As President-Elect Donald Trump prepares to take office in less than 60 days with a plan to initiate the “largest deportation operation in history”, it’s important to reflect on the policies which lead to the current immigration crisis.
On November 19th, U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana released a report accusing the Biden administration of failing to “secure the southern border” resulting in the exploitation and abuse of migrant children.
The report, The Biden-Harris Administration’s Failure to Protect Unaccompanied Children from Abuse and Exploitation, lays the blame for the crisis at the feet of the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and the Department of Labor (DOL). Cassidy says the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies led to the current situation where thousands of unaccompanied children have fallen prey human trafficking and forced labor.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had the power to prevent the exploitation of children by securing the southern border. Unfortunately, Democrats treated the border crisis as a messaging issue for their presidential campaign rather than address the humanitarian catastrophe that has resulted from failed Biden-Harris policies,” Cassidy stated.
Cassidy’s report concluded that the Biden administration took several steps over the years which altered the process by which unaccompanied children are assigned a guardian, often known as a sponsor. Typically, the sponsors must be a family member or family friend who has undergone a vetting process, including a background check.
However, Cassidy says the Biden administration weakened the sponsor vetting process, including by working with a third-party contractor, The Providencia Group (TPG), which has an “abysmal record providing similar services to ORR in the past”. Cassidy also accuses the ORR under the Biden administration of refusing to cooperate with Congressional investigations into their sponsor vetting process.
In August, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released their own report blaming Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for failing to consistently “monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children” (UCs) once they are released from federal government custody.
The OIG report says that between 2019 and 2023, 448,000 UCs were transferred from ICE to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). More than 32,000 UCs did not appear for follow up immigration court hearings during that same period. This means that ICE was unable to confirm whether these children were still with their sponsors or whether they were safe.
“Based on our audit work and according to ICE officials, UCs who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” the OIG report states. The OIG also notes that the number of unaccounted for children may have been “much larger”, but, due to ICE’s failure to issue Notice to Appear in court to all UCs the changes of contacting and monitoring the children to verify their safety is limited.
“Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” the report concluded.
While there may be a tendency to view these reports as nothing more than bipartisan political theater, the dangers posed to migrant children have been known for years.
“The Exploitation Crisis”
In July 2024, Senator Cassidy and Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) hosted a roundtable titled The Exploitation Crisis: How the US Gov’t Fails to Protect Migrant Children from Trafficking & Abuse. The Senators took aim at the HHS’ Unaccompanied Children (UC) program, claiming the UC program allowed thousands of unaccompanied migrant children to be lost in the system and/or handed over to criminals.
Senator Grassley said that beginning in 2015 he received whistleblower information warning about minors being released to sponsors with criminal records, including domestic violence and child molestation.
“I asked this during a February 2016 Judiciary Committee hearing on this issue, and I quote myself, “How many more minors have been released into the care of others who claim to be their parents or family friends who don’t really care about their well-being?”, Grassley recalled at the July 2024 hearing.
Grassley noted that when he was chair of the Senate Finance Committee he worked with the Democratic Senator Ron Wyden on an oversight investigation into these issues and found that HHS failed to conduct oversight necessary to protect unaccompanied children from sexual and physical abuse at its shelters.
“Unfortunately, children are still suffering, and HHS has failed to get its act together,” Grassley stated at the time.
Senators Grassley, Johnson, and Cassidy invited several witnesses to testify at the roundtable, including HHS UC program whistleblowers Tara Rodas and Deborah White, Florida’s Department of Children and Families Secretary Shevaun Harris, and criminology expert Dr. Jarrod Sadulski.
Both Rodas and White confirmed that the Biden administration’s Office of Refugee Resettlement failed to vet sponsors before giving them guardianship over unaccompanied children.
Tara Rodas worked as federal volunteer at the Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake Site in Pomona, California. In this role she placed unaccompanied minor children with sponsors in the U.S. After she began to express concerns about corners being cut to more rapidly place children with sponsors, including allowing MS-13 gang members to sponsor children, Rodas says she was silenced, removed from her position, and escorted from the agency.
“If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I do not believe I could accept that a federal government agency is responsible for using billions of taxpayer dollars annually to put children in to the homes of gang members. It is shocking and shameful,” she stated.
Rodas also described a situation where a young girl from Guatemala was being sponsored by an older man claiming to be her brother. After the girl was released to her sponsor, Rodas says she found pictures on the sponsors social media where he was touching the girl inappropriately. “It was clear her sponsor was not her brother,” Rodas said. Further, Rodas claimed the ORR federal field specialist said the girl “looked drugged” and that her sponsor made posts on social media as if “she was for sale”.
Rodas and her colleague Deborah White, a federal employee with the HHS’ ORR program, claim they first discovered a case of child trafficking across the border in June 2021, but nothing was done.
Instead, White said the children continued to be sent to dangerous locations with unvetted sponsors. White called the ORR program “the biggest failure in government history that I have ever witnessed”. White claimed the HHS’ ORR leadership allowed children to be trafficked under their watch.
“What I discovered was horrifying: children were being trafficked with billions of taxpayer dollars by a contractor failing to vet sponsors and process children safely, with government officials complicit in it,” Deborah White stated during the roundtable.
White recalled situations where children are sent to abandoned or nonexistent houses. “In Michigan, a child was sent to an open field, even after we reported making an 911 call after hearing someone screaming for help, yet the child was still sent,” White stated.
White also said she was admonished when she brought her concerns about fake identification documents to her superiors.
“We never saw sponsors face-to-face, and fake documents were rampant. When we questioned documents, HHS ORR leadership said, ‘You’re not fake ID experts, and your job is not to investigate the sponsor. Your job is to reunify the child with the sponsor’,” White said.
“Contacting the Guatemalan consulate in regards to fake documents resulted in a reprimand by an HHS ORR official stating ‘That’s not your job, and you are never to contact the consulate again.’ When I checked on a child’s welfare at another facility I was told, ‘Do not do that again. Once these children leave here…they’re gone and they are no longer your responsibility.’”
Dr. Jarrod Sadulski, an associate professor in the School of Security and Global Studies with two decades in the field of criminal justice and a master’s degree in criminal justice from American Military University, also testified about his interviews with child traffickers. Sadulski warned about the danger of criminals harvesting organs from unaccompanied minors.
“I’ve interviewed former sex traffickers who are currently incarcerated in the U.S. and abroad. Sadly, I’ve found that there is a market for juvenile organ harvesting. Unaccompanied minors are especially vulnerable, en route to the border, of this threat,” Sadulski stated.
He also claimed to have found a case where a trafficker harvested a 12-year-old’s eye for $15,000 in Mexico.
NGOs and Cherokee Federal
Throughout the July roundtable the witnesses mention Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as playing a vital role in the trafficking of unaccompanied minor children. Specifically, Tara Rodas and Deborah White refer to Cherokee Federal as being complicit in the horrific practices of releasing children to dangerous people posing as sponsors.
“The program prioritized speed over safety. HHS, ORR, and Cherokee Federal, the prime contractor, created a quote-unquote Strike Team to remove children faster, ignoring warnings that came from case managers that children were being trafficked,” said Deborah White. “Please understand, this is taxpayer funded child slavery. Sanctioned by our government and brought to you by NGOs like Cherokee Federal,”
Cherokee Federal is a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based government contractor owned by the Cherokee Nation Business, itself a subsidiary of the Cherokee Nation. According to USAspending, the Cherokee Nation received a contract with a total value of more than $706 million for handling migrant processing from April 27, 2021 to Nov. 19, 2021 at the Pomona Emergency Intake Site in Ponoma, California.
The facility in Pomona began receiving migrants in April 2021. However, the contract was terminated earlier than expected, and the government stopped sending UCs to the Pomona facility in October 2021.
One week after the roundtable accused Cherokee Federal of involvement in trafficking, Steven Bilby, president of Cherokee Federal, defended the NGOs work in front of the Tribal Council’s Executive and Finance Committee. Bilby also released a public statement claiming there was “extensive oversight on this contract from multiple state, local and federal agencies”.
CNB CEO Chuck Garrett also told the Cherokee Tribal Committee that Cheroke Federal was “caught in the middle of the national immigration debate. It has resulted in outrageous and false associations. There is zero evidence and zero basis for these claims,” Garrett stated.
Chuck Hoskin, Jr. Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, also released a statement condemning the whistleblower testimony:
“The allegations raised by roundtable participants are shameful, sickening, and unequivocally false. The Cherokee Nation and its subsidiary entities have not and would never traffic children,” Hoskin, Jr. wrote. “Case managers in Pomona were trained to precisely follow all federal guidelines and policies to vet parents and sponsors, including criminal background checks.”
In August, two months after the initial roundtable, U.S. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma was questioned about the role of Cherokee Federal and the accusations of their involvement with trafficking. Lankford serves on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence and was at the July roundtable.
“I’ve done some followup on that. Here’s the tough part with Cherokee Federal: Cherokee Federal was drawn into this,” Lankford said. “They don’t actually do the selection of where those kids go. Health and Human Services actually do the final selection.”
Regardless of whether or not Cherokee Federal was wrongly implicated in the shortcoming of the HHS’ ORR program, the fact remains that the policies set by the federal government are to blame. NGOs like Cherokee Federal were likely overwhelmed due to the Biden administration’s immigration policies welcoming tens of thousands of migrants into the U.S. However, these policies predate the presidency of Joe Biden.
Warnings Have Been Building Since 2012
The statements made by whistleblowers echo what recent reporting from The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal has uncovered.
In February 2023, NYT journalist Hannah Dreier reported that HHS data obtained by The Times showed the agency had lost contact with more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children. Dreier’s reporting was part of the series Alone and Exploited which explored the life of migrant children who crossed the U.S. border without parents and often end up being exploited.
Her series highlighted the experiences of migrant children who end up working “some of the most punishing jobs in the country” as part of child labor schemes enacted by their sponsors.
“This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota,” Dreier reported.
As part of her investigation, Dreier and colleagues spoke with more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states. They describe working jobs late into the night to the point of exhaustion, living in fear of being permanently trapped in these circumstances. The Times also interviewed hundreds of lawyers, social workers, educators, and law enforcement officials who confirmed the stories.
According to data obtained by Dreier and The Times, the HHS could not reach more than 85,000 children in follow up calls to their sponsors.
Dreier’s 2023 reporting confirms what Tara Rodas and Deborah White would share at the July 2024 roundtable — the Department of Health and Human Services failed to ensure the sponsors of these children protected them from abuse and exploitation. Her reporting also confirms that the Biden White House “ramped up demands on staffers to move the children quickly out of shelters and release them to adults”. This led to rushing through vetting sponsors, including skipping background checks.
In response to the reporting the Biden administration announced a crackdown on child labor exploitation while the U.S. Congress and the Department of Labor launched their own investigations.
Dreier’s investigations would be nominated by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Despite the recognition of her investigative work, the Biden administration and some of the corporate media have denied aspects of the reporting.
In March 2023, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra challenged Republican senators for using the 85,000 figure.
“Those statistics that you’ve mentioned, as I said previously, in regards to another question by one of your colleagues, those are those are unfamiliar to me,” Becerra state during a Congressional hearing. “I have no idea where those statistics come from, if they’re based in reality or not. And we do everything we can to make sure any child, before we allow them to be released to a sponsor, that that sponsor has been vetted.”
In response to Becerra, Dreier shared a video clip of his statements and responded, “In several congressional hearings, HHS Secretary Becerra has been asked about our reporting that HHS couldn’t reach 85,000 migrant children right after releasing them. He says he doesn’t know where those numbers come from. For what it’s worth, they’re from the HHS press office.”
While it is true that some independent media outlets have used salacious headlines for clickbait, there is a real problem with the HHS’ process for finding unaccompanied minors appropriate sponsors, as well as the follow up process.
For example, Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) director Robin Dunn Marcos was questioned by Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) at an April 2023 Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing regarding the ORR program.
“I would like to set the record straight, we did not lose anyone. We provide safety and well-being calls between 30 and 37 days after release,” Dunn Marcos stated. He also emphasized that “ORR’s custodial authority ends when they are discharged to a vetted sponsor.” Dunn Marcos stated that HHS “have a number of things in place where we try to maintain contact.”
When Grothman pressed Dunn Marcos on the 85,000 number he repeated that ORR custodial authority ends after a child is discharged to a sponsor but did not deny that the agency has failed to contact many of the children after finding them a sponsor.
A July 2024 investigation by the Wall Street Journal also confirmed similar problems and lack of oversight during the Biden administration.
Unfortunately, this problem predates the Biden administration.
In January 2016, the Associated Press detailed how the Obama administration was overwhelmed by tens of thousands of children fleeing violence in Central America. In response the wave of unaccompanied children, the HHS under Obama “lowered its safety standards” so they could “swiftly move children out of government shelters” and into custody of sponsors.
“The procedures were increasingly relaxed as the number of young migrants rose in response to spiraling gang and drug violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, according to emails, agency memos and operations manuals obtained by AP, some under the Freedom of Information Act,” the AP reported.
The investigation found that the U.S. government stopped fingerprinting many adults who were claiming children. In 2014, HHS stopped asking for copies of birth certificates to prove sponsors’ identities, and later chose not to use forms asking sponsors for personal and identifying information before handing the children over. Finally, the HHS stopped using FBI criminal background checks for many sponsors.
As a result of these policy changes, the AP was able to identify “more than two dozen children” who were placed in homes where they were sexually abused, trafficked for labor, or severely abused and neglected.
The AP noted that contractors warned HHS in 2012 about the “steady increase” in children appearing at the border. By 2014 the overwhelming number of unaccompanied minors had become a “full-blown crisis”.
The AP investigation was the impetus for a bipartisan congressional report which concluded the U.S. government failed to protect child migrants from trafficking. As more recent reports have noted, the U.S. government failed to conduct background checks before handing over children to adult sponsors.
Is Trump’s Militarization of the Border and Military Deportation the Solution?
With the American public — and a growing number of politicians from the right and left — finally reckoning with the immigration crisis, President-Elect Donald Trump has promised to put an end to the influx of illegal immigrants and child trafficking. Unfortunately, the solutions being promoted by Trump are likely to lead to curtailing of civil liberties of Americans while failing to address the root of the problems.
The reality is that the border crisis has been allowed to fester to the point of Americans demanding something be done about the child trafficking problem, not to mention violent crime from illegal immigrants, and ridiculous policies which allow violent, repeat offenders to roam American streets. Now that the domestic population is pumped full of fear based on half-truths and often exaggerated claims of immigrant-caused violence, the solution of a smart border wall with facial recognition cameras and biometric scanning can be presented as the solution.
A “smart” or “virtual” border wall has been supported by Trump and the Biden administration. In February 2021, The Last American Vagabond reported that more than 40 privacy, immigrants rights, and civil liberties organizations called on the Biden administration to abandon a bill which would extend the Trump administration’s border policy, particularly the ongoing creation of a “virtual” or biometric wall.
Trump has also promised to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history”. If enacted, Trump’s deportation operation is likely to lead to a massive increase in police state measures by the federal government.
Trump’s current answer to the immigration crisis is to call for the creation of a massive network of temporary holding facilities and camps as he empowers the national guard and/or the military to round up individuals accused of violating immigration laws. Former Trump administration officials told the Washington Post in early 2024 that he was “obsessed with having the military involved”.
“As a model, he points to an Eisenhower-era program known as ‘Operation Wetback,’ using a derogatory slur for Mexican migrants. The operation used military tactics to round up and remove migrant workers, sometimes transporting them in dangerous conditions that led to some deaths. Former administration officials and policy experts said staging an even larger operation today would face a bottleneck in detention space — a problem that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other allies have proposed addressing by building mass deportation camps.”
Last week Trump confirmed he will call for using the military to lead the deportation operation. While many Republicans are celebrating the move, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has pushed back against the notion, warning conservatives that it was a “terrible image”.
“I’m not in favor of sending the Army in uniforms into our cities to collect people,” Paul told Newsmax host Rob Schmitt. “I think it’s a terrible image and that’s not what we use our military for, we never have and it’s actually been illegal for over 100 years to bring the Army into our cities.”
Paul emphasized that he would not support an emergency declaration to “put the Army into our cities”, calling the move a huge mistake.
Source: The Last American Vagabond
Derrick Broze, a staff writer for The Last American Vagabond, journalist, author, documentary film maker, public speaker, and activist. He is the founder of The Conscious Resistance Network, an independent media outlet dedicated to investigative journalism, and the intersection of liberty and spirituality. Derrick is the author of the underground best-seller How to Opt-Out of the Technocratic State. He is also the writer, director, and narrator of the 17-part documentary series, The Pyramid of Power.
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