The Biden administration’s Office of Refugee Resettlement failed to vet sponsors responsible for caring for unaccompanied children apprehended across the border, a whistleblower told senators on Tuesday, describing multiple cases of apparent human trafficking involving minors and their sponsors.
“What I discovered was horrifying: children were being trafficked at the expense of billions of taxpayer dollars; contractors failed to vet sponsors; failed to process children safely; and government employees were complicit,” Deborah White, a federal employee with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), told Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP).
White said she and her colleague Tara Rodas first discovered cases of minors being trafficked across the border in June 2021, but even after they reported them, “children continued to be sent to dangerous places by improperly vetted sponsors.”
“In some cases, children were sent to abandoned buildings or addresses that didn’t exist,” White said. “In Michigan, a child was sent to a vacant lot despite the fact that someone had heard someone screaming for help and called 911.”
“When I expressed concerns about the contractor’s inadequacies and asked to see the contract, I was told, ‘You won’t get a contract, so don’t ask again.’ So I decided to take it upon myself to create training on critical incident reporting of sexual abuse and flagging human trafficking to equip case managers,” she added.
“But children continued to be sent to dangerous places.”
White noted that ORR officials never met in person with sponsors and that document fraud was “rampant.”
Rodas said ORR pairs children with “random people,” which he characterized as people who, in most cases, are not the children’s parents.
She described the case of a 16-year-old girl from Guatemala who claimed her sponsor was her brother.
“He was touching her inappropriately and it was clear that her sponsor was not her brother,” Rodas said, noting that the sponsor’s social media posts made the girl “appear to be on drugs” and as if she was “being sold.”
Rodas said the sponsor also had other social media accounts that contained child pornography that kept her up at night worrying about the girl’s safety.
Florida Department of Children and Families Secretary Shevan Harris told the Senate committee he is “horrified” that fewer than 10 percent of children apprehended crossing the border are released to their parents.
“It defies logic and it’s inhumane,” Harris said.
“When we questioned the documents, HHS ORR officials said, ‘You guys are not experts in fake IDs and it’s not your job to investigate sponsors. Your job is to reunite children with sponsors,'” White told the Senate committee.
The whistleblower alleged that ORR and the Cherokee Confederation, a former prime contractor involved in resettling unaccompanied children, ignored warnings that children were being trafficked as part of efforts to prevent overcrowding at the southern border.
“The Cherokee Confederacy placed several unqualified, unvetted and, frankly, unsafe contractors in contact with vulnerable children who were not given the proper support, services and humanity they deserved after such a dangerous journey,” White said. “I have seen these children, I have interviewed them, and there are stories that will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
She called the ORR program “the biggest failure in the history of government I’ve ever witnessed.”
“HHS ORR leadership and contractors have allowed child trafficking to occur on their watch and continue to be funded by taxpayers,” she added.
“Child exploitation should not be a partisan issue,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) asserted.
“President Biden has the power to prevent this by securing the border and reforming ORR to protect children from harm,” he added. “Unfortunately, Biden has chosen to address the border crisis as a campaign message rather than addressing the humanitarian disaster his policies have created.”
“If child exploitation doesn’t spur the president to act, I don’t know what will.”
HHS and the Cherokee Federation did not immediately respond to The Washington Post’s requests for comment.
