NRO has discovered that the Department of Justice has court receipts for only 4 in 10 illegal alien children who have been apprehended in the last two years  The receipts - Notices to Appear - are the way that DoJ keeps track of the illegals that have been released by HHS.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show more than 85,000 total apprehensions of unaccompanied alien children during fiscal year 2013 and fiscal year 2014 through June. Information from the same time period provided to National Review Online by the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review shows 41,592 total receipts marked as juvenile in immigration courts. Kathryn Mattingly, spokesperson for EOIR, tells NRO the receipts refer to new Notices to Appear (NTA) — the document the Department of Homeland Security uses to charge an illegal immigrant with being removable from the United States.

EOIR has recorded 20,814 receipts marked as juvenile in fiscal year 2014 as of June 30, but Border Patrol recorded 57,525 apprehensions of unaccompanied alien children during the same time frame. This means immigration courts have receipts for fewer than four out of every ten unaccompanied alien children apprehended by Border Patrol this fiscal year. Mattingly said EOIR stands behind the numbers of receipts it has recorded, but would not speak about the difference between the number of juvenile receipts and CBP’s apprehension data.

Within DHS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have the authority to charge unaccompanied alien children. An ICE spokesperson declined to comment on this story, and a USCIS spokesperson referred questions to DHS, which did not respond to requests for comment. A CBP spokesperson responded to NRO’s requests in an e-mail with a link to apprehension data publicly available on CBP’s website but did not provide comment about the number of NTAs issued to illegal-immigrant children.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, tells NRO it is difficult to determine how much of the discrepancy in apprehensions and receipts appears deliberate and how much resulted because federal officials were overwhelmed with work. “But I think it’s really willful negligence on the part of DHS leadership to allow this already dysfunctional system to become even more overwhelmed,” she says. “It’s just like deliberate chaos.”  

"Deliberate"? Not impossible, but doubtful. Far more likely is that agents were too busy changing diapers, feeding infants, and trying to keep order in the chaos of the detention centers to do the paperwork on the kids.

It's not surprising that no one in the government wants to talk about this massive incompetence and failure. The sad fact is that tens of thousands of these kids are now beyond the reach of the system and have disappeared down a black hole never to emerge.