that the state of Florida would not cooperate with HHS in refugee resettlement, Roy read from a Florida grand jury report which blew a hole in Becerra’s puffery.

CHIP ROY: On March 29, 2023, a Florida grand jury released a report detailing the impact of the UAC (unaccompanied minors) influx at the Southern border. The grand jury made some of the following conclusions of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the component agency within HHS entrusted to you, Mr. Secretary. 

Excerpt, quote: “A disturbing pattern has emerged whereby the same sponsor applies to receive multiple UACs sometimes at the same address, sometimes at a different one. Some individual sponsors apply to receive more than one child at more than one address simultaneously. One address in Texas had 44 children sent to it. Another had 25. One sponsor in Bonini Springs, FL had multiple children sent to multiple addresses, and he applied using different versions of his hyphenated surname.” One address in Austin, TX — a town which I represent — had more than 100 UAC released to a single family dwelling. 

Mr. Secretary, is this remotely consistent with the claims by your department that you are doing everything in your power to ensure child security?

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Becerra danced around the question and claimed that all sponsors are vetted, rattling off procedures and processes that anyone could look up on the HHS website. 

BECERRA: Congressman thank you for the question. All potential sponsors, anyone who wishes to apply to sponsor a child must undergo extensive vetting process that follows child welfare best practices. We use a variety of tools, we try to monitor as best we can. And recently through the foundational rule we have established an even more extensive process for vetting as well.

Roy countered with HHS’s foundational rule Becerra so glowingly mentioned. This rule, finalized on April 30, 2024, supposedly strengthened protections for unaccompanied minors.

ROY: Do you believe that the HHS foundational rule from April 30 of 2024 is consistent to what you just said in terms of background checks? Is it sufficient?

BECERRA: The foundational rule is what we built to try to give us a better way to not only care for kids but also to make sure —

Roy interrupted him.

ROY: Does it require full public records background checks?

BECERRA: I’m sorry?

ROY: Does it require full public records background checks and FBI National criminal history checks?

BECERRA: As I said, we follow child welfare best practices…

ROY: Yes or no though? Do you do the full criminal history checks for the potential sponsors for these children?

BECERRA: Well, yes we follow child best practices, best practices…

ROY: Right, the answer’s No.

BECERRA: It’s a Yes. We follow child welfare best practices.

Becerra flat-out lied. Roy was correct, it was not only a “No,” but a big, fat one. Comments made on the foundational rule before it was finalized raised concerns about the lack of requirement and dependence upon FBI National background checks. Roy countered Becerra’s canned answer to a question he was not even asked.

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ROY: That’s not my question, my question is, do you do background checks? The full criminal records public background checks for the FBI National criminal history?

BECERRA: We certainly check for criminal records, we check for sex offender in the sex offender registry, we do, again, the different things that the foundational rule—

ROY: The rule I’m talking about says you do not.

Becerra was actually befuddled, which reflected that he probably never even saw the rule, let alone knew what was written in it.

ROY: The rule that we’re talking about that was released on April 30 2024 says you do not. 

BECERRA:  We do not what?

ROY: That you do not carry out FBI National history checks for all potential sponsors.

BECERRA: We do background checks on every individual.

ROY: Right, but that’s a slippery description. What I’m saying is this rule is pretty clear and what it’s saying is that you do not provide the kind of background checks, which by the way, has created a problem.

Roy then brought the receipts. In 2023, Maria Gonzalez, an 11-year-old from Pasadena, TX was raped and murdered by Juan Carlos Garcia Rodriguez who had crossed over the Southern border, but whose sponsor was supposedly in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

A warrant was issued for his arrest, and he was taken into custody by police in Shreveport, La. He will be extradited back to Harris County. 

April Aguirre, a community advocate in Pasadena, spoke to FOX 26 on behalf of the family Saturday and thanks the community members for stepping up to help police make an arrest.

“We passed out hundreds of fliers, and the image of that individual was blasted all over town and nationally,” says Aguirre.  “People started reporting sightings. Our law enforcement can only be as efficient as the partnership is with the community.”

Maria was found dead on Aug. 12 at an apartment in the 1000 block of Main in Pasadena.

[…]

On Friday, police identified Garcia-Rodriguez as a person of interest in the case and asked for the public’s help to locate him. According to police, the 18-year-old was living at the same apartment complex but left.

Aguirre says Garcia-Rodriguez, an immigrant from Guatemala, was only at the complex for three weeks and just arrived in the states a few months before. She was told the 18-year-old had a sponsor in Baton Rouge.

“When you have someone who is undocumented, you can’t trace a credit or debit card, and you don’t have any particular plates on a car that’s owned. It’s like chasing a ghost,” she says.

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Roy then mentioned the 2022 rape and murder of 20-year-old Kayla Hamilton in Maryland by Salvadorean illegal immigrant Walter Javier Martinez, who was part of the violent MS-13 gang. 

On July 27, 2022, Hamilton’s boyfriend found her brutally murdered inside an Aberdeen mobile home.

The 20-year-old, who was diagnosed with Autism, was raped, tied up, and strangled with a phone cord.

DNA evidence collected from Hamilton’s clothing led to a teenage El Salvadorian national named Walter Javier Martinez, whose identity remained under seal until Wednesday.

[…]

Detectives soon learned Martinez was a member of the notorious crime gang MS-13 with an extremely violent past.

He reportedly was smuggled into the United States illegally back in March of 2022, just four months before Hamilton’s death.

Roy then went for Becerra’s jugular.

ROY: Mr. Secretary, how can you credibly claim that HHS is working to protect these children. And by the way, children we’re talking about in the order of magnitude of 400 and something thousand children which you are dismissing that they are lost.

Let me ask you a very specific question, Mr. Secretary: Can you account for the whereabouts of those 400 and something thousand children? The 320,000 that were put in the report by the Inspector General, the 85,000 that we talked about before in 2023, do you know where all of these children are and that they are safe—Yes or No?!

Becerra retreated back to his procedures and process, then blatantly claimed that once the children are with a “vetted sponsor” HHS loses custody.

What?!

BECERRA: Congressman, as I explained the process. We get these kids when they are referred to us by the Department of Homeland Security. We then provide them with care while they are in our custody. We lose custody of those kids once we find a vetted sponsor with whom they can stay.

ROY: A vetted sponsor that rapes and murders the people that they’re entrusted to because you’ve issued a rule that doesn’t even do the background check? That’s what you think is the appropriate care for these children? 

BECERRA: We do do background checks…

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As my colleague Brandon Morse has noted, Xavier Becerra has no health or social services background whatsoever. He is an attorney and a politician with a questionable track record, who was confirmed by the Senate without issue, and has been the titular head of this clown car which has lost over 400,000 children placed into the care of supposedly vetted sponsors who never went through an FBI background check, and allowed criminal illegal to slip through with them who went on to murder innocent young women.

Meanwhile, the Left is clutching their pearls over President-elect Donald Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as HHS Secretary because he’s a dangerous vaccine skeptic who spouts conspiracy theories. 

Take all the seats.

January 20 cannot come soon enough for many of us, but especially for those children who, if they are still alive, are in dire need of rescue. 

The full five minutes of Chip Roy eviscerating Becerra is a palate cleanser.

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