'Taxpayer-funded child slavery': Whistleblowers raise alarm on trafficking of migrant children
Two whistleblowers testified during a roundtable discussion on Capitol Hill Tuesday that the Office of Refugee Resettlement under the Biden administration failed to properly vet sponsors responsible for the care of unaccompanied migrant children, resulting in thousands of children being lost or handed over to potential criminals.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., hosted a roundtable meeting titled “The Exploitation Crisis: How the U.S. Government is Failing to Protect Migrant Children from Trafficking and Abuse.” The roundtable featured testimonies from Deborah White and Tara Lee Rodas, two U.S. Department of Health and Human Services whistleblowers.
At one point during the hearing, Johnson cited a February 2023 report from The New York Times stating that the HHS could not locate over 85,000 migrant children who had been released to a purported sponsor. The Republican lawmaker also asserted that the situation is no “accident,” stating that the Biden administration’s “open border policies” are responsible.
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The HHS and Office of Refugee Resettlement did not respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment. This article will be updated if a response is received.
White, who worked in the HHS’ Unaccompanied Child Program, testified that she discovered several instances of human trafficking involving child migrants. The whistleblower said she and her colleague, Rodas, found out about the first case of human trafficking of minors who had come across the border in June 2021.
According to White, despite reporting the human trafficking case, “children continued to be sent to dangerous locations with improperly vetted sponsors.”
White told senators that she had reported on a case involving more than 329 children being sent to live in two garden apartments in Houston, Texas, where she found instances of human trafficking taking place.
Another case of improperly vetted sponsors resulted in at least 12 children being sent to one sponsor in Florida who had multiple addresses. White also said that many children were sent to abandoned homes or nonexistent addresses.
“Children were sent to addresses that were abandoned houses or nonexistent in some cases,” White said. “In Michigan, a child was sent to an open field, even after we reported making a 911 call after hearing someone screaming for help, yet the child was still sent.”
White said when she expressed concerns about contractor failures and asked to see the contract, she was told not to ask for it again. The HHS whistleblower testified that she then had to take it upon herself to create trainings that would equip case managers to flag cases of human trafficking or sexual abuse. She also claimed that ORR officials never met with sponsors face-to-face and that fraudulent documents were “rampant.”
“Please understand,” White said. “This is nothing less than taxpayer-funded child slavery, sanctioned by the government.”
Rodas also testified that ORR often sent children to live with “random people” who were unvetted. One example of such a case was the story of a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl who she referred to as “Carmen” during the hearing. Carmen’s sponsor claimed that he was her older brother, and she was subsequently released from the unaccompanied children program to live with him in North Carolina.
The girl later appeared in a photo on the sponsor’s social media in which he was “touching her inappropriately.” Rodas stressed it was “very clear” that the man was not her brother. When Carmen appeared on her sponsor’s social media page again, Rodas recalled that the teenager’s shirt was unbuttoned, and she appeared to be alone.
A federal field specialist said Carmen seemed to be drugged and looked like she was for sale. According to Rodas, it was later discovered that the teenager’s sponsor had other social media accounts containing child pornography.
In response to the reports of human trafficking and child sexual abuse, Cassidy accused the Biden administration of refusing to cooperate with the investigation into child trafficking and had attempted to block one ORR contractor, The Providencia Group, from responding to the lawmaker’s inquiries.
“The exploitation of children should not be partisan. This is not a Republican or Democratic issue. When vulnerable children are harmed or die at the expense of bad policies, everyone should be outraged. Everyone should be seeking to do things better,” Cassidy stated.
In 2023, the Department of Labor reported that nearly 6,000 child migrants were working in violation of federal labor laws. Another report released this year by the HHS OIG found various instances where ORR officials had failed to comply with vetting requirements for sponsors.
Samantha Kamman is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter: @Samantha_Kamman
