Hundreds of volunteers from several federal law enforcement agencies are going through 65,000 calls to a federally funded Health and Human Services (HHS) hotline where people called with concerns about the treatment of unaccompanied alien children (UAC). The calls were all made during the Biden administration, when the minors were rushed away from the border to avoid TV images of children in cages. Most of the calls were from the minors themselves.
At that time, the Biden administration was allowing children to be placed with almost anyone with minimal vetting. According to HHS whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas, “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 [Office of Refugee Resettlement] delivers a child to a sponsor – some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations.”
“As the Biden administration was assuring Congress and the American people that the 150,000 unaccompanied minor children who entered the U.S. in 2021-22 were placed with people who weren’t ‘fully vetted,‘” I wrote in 2024.
The Associated Press reported that HHS “also failed to provide proof it had conducted basic safety checks – like background checks or address checks – in 16% of the cases, the agency watchdog found.”
Incredible.
And now it appears that the Biden administration did nothing for up to 65,000 UACs who called a hotline for help.
According to HHS, the backlog of calls was discovered in early February, and the effort to follow up and investigate began a few weeks later, even for immigrants who were minors when they entered the U.S. but have since turned 18 and thus are no longer part of ORR’s system.
The hotline calls now being traced piled up for about three years during the Biden administration, according to Trump administration officials. About half a million children crossed the border alone during those three years, and reports from federal watchdog agencies and whistleblower testimony indicated that some children were placed with improperly vetted sponsors. The most serious examples included children who wound up with sponsors who had ties to MS-13 gang members or human traffickers.
“We’re working long hours and clearing up about 1,000 calls per day,” said John Fabbricatore, an Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) senior adviser who started work in May. “We’ve come across serious cases in which children were calling in for help, saying that they were being raped. They were in very bad situations.”
The Free Press reported last year that forced labor and prostitution among UACs reached record highs, tripling under President Biden.
More than 400 sponsors have been arrested so far, including the sponsor of two girls who were rescued in June. They entered the U.S. in 2023 when they were 14 and 16 years old, and were placed with a sponsor who forced them to work in a plastics factory in Chicago and held them in debt bondage.
A call received by the hotline in April of this year said that three Honduran teenagers who crossed the border in May 2023 were being trafficked by their sponsor, who was a distant relative. Law enforcement officials who responded to the report found them living in squalid conditions in a New Jersey apartment and showing signs of physical and sexual abuse. They lacked food and were not attending school. The sponsor was arrested, and the teenagers are awaiting foster-care placement, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The 400 sponsor arrests are the tip of the iceberg, especially when you consider the involvement of transnational gangs like MS-13 and other notorious child trafficking outfits.
The scary part is that no one knows the full extent of the Biden administration’s politically motivated campaign to desperately hide the UACs and keep them off America’s TV screens.
“DHS is leading efforts to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS assistant secretary.
The fact that the Biden administration allowed the backlog of calls concerning the safety of UACs to reach 65,000 is extreme negligence bordering on depraved indifference. Meanwhile, offenses worse than anything that allegedly happened during Trump’s first term are getting a free pass from America’s gatekeepers.
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