Morgan Luttrell Asks Witness If NGOs Should Be Accountable For Unaccompanied Migrant Children

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During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX) spoke about unaccompanied migrant children.

Transcript

00:00I'm going to point out Mr. Swalwell's point about that young man, and I don't know the

00:13information on it, that he was detained. We have to do a better job, you know, here on

00:19this committee as far as oversight goes. There's multiple problems that I see. We should do

00:27our absolute best in the department to not make mistakes. The number of 325,000 missing

00:36children is a problem. We shouldn't have that problem. My question is to Mr. Howell and Ms.

00:44Harper, when those babies came across the border and were touched by Homeland Security and then

00:51passed on to an NGO, I would think that the NGO should have responsibility of knowing

00:56where those children went, correct?

01:03They should.

01:06Do, are we aware of whether or not the NGOs have records of who took those children

01:10into custody? Because I would think that we should have the NGOs also in front of us

01:15answering those questions so we can find those children.

01:20They should.

01:21Do they?

01:24That would be a great question for the NGOs.

01:28Mr. Howell?

01:29Congressman, in litigation, we have sued the department for record sets kept by the NGOs that

01:33the department has access to. Those record sets do not have a lot of information. That is by design. It

01:39is why the government offloads this responsibility to nonprofits so they don't have to answer your tough

01:44questions and have custody of this derogatory information.

01:48So to clarify your statement, NGOs are not to be held accountable for data aggregation on children

01:57that they move through their organization into custody of someone else?

02:02They absolutely should be held accountable.

02:04I know they should be, but are you saying that they are or are not?

02:07Are not.

02:08And that is in the language that has been created for NGOs to get government grants?

02:13Correct. There are obligations on the recipient of grants to keep statistics, information,

02:19et cetera, and all sorts of other legal obligations that are upon them.

02:27To add to that, they have a contractual accountability, but aside from contractual accountability,

02:34it ends there.

02:39What you got?

02:40Well, that's exactly the problem, because it's not just the fact that we had this massive volume

02:47of people, and so things are obviously going to slip through the cracks. There's no way to

02:51really figure out exactly how many they ran through or how many they processed, because

02:56like Border Patrol at the time and Customs, they were overwhelmed because people had a greater

03:02incentive to arrive illegally because of the policies pursued by the Biden-Harris administration.

03:06So to my understanding, for this committee and moving forward, we need to make sure that

03:11legislation states properly that any NGO, whether or not be it the Catholic organization or

03:17whomever, has to follow certain guidelines and rules, which obviously that is not in place,

03:22correct?

03:22And in order for us to maintain accountability for any and all who come through our border,

03:30child, whomever, into the United States of America, we need to know exactly where they

03:36are at all times, correct?

03:38It should be tied in the contract, along with the grant money, that it has outlined who is

03:42responsible for the data collection and management, whether it's HHS or the NGOs.

03:49And if the NGOs are responsible, it needs to outline the requirements and the expectations

03:54of how to maintain.

03:55So DHS needs to provide those standards to any NGO.

04:01Those NGOs need to have those standards passed on to anybody that's receiving a child.

04:06If they're accepting the grant dollars.

04:08Correct.

04:08So that's our next step.

04:10I would say that's pretty simple, right?

04:11I would say the simpler solution is to stop funding the invasion of the United States.

04:17We can impose the standards.

04:18I don't, okay, I got you, buddy.

04:20I'm trying to go granular on this.

04:22I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I'm trying to fix a problem that exists.

04:24We can bitch about it all day long, which we're just going to beat each other up and

04:27we're not going to go anywhere.

04:28I'm really trying to fix this problem, okay?

04:30So we have to move legislatively in order to solve that problem.

04:35Right.

04:36And H.R. 2 contains a provision which would do a lot of that.

04:39It could also be improved.

04:41Okay, so our next, my next step as a congressional member is to write out legislation that both

04:46sides would agree on in order to fix this problem.

04:49That sounds like a pretty good fix, correct?

04:51Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

04:52I yield back.

04:54Joe.

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