DHS Secretary Kristi Noem accused the Biden administration of paying government-funded sponsors through the Department of Health and Human Services, who then turned around and trafficked the very children they were entrusted to protect.
Noem delivered the accusation Tuesday during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, laying out what she described as a systemic failure in which federal dollars flowed to individuals who exploited unaccompanied alien children in their custody.
"The one thing that has been challenging is that under the Biden administration, the government paid sponsors in [the Department of Health and Human Services] in order to host these children and those sponsors, many times, we found instances where they trafficked these children themselves."
That is a sitting Cabinet secretary telling Congress, under oath, that the previous administration funded child trafficking with taxpayer money. Not through negligence alone, but through a pipeline that routed vulnerable children to adults the government never bothered to properly vet.
Noem's testimony reinforced what HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been saying for the better part of a year. Kennedy last year accused the Biden administration of becoming the "biggest facilitator for child abuse" in American history through its handling of unaccompanied alien children, as Breitbart reported.
Kennedy told members of Congress that his predecessor employed a deliberate policy framework that gutted the safeguards designed to prevent exactly this kind of outcome:
"My predecessor was deliberately employing a policy of speed over safety so they waived all of the identification requirements for sponsors."
The specifics are staggering when laid out plainly:
Every standard protocol that existed to protect children from predators was stripped away. Not by accident. By policy.
Biden's HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra reportedly carried out a policy that prioritized the rapid release of unaccompanied alien children to adult sponsors over long-held protocols designed to protect those children from labor trafficking, sex trafficking, and child abuse. Many of these children, as a result of that policy, ended up in trafficking schemes and lost contact with HHS officials entirely.
Think about what that means in practice. The federal government took custody of children who crossed the border alone. It then handed those children to adults it refused to identify, refused to fingerprint, and refused to verify through DNA testing. It paid those adults to take the children. And then it lost track of them.
This was not a bureaucratic oversight. This was a system designed for throughput, not protection. The Biden administration treated unaccompanied minors as a logistical problem to be cleared from the books, not as children to be safeguarded.
Noem told the committee that the current administration has moved to dismantle what the Biden team built:
"So under that administration, we not only had children in this country that were part of a program, the government was paying individuals that were knowingly trafficking them and abusing them. That has stopped, we have gone through and found these children and put them back with their families when we have been able to do so."
That last clause carries weight. "When we have been able to do so." Because when you waive identification requirements, skip fingerprinting, and ignore DNA verification, the children who disappear into that system do not come back easily. Some may not come back at all.
The same political class that lectures endlessly about compassion for migrants built a conveyor belt that delivered children into the hands of traffickers. The same voices that called border enforcement "cruel" presided over a program that paid adults, with no verified identity, to take custody of minors the government was obligated to protect.
This is the fundamental inversion at the heart of the open-borders project. Every policy that weakened enforcement, every protocol that was waived in the name of speed, every safeguard that was dismissed as an obstacle to "humanitarian" processing created the conditions for exploitation. The people who claimed the moral high ground made children disposable.
No one in the Biden administration has been named. No one has been charged. The "top officials" Noem referenced remain unidentified in her public testimony. That should change. When a Cabinet secretary tells Congress that the previous administration knowingly funded the trafficking of children, "reportedly" is not a sufficient standard for accountability. Names, cases, and prosecutions are.
The children who vanished from HHS contact deserve more than a hearing. They deserve a reckoning.
