President Joe Biden’s administration has tripled the inflow of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) arriving in the United States, coinciding with a surge in child labor trafficking, an expert told Congress on Wednesday.
During a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, Center for Immigration Studies Director of Policy Jessica Vaughan detailed the size and scope of the UAC program in the first two years since Biden took office.
“Under the Biden policies, the annual number of UACs referred to [Health and Human Services] custody after crossing illegally has tripled from an average of 40,000 a year to more than 120,000 in each of the last two years,” Vaughan said. “Half of the 600,000 unaccompanied minors who have been released into the country since 2012 have arrived on Biden’s watch.”
The UAC program takes migrant children from the southern border and puts them in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) before delivering them to adult sponsors throughout the U.S. — a fraction of whom are their biological parents.
In recent months, details have emerged of a labor trafficking pipeline where UACs are being placed with sponsors who then force them to work brutal jobs to pay debts. In other cases, UACs are being sex trafficked or recruited for gangs.
“Not only did [Biden] relax border controls and suppress immigration enforcement inside the country, when the [UAC] numbers predictably exploded, [Biden] officials responded by gutting what few meager protections for child migrants still existed,” Vaughan said:
As HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra revealed … the goal was to release these kids faster, with fewer questions asked to make it a more efficient assembly line. And this assembly line is staffed by crony contractors spending billions of taxpayer dollars on what is now a pipeline for child labor trafficking. [Emphasis added]
As Breitbart News reported, whistleblowers have said that they warned the Biden administration of the surge in labor trafficking and abuse within the UAC program but have been met with silence or retribution.
In particular, Biden’s Domestic Policy Adviser, Susan Rice, set to step down from her position next month, was named as one of many top officials who seemingly ignored warnings of the labor trafficking pipeline, as well as HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
In February, for instance, reports indicated that HHS had lost track of more than 85,000 UACs after they were turned over to sponsors living throughout the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials have seemingly admitted that many of those lost UACs have ended up in the labor trafficking pipeline.
A month later, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said he had “no idea” whether HHS had lost track of 85,000 UACs in the U.S. — questioning whether the figure is “based in reality or not.”
“We don’t [know what has happened to them,” Vaughan said in her testimony of the 85,000 UACs with whom HHS officials have lost contact.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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