The vetting system is broken.
An El Cajon shelter for unaccompanied migrant children reported seven runaway children to police in 2017, but reported only three of those to the California Department of Social Services, which oversees such facilities.
The facility, known as Casa San Diego, is run by a Texas-based nonprofit organization, Southwest Key, which contracts with the federal government to provide care to children who either show up at the U.S.-Mexico border without any parents or who are separated from their legal guardians by U.S. immigration officials.
The shelter houses about 65 children ages 6 to 17 at Broadway and Oro Street in El Cajon. Southwest Key operates 27 such shelters for unaccompanied migrant children across California, Arizona and Texas.[…]
In one of the cases unreported to the state, the minor returned to the shelter the same day he ran away, police records show. In another case, one that Southwest Key did report to Social Services, the minor turned out to be a 24-year-old man.
El Cajon police officers found the individual the same day he ran away at a nearby restaurant, and determined he was actually an adult man pretending to be a child in the facility, police records show.
“Juvenile detained at taco shop,” the El Cajon Police Department report says. “States he is actually 24 years old and went to get food.”
The police report says the agency called Border Patrol to take custody of the man.