When Joe Biden was still in office, an explosive New York Times piece was published regarding a large number of unaccompanied minors in this country being used for slave labor or being lost in the system after they were released to sponsors.
Somehow, Biden sidestepped that report, but I can assure you, if that report were published with a GOP president, there would have been all hell to pay.
ICE is now making the same claims against Biden, so we have to see if it sticks this time.
In April 2023, I was stunned when I read a piece in the Times about migrant children being used for slave labor and the human trafficking implications.
There were also questions being asked about children who had been released to sponsors but the department could not find them.
The report centered on an HHS whistleblower, providing inside details about how lax the vetting was regarding the release of these minors to adults.
As an example, the report stated, “Over the past two years, more than 250,000 migrant children have come alone to the United States. Thousands of children have ended up in punishing jobs across the country — working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories — all in violation of child labor laws, a recent Times investigation showed.”
Then-DHS Secretary Mayorkas denied the reports, as did everyone else in the administration.
However, another strike against the administration came when the DHS Inspector General released a report, which showed tens of thousands of children who had been “lost” in the system.
Again, however, the administration denied the allegations in the report.
The missing children were dismissed along the lines of clerical errors, with the administration claiming that it only had so much control to track the children once they were released. And just like that, the scandal went away.
After Trump took office, DHS almost immediately did a deep dive into this issue, and the results of the investigation, sadly, were predictable.
The DHS tried to track these children down, doing welfare checks, announcing, “Many of the unaccompanied children who came across the border are victims of smugglers and sex traffickers. DHS is leading efforts to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure they are safe and not being exploited.
“These welfare checks have resulted in arrests of some sponsors of these unaccompanied minors and as a result the children have been placed in the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) custody.”
This is child abuse, and the Biden administration, from Joe Biden to Secretary Beccera to Secretary Mayorkas, were all complicit. Now, the only question is if any of them will be held accountable.
