Whistle-Blower Account Contradicts Government’s Claims on Guatemalan Children

More than two dozen children from Guatemala whom the Trump administration sought to deport earlier this month had been flagged as vulnerable to child abuse and human trafficking in a Health and Human Services Department database that tracks unaccompanied children, according to a whistle-blower complaint filed to Congress on Tuesday.

The report, based on accounts of several unidentified federal employees familiar with the data, appeared to contradict a sworn statement made in a lawsuit over the children’s fate by Angie Salazar, a senior health official. She said the children had been properly screened and cleared for repatriation. It also came less than a week after the judge presiding over the case, Timothy J. Kelly, challenged lawyers from the Justice Department about the veracity of another of their central claims in the dispute: that the children’s parents had requested their return.

Filed to Congress by the Government Accountability Project, a whistle-blower protection group, the report said at least 30 of the 327 children the government cleared for imminent removal had “indicators of being a victim of child abuse” in Guatemala, based on the government’s own findings.

The children, who came to the United States as unaccompanied minors in recent years and have been living in shelters or foster care under government supervision, were hastily targeted by the Trump administration over the Labor Day weekend. Upon learning that the children were being loaded onto flights to be sent back, lawyers from the National Immigration Law Center sued to block the removals and a federal judge ordered the government to halt until the case could be argued.

The Trump administration has said it was exercising an authority to reunify unaccompanied children with their parents abroad, claiming that it was acting at the behest of the children’s families and with the children's well-being in mind.

But the report on Tuesday was the second time that notion had been called into question.

Ms. Salazar filed the declaration in her capacity as the acting director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services that maintains custody over minors who enter the United States alone.

It stated that her office had reviewed the cases of all 327 children using a “best interests framework” that included considerations such as whether her office was “assured the child will not be trafficked upon their return” or whether the children had been known to have faced abuse in the past. It added that the government had completed the review and deemed all the children eligible to be sent back to Guatemala, where most or all have parents residing.

But the whistle-blower report countered that the available data about the children made it clear that around 10 percent of them, and possibly more, should not have been eligible under the government’s criteria.

The report stated that as recently as Sept. 5 — the day before the government filed Ms. Salazar’s declaration in federal court — analyses run by her office had returned results showing that many of the children faced dangers in Guatemala or had expressed fear of being sent there. It added that Ms. Salazar “knew or should have known of the inaccuracies in her declaration,” based on the data on hand.

“These whistle-blowers’ disclosures evidence violations of law, rules and regulations, abuse of authority and substantial and specific danger to public health and safety on a matter of urgent, and potentially life and death, importance,” it said.

Lawyers for the Government Accountability Project sent the report on Tuesday to Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Alex Padilla of California, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Border Security and Immigration subcommittee.

“The allegations in the whistle-blower complaint are shocking,” Mr. Padilla said in a statement.

“Sending children back into danger is a betrayal of our moral and legal obligations,” Mr. Padilla’s statement said. “And we’re going to hold them accountable for endangering children.”

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

After the children were nearly flown out over the Labor Day weekend, a judge intervened on an emergency basis, halting the government’s effort. The case was then transferred to Judge Kelly to manage the rest of the proceedings, and he extended the order blocking the government from making further attempts to remove the children until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday.

During a hearing last week to determine how to proceed, Judge Kelly grew skeptical about the government’s position, pressing for details about its claim that the children’s parents had asked for their return.

He homed in on a memo prepared by the Guatemalan government, which was filed as evidence in the case, in which officials tried to contact and survey the children’s parents. Of those they were able to track down, none had asked for their children’s return, with more than half explicitly refusing to authorize any attempt to have their children forced out of the United States.

Asked by Judge Kelly to reconcile the competing claims, a lawyer from the Justice Department conceded that the government had no reason to believe that the parents had asked to have their children returned.