Thanks in large part to President Joe Biden's lax enforcement policies with regard to border security and immigration, there has been a historic surge of illegal migration into the United States over the past two years, including among unaccompanied migrant children.
On Wednesday, a whistleblower came forward and testified before a House committee about how the U.S. government is acting as a "middleman" in a multi-billion-dollar trafficking scheme to exploit migrant child labor, Fox News reported.
That shocking claim came from Tara Lee Rodas, who previously worked in the inspector general's office of the Department of Health and Human Services, and who served as a volunteer for the Biden administration to help process unaccompanied migrant children and connect them with sponsors.
That testimony came during a hearing held Wednesday by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement that was titled, "The Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children."
"Today, children will work overnight shifts at slaughterhouses, factories, restaurants to pay their debts to smugglers and traffickers. Today, children will be sold for sex," Rodas said in her prepared opening statement. "Today, children will call a hotline to report they are being abused, neglected, and trafficked. For nearly a decade, unaccompanied children have been suffering in the shadows."
Rodas revealed that she only began to learn of the "suffering" the migrant children endured when she volunteered in 2021 to help the Biden administration respond to the surging migrant crisis at the southern border, where she was assigned to a facility in Southern California and tasked with helping the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement reunite migrant children with purportedly vetted sponsors.
"I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes," she said. "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 delivers a child to a sponsor."
"Some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations. Some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income -- this is why we are witnessing an explosion of labor trafficking," Rodas continued.
She added, "Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the U.S. Government has become the middleman in a large-scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children."
Rodas went on to share a few examples of the terrible things that observed during her time at the border, such as unaccompanied children that spoke neither English nor Spanish and were incapable of asking for help and essentially stuck with whoever sponsored them.
She also recounted case managers who cried while sharing their own tales of what they'd learned about the dangerous journey to the border, and children who knew that they were captives of their sponsor until their debt had been paid off.
The whistleblower also recounted seeing upwards of 40 children packed into a single apartment, sponsors attempting to adopt multiple children from different facilities, or sponsors using multiple addresses in their efforts to obtain children.
"Realizing that we were not offering children the American dream, but instead putting them into modern-day slavery with wicked overlords was a terrible revelation," Rodas said. "These children are a captive victim population, with no access to law enforcement or knowledge of their rights. They are extorted, exploited, abused, neglected, and trafficked. This is why I blew the whistle."
🚨HHS Whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas testifies that the U.S. government is functioning as the “middleman” in a massive child trafficking operation.
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 26, 2023
