A whistleblower who worked at President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services (HHS) says the federal government is facilitating a “multi-billion-dollar child trafficking operation” at the United States-Mexico border that delivers migrant children to traffickers, abusers, and others looking to exploit them.
On Wednesday, House Judiciary Subcommittee Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Chair Tom McClintock (R-CA) held a hearing with experts and whistleblowers regarding the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) program, overseen by the Biden administration, that releases migrant children to sponsors throughout American communities.
Tara Lee Rodas, who worked at HHS in 2021 before blowing the whistle on the UAC program, testified that the federal government is merely a “middleman” in a migrant child trafficking operation that has proven lucrative for the Mexican drug cartels and the sponsors the children end up living with inside the U.S.
“Today, children will work overnight shifts at slaughterhouses, factories, and restaurants to pay their debts to smugglers and traffickers,” Rodas testified:
Today, children will be sold for sex. Today, children will call a hotline to report they are being abused, neglected, and trafficked. For nearly a decade, unaccompanied children have been suffering in the shadows. [Emphasis added]
I must confess; I knew nothing about their suffering until 2021 when I volunteered to help the Biden administration with the crisis at the southern border. As part of Operation Artemis, I was deployed to the Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake Site in California to help the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) reunite children with sponsors in the U.S. [Emphasis added]
I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes. Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with being recruited in their home country, smuggled to the U.S. border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to a sponsors – some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations. Some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income — this is why we are witnessing an explosion of labor trafficking. [Emphasis added]
In one case, Rodas said a female UAC was found to be living with an adult female claiming to be her aunt but whom the girl had never met. The woman was acting as the girl’s pimp as she was made to work in prostitution.
Rodas accused Biden’s HHS of doing “everything they could to keep all of this silent” including retaliating against her when she blew the whistle on the sheer number of UACs trafficked and exploited by sponsors with the help of the federal government.
“Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the U.S. government has become the middleman in a large-scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children,” Rodas said.
“Realizing that we were not offering children the American dream, but instead putting them into modern-day slavery with wicked overlords was a terrible revelation,” she continued. “These children are a captive victim population, with no access to law enforcement or knowledge of their rights. They are extorted, exploited, abused, neglected, and trafficked. This is why I blew the whistle.”
As Breitbart News has chronicled, the UAC program is reportedly helping funnel migrant children into a labor trafficking pipeline where sponsors force them to take brutal jobs to pay off debts to cartel smugglers and themselves.
In a handful of cases noted by the New York Times, adult male sponsors were found to be sponsoring multiple UACs, only to have them take hard-labor jobs once they arrived in their care. Those jobs include construction work, industrial plants with dangerous chemicals, and food processing facilities, among others.
Other cases reported by the Times show a trend where sponsors use migrant children to pay them back debts. In one case, a 12-year-old male UAC was made to work after arriving in his sponsor’s care. That same sponsor had already sponsored at least five other UACs.
Whistleblowers like Rodas said they warned the Biden administration of such abuses in the UAC program that appeared to be migrant child labor trafficking but received radio silence, and often, employment retribution for doing so.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.