During a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, Tara Lee Rodas, a former Health and Human Services (HHS) official turned whistleblower, alleged that the U.S. government had acted as a “middleman” in a migrant trafficking operation worth billions of dollars at the southern border.
Over the course of two-plus years, after Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President, over 3.5 million undocumented immigrants have crossed the southern border. Since January 2021, border patrol agents have encountered more than 356,000 unaccompanied minors at the southern border, and the majority of them were subsequently released into the United States by the authorities, The Daily Wire revealed on Thursday.
During the hearing, committee members cited a recent article from The New York Times that claimed that HHS was unable to locate over 85,000 children after they were placed with sponsors. The article also contained accusations of unaccompanied minors being forced to work in hazardous conditions in violation of the law.
Rodas, who had previously worked with a government agency’s inspector general’s office, had initially come forward as a whistleblower two years ago. At that time, she had made allegations about witnessing “the horrors of child trafficking and exploitation” firsthand.
Rodas claimed during her testimony that HHS officials would locate a sponsor for migrant children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, who were mostly unauthorized to be in the country. These sponsors would then pay off debts owed to cartels by exploiting the minors through various means such as cheap labor, commercial sex, gangs, and other illicit activities.
“Today, children will work overnight shifts at slaughterhouses, factories, and restaurants to pay their debts to smugglers and traffickers,” she testified. “Today, children will be sold for sex. Today, children will call a hotline to report they are being abused, neglected, and trafficked — and we don’t know if they’re going to get the help they need. For nearly a decade, unaccompanied children have been suffering in the shadows.”
About two years ago, Biden eliminated a policy implemented during the Trump presidency that mandated vetting of sponsors and conducting background checks within the sponsor’s household. According to California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock, many of these sponsors are involved in trafficking the children into the United States in the first place.
As part of Operation Artemus, Rodas volunteered to assist the Biden administration in responding to the crisis at the southern border. Her role involved aiding emergency intakes for refugee resettlement, which aimed to reunite children with sponsors at the Pomona Fairplex in California, The Daily Wire added.
“I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes,” she said. “Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with recruiting and home country smuggling to the U.S. border and ends when [Office of Refugee Resettlement] delivers a child to a sponsor.”
According to Rodas, certain sponsors were identified as belonging to a transnational criminal organization that engages in human trafficking. She testified that these groups viewed children as commodities and assets to generate income.
“Whether it’s intentional or not, it could be argued that the United States government has become the middleman in a large-scale multi-billion dollar child trafficking operation that is run by bad actors seeking to profit off of the lives of children,” she said.
During the hearing, Democratic subcommittee members sought to challenge the veracity of Rodas’ allegations and cast doubts on the accuracy of The New York Times report — the latter of which is something they rarely, if ever, do normally.
During the hearing, lawmakers called upon Robert Carey, a significant witness who had served as the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Obama administration. Carey affirmed that during his tenure, around 90% of children were successfully reunited with their families. However, he did acknowledge that some of the follow-up calls made to sponsors had gone unanswered, The Daily Wire noted.
Last month, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra defended the agency in response to The New York Times report, citing that the agency’s authority is restricted by Congress.
“I have never heard that number of 85,000, I don’t know where it comes from and … so I would say it doesn’t sound at all to be realistic, and what we do is we try and follow up as best we can with these kids,” he said, according to Fox News.
But Jessica Vaughn, who serves as the Director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, told members during the hearing that Becerra had admitted in a video that the department’s objective was to expedite the release of children with minimal questioning, thereby streamlining the process.
“And this assembly line is staffed by crony contractors spending billions of taxpayer dollars on what is now a pipeline for child labor trafficking,” Vaughn said.
