A shocking new report says the Biden-Harris administration is missing more than 320,000 migrant children who crossed the border without their parents.
Countless children released to “qualified sponsors” in the United States are now at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor and other exploitation, according to a report released Monday by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.
As of May 2024, there are 291,000 migrant children who have arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors, but after they are released, they are not given a date to appear in immigration court, meaning there is no way to track their whereabouts.
This is in addition to 32,000 children who Immigration and Customs Enforcement released into the U.S. on the day of their hearing but then failed to show up for court. 14 page report — Tracked for the period October 2018 to September 2023.
A federal whistleblower said he believes many of these vulnerable children may already be in the hands of criminals and sex traffickers.
Tara Rodas, who was hired as a federal employee in 2021 to handle the influx of migrant children at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), believed she was doing a noble job. But she told The Washington Post she was shocked to find that children were being handed over to “human traffickers, members of international crime organizations, bad people, bad, bad, bad people.”
When migrant children cross the border illegally and are apprehended by Border Patrol, they are released to HHS, which helps them connect with sponsors in the United States.
The sponsor doesn’t have to be a family member, and they don’t have to meet in person with HHS officials during the vetting process, which is typically done over the phone, Rodas said.
“At the beginning of the Biden administration, they removed all vetting from the process,” Rodas said.
Rodas told a House committee last month that one of the cases he saw involved a 16-year-old migrant girl who claimed her brother was her sponsor.
“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.”
Some non-family sponsors have been found to be sponsoring multiple children who have been released by HHS, something Rodas called a “red flag.”
In 2023, 344 unaccompanied migrant children released by the Biden administration were found to have been living with non-family sponsors, including at least three migrant children, and hundreds of similar cases were reported. According to NBC News:.
Dr. Jason Piccolo, a former federal agent who blew the whistle in 2015 on the government turning over unaccompanied children to potential criminal offenders, said the recent revelations about the missing children are “deeply disturbing.”
Some of the children released by the federal government into the United States work in exploitative conditions in slaughterhouses and factories. According to multiple media reports.
“All relevant agencies must immediately implement standard operating procedures to track the status and location of each unaccompanied migrant child,” Piccolo said.
“Even one child lost to trafficking is one too many. This systemic failure requires immediate response and reform to ensure the safety of every child in our care,” Piccolo added.
Rodas also said the children themselves are not “screened” and that he has seen cases where adults have gone through the process by falsely representing themselves as minors.
In less than six months, Rodas observed dozens of such cases.
“This is fraud on the part of adults posing as unaccompanied children, as well as fraud on the part of sponsors seeking to sponsor those children. This is very serious.”
The government watchdog report found that of eight ICE offices audited, only one had “attempted to locate” missing migrant children.
“Nobody from Homeland Security has actually looked into it,” Rodas said.
Tragic cases of immigrant crime in the United States also involve illegal immigrant children who have been released to sponsors by the federal government.
One of them is an MS-13 gang member who is suspected of brutally raping and murdering Kayla Hamilton, a young woman with autism, in July 2022 in Maryland.
Her mother, Tammy Nobles, accused HHS of “professional negligence” that “further sealed my daughter’s fate.”
At the border, federal authorities did not check the suspects for gang tattoos, nor did they contact authorities in the suspects’ home country of El Salvador. She testified before Congress In January.
“Had they done so, Salvadoran government authorities would have identified the perpetrator as a known MS-13 gang member with a criminal history,” she said at the time.
Nobles then said HHS officials “were negligent and recklessly failed to verify the legitimate family members or sponsors of the perpetrators before allowing them entry into the United States,” adding that they “allowed an MS-13 gang member to rent a room in a trailer park from another individual who was also an illegal immigrant, even though he was a minor.”
