Report: Immigrant Children With Tuberculosis Being Released Into US
Critics of the Biden administration have long cited the spread of crime, drug and disease as common reasons that more needs to be done to regulate immigration into the United States.
That argument has been bolstered by recent revelations that almost 2,500 undocumented immigrant minors infected with tuberculosis have been released across 44 states within the past year alone.
In total, the Department of Health and Human Services has reportedly released roughly 126,000 children, meaning that roughly 1 in 50 had been diagnosed with latent infections. Once they left HHS custody, there were no guarantees that these ill children would receive proper treatment or that the local community would be informed of the risk.
For its part, the federal agency insists that it is not possible to provide the treatment, which can last for as long as nine months, since HHS employees only have custody of them for a limited amount of time. Once released, it is up to the child’s sponsor to take care of his or her medical needs.
The Virginia Department of Health was candid in its assessment of the situation, asserting: “{We do not know how often the sponsors follow through on treatment. By the time outreach takes place, the child has sometimes moved to another area or state.”
The troubling details about HHS protocol came to light after a court appointed Aurora Miranda-Maese to serve as a monitor and compile a report about the treatment of unaccompanied alien children. She found that a rapid churn of incoming and outgoing immigrants means that tuberculosis is just one of several diseases that are insufficiently treated by government workers.
Miranda-Maese concluded that minors infected with latent tuberculosis do not receive proper treatment “because the average length of stay is typically shorter than the time required to complete treatment, and because there could be negative effects from discontinuing … treatment before completion, such as developing drug-resistant TB.”
As Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas tacitly admitted, undocumented immigrants receive a perverse form of preferential treatment compared to immigrants who attempt to enter the country through the proper legal channels.
Whereas legal immigrants are required to undergo screenings for tuberculosis and certain other diseases before being admitted into the U.S., those who arrive illegally are only instructed to be tested within 90 days of entering the country.
