An HHS whistleblower is calling on Congress to crack down on the federal government’s role in a “sophisticated network” of child migrant smuggling, Fox News reported.
On Wednesday, Tara Lee Rodas, who worked at an Emergency Intake Site in Pamona, California, gave testimony at the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement’s hearing on the “Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children” where she described what she saw first-hand.
Rodas said when she arrived at the Intake Site, she expected that she would be helping “place children into loving homes,” but in reality, she discovered that the child migrants were “being trafficked through a sophisticated network,” which starts when the children are recruited in their home countries and ends with the Office of Refugee Resettlement placing the child with a US sponsor.
Child migrants encountered at the US border are transferred into HHS custody and then transferred to a sponsor, ostensibly a parent or a family member already living in the US.
But Rodas told lawmakers that some of the sponsors are traffickers, criminals, and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations who use the children like “commodities” to make money for them. She explained that this is why labor trafficking has exploded in the United States.
Recent reporting has detailed the rise in child exploitation in which children are forced into the labor force, often to pay back the costs of smuggling them across the border. This has led to concerns that, by facilitating the transfer of children to sponsors, the Biden administration is involved in child trafficking.
Rodas told lawmakers that whether or not it is intentional, the federal government has arguably become “the middleman” in a child trafficking operation worth billions of dollars that is run by criminals looking to “profit off of the lives of children.”
She asserted that the federal government isn’t offering these children “the American dream.” Instead, it is “putting them in modern-day slavery.”
