In the waning days of the campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris is trotting out an old talking point: that former President Donald Trump “separates” migrant families and puts kids in “cages.”
But mounting evidence shows that Harris was instrumental in forging a status quo where migrant children are incentivized to cross the border alone — and then placed with unrelated sponsors, many of whom traffic and otherwise exploit the vulnerable youth.
In an October town hall on the Spanish-language network Univision, Harris highlighted what she called “Trump’s cruel family separation policy,” saying if Trump is reelected, he would “rip families apart.” Harris was referencing Trump’s use of holding centers — also used by the Obama administration — to house unaccompanied minor children while they awaited placement with sponsors. The Biden-Harris administration smeared those facilities as “cages,” and emphasized placing unaccompanied minors with sponsors as quickly as possible.
But the Biden-Harris administration also did away with DNA testing implemented by the Trump administration to ensure that the adults the minors were sent to live with were actually their relatives. Now, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) does not even see the proposed sponsors physically. Instead, to prove their relation, they text a photo of a birth certificate issued by their home country. HHS is not a law enforcement agency and has no way to verify that it is authentic; they release the child essentially based on a computer image of a foreign document that has the same last name as the child.
Former HHS employees tasked with the resettlement of unaccompanied minors say now, many of the “sponsors” are actually human traffickers — part of the same cartels that brought the children to the border. That means they are essentially using HHS, which pays contractors to drive the children to their sponsors, as a leg in the human smuggling operation.
In a Pulitzer Prize-winning series, the New York Times unearthed internal government data that showed that in one-third of the cases, “sponsors” could not or would not tell the government where the child was 30 days later. At the time, 85,000 children were unaccounted for.
And the number has likely grown since then. In fiscal year 2012, 14,000 minors were referred to Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program. In 2019, 69,000 were referred. By 2021, the number had exploded to 123,000 a year, and has hovered at a similar number since. If the one-third rate holds, there could now be 150,000 missing and vulnerable children in the United States
Children are induced to trek to the United States without their family because unaccompanied minors cannot legally be deported. The new Democratic Party platform, unveiled as Harris accepted the Democratic nomination, states that the unaccompanied minor loophole should remain intact even if border security measures are tightened for adults.
Even before she was vice president, Harris was the person most responsible for loosening protections designed to ensure that kids were not sent to live with human traffickers. In 2019, then-Senator Harris authored a bill that would prevent the Department of Homeland Security from deporting illegal immigrant adults if a background check conducted for the purpose of evaluating them as a prospective sponsor showed that they were sex traffickers, child abusers, or another kind of criminal.
The language in Harris’s bill was later incorporated into a Homeland Security funding bill — but not before other Democrats, who found her policy too extreme, added language ensuring that prospective sponsors could still be deported if the crimes turned up by background checks included an “aggravated felony,” child abuse, of sex abuse.
In August, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general issued an “urgent” alert saying the agency did not know the location of nearly 300,000 unaccompanied alien children and “Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
HHS data suggests that as the unaccompanied minors program has grown, so has the sex-trafficking problem. Data obtained by The Free Press via a Freedom of Information Act request show that the number of children who the government is aware have escaped from sex traffickers has grown by 426% since 2020.
Those numbers include only children who are successfully rescued from sex traffickers. The Free Press tagged along with a nonprofit called Shepherd’s Watch, which works to stop the sex trafficking of minors. Its leader said “Nearly all of my sex-trafficking rings now are migrant girls. The ads exploded within the first three months of the border being open.”
HHS says it has no responsibility for what happens to children after they are sent to a sponsor, saying state Child Protective Services agencies would have responsibility. But under the Harris policy that prioritizes the privacy of illegal immigrant sponsors, the United States has refused to share data about the children’s existence with states. That means when unaccompanied minors don’t register for school, local governments have no way of knowing that they are truant. And social workers have no way to know if they have gone missing.
It is a perfect storm for exploitation. A Center for Immigration Studies annotation of the Times’ data found that evidence of abuse rose first when Harris barred ICE from deporting bad sponsors, and then when the Biden-Harris administration took office and rules on sponsors were loosened and the number of unaccompanied children rose. HHS provides a hotline that children can call to report abuse or trafficking, but it is unclear what would happen should a child call.
According to HHS data, fewer than 40% of unaccompanied minors are turned over to parents, while the remainder go to relatives or unrelated sponsors. But the agency’s policies, particularly its lack of DNA testing, make it impossible to verify whether those recorded as relatives are actually related — with employees at one site recounting how when a male on the phone put on an obvious falsetto to claim to be a child’s mother, they simply had to accept it.
On Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wrote to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra that the Biden-Harris administration had failed to provide legally required annual reports on refugee resettlement for fiscal years 2021, 2022, and 2023.
“President Biden and Vice President Harris have left Congress in the dark for the entirety of their administration and lost track of tens of thousands of vulnerable migrant children in the process,” Grassley said in a statement.
Grassley said HHS has also refused to cooperate with subpoenas in a child sex trafficking investigation he ran based on information from agency whistleblowers.
Last month, a group of Republican senators wrote that “Even as the trafficking business and the number of children entering the U.S. surged, HHS ORR cut back significantly on background checks and vetting procedures to speed up the process, despite knowing children were being trafficked through HHS ORR’s UAC program.”
Tara Lee Rodas, a former deputy director of an unaccompanied alien children site, said that the UAC program serves as a magnet separating children from their parents, and that once in the United States, they were placed with poorly-vetted sponsors who they had oftentimes never seen before. “Why would the US government have any program that separates children from their parents in their home country?” she told Congress.
