How Biden Facilitated the Trafficking and Exploitation of Migrant Children on a Monstrous Scale
© AP Photo / Eugene Garcia
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Democratic lawmakers and activists are pushing back against Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, accusing the president of a lack of empathy. But there’s nothing compassionate about the policies of his predecessors, who not only lost track of tens of thousands of migrant children, but eased the work of criminals engaged in their systematic abuse.
Independent investigators, whistleblowers and a handful of MAGA lawmakers have spent years detailing the horrific risks underage illegal immigrants face when they come to the US, from forced labor and sexual exploitation to ‘recycling’ by traffickers who match them with strangers to ease adults' entry into the US.
Documented abuse has been rampant, and includes:
The drugging of toddlers in transit to the border to prevent them from confirming whether the adults accompanying them are relatives.
Infants as young as two being left alone at the border with pieces of paper with contact information about guardians supposedly already in the US.
Testimony from HHS and CBP whistleblowers in a bombshell viral documentary by independent journalist Ryan Matta about what effectively amounted to a “public-private partnership” between Biden officials and criminal cartels facilitating the trafficking of children, including for sexual purposes.
Allegations by Matta and others accusing USAID and NGOs of orchestrating a $797M campaign in Guatemala to turn the country into the “Child Kidnapping Capital of the World”.
Allegations in a 2024 report by the DHS’s internal watchdog over responsible agencies’ abject failure to keep track of unaccompanied minors released from government custody who fail to appear for their immigration court hearings (32,000+ such cases reported over a five year period up to mid-2024).
Charges by Congressional Republicans briefed on DHS and HHS policy revealing severe shortcomings in agencies’ vetting of sponsors, the loss of contact with over 85,000 unaccompanied children between 2021-2023, plus the HHS’s release of 290,000 minors without orders to appear in court.
Evidence that the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s budgeting of some $6.9 bln per year to care for children went to private companies whose employees engaged in the systematic sexual abuse and harassment of children in shelters (including Southwest Key Programs, which got $2.5 bln+ in FY2023).
Investigations even by mainstream outlets like the New York Times on how sponsored children have been forced to work dangerous jobs to pay off debts to abusive sponsors and try to send money home.
Damning Congressional testimony last November by an HHS whistleblower, a retired CBP agent and trafficking expert on the administration's looking the other way as children have been exploited by gangs, with some falling victim to sex trafficking, forced labor or worse.
“Organ harvesting is real,” retired patrol agent J.J. Carrell told a shocked panel at the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement.
“This federal government’s bringing children over that are being lost, sexually mutilated, raped, murdered, and then we’re shocked or appalled that there could be organ harvesting. The people I’ve interviewed, multiple people – and I asked them, is this an anomaly, a one-off? No. This is pervasive and is growing daily,” Carrell said.
The Biden administration has not even tried to disguise the dark direction of some of its immigration-related directives as they applied to children, with its DoJ moving in May 2024 to partially terminate the Flores Agreement – which provided limited court supervision for unaccompanied children in HHS custody.
The agreement was settled in 1997 after hard-fought legal battles with the explicit purpose of tackling allegations of the widespread mistreatment of migrant children entering the US going back to the 1980s.
Amid damning revelations and scandals surrounding elite pedophilia, child prostitution and trafficking rings, run by odious figures such as Jeffrey Epstein while authorities spent years looking the other way, is conspiratorial to ask why the US government facilitated policies seemingly deliberately designed to result in so many ‘lost’ migrant children?
