JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Former President Donald Trump said Friday that thousands of children who entered the US illegally are working as sex slaves, missing or dead due to Vice President Kamala Harris — making one of his most forceful denunciations yet of her performance as border czar.
Trump told a rally audience in battleground Pennsylvania that the Democratic presidential nominee, who serves as President Biden’s point person on addressing a surge in illegal crossings, bears responsibility for roughly 325,000 minors whose whereabouts are unknown to federal officials.
“Think of the number — 325,000 children are missing. Many are dead. Many are involved in sex operations. Many are working as slaves in different parts of probably this country,” the Republican presidential candidate said in Johnstown.
“She was the border czar,” Trump added.
“Now she says, ‘I wasn’t the border czar,’ but she was. It was headlines — ‘border czar’, ‘border czar’ — but now she doesn’t want that term. But whether she was border czar or not, she was in charge of the border. 325,000 children are missing.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general issued a report last week saying that 323,000 migrants under age 18 have either failed to show up for immigration court hearings or were released from custody but have yet to be contacted for subsequent proceedings.
Some rally-goers thought Trump drew a necessary visceral reaction.
“If he doesn’t talk like that, who would listen to it?” said Gwen Gresco a 58-year-old mother of three from Indiana County, Pa.
Unaccompanied migrant children were allowed to remain in the United States upon crossing the border illegally beginning shortly after Biden took office — at a time when most others were summarily expelled under a temporary COVID-19-era health policy that under Trump also applied to minors.
Biden’s aides described the policy as humane, but Republicans argued it could lead to even greater numbers of unaccompanied minors — many of them in their late teens — crossing into the country.
Investigative reporting revealed that many unaccompanied minors were placed by the Department of Health and Human Services with businessmen who treated them like indentured servants and put them to work rather than into school.
Some were forced to clean sharp equipment in slaughterhouses in overnight shifts.
Over time, the administration allowed most family units and single adults to remain in the United States as they pursue asylum from alleged persecution in badly backlogged proceedings. After six months of waiting, asylum seekers are entitled to work permits.
During his stop in the Keystone State, Trump pledged to back fracking and drilling in Pennsylvania’s oil and natural gas rich rock formations, which will be vital in realizing his vision of making the US “energy dominant.”
“When we win, on Day One, I will tell Pennsylvania to drill, baby, drill,” the former president said. “We’re going to drill, baby, drill.”
“Kamala Harris surrendered our energy independence,” Trump said of his opponent, noting that Harris has held conflicting positions on fracking going back to her 2020 White House run.
“She’s vowed repeatedly to ban fracking … Then she said, ‘I’m in favor of fracking,’” the GOP nominee charged, referencing Harris’ stunning flip-flop on the issue Thursday in her first TV interview since replacing President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
“The people of Pennsylvania are smart,” he continued. “They will not fall for it. If you do not have fracking, you do not have a commonwealth.”
Trump signaled his strong support for Pennsylvania workers, many of whom depend on fracking and coal mining for their livelihoods.
“We will cut wasteful and unnecessary spending — and we will terminate the Green New Deal,” he vowed, committing to spending money on “roads, bridges, real infrastructure and paying down debt, not fake infrastructure that has caused massive inflation and no benefits.”
“We will make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far,” Trump promised, point out that the US has “more liquid gold under our feet than any other country in the world.”
“In 12 months, we will cut your energy bills in half – and that includes heating, air conditioning, electricity, and gasoline,” he said, referencing a key point in his energy plan that he laid out earlier this month.
Going back to the border crisis, Trump reiterated his Day One plan to “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion into our country.”
“We will carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” he pledged, predicting that under a Harris presidency, four years from now, “over 100 million” illegal migrants will have entered the country under Biden and Harris.
Illegal crossings hit all-time record highs in each year of Harris’ tenure in charge of stemming the crisis — totaling nearly 2.5 million in fiscal 2023 — though recent monthly apprehensions have trended downward since Biden in June issued an order allowing for caps on the processing of illegal entrants.
Harris defended herself in a Monday interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, saying she had made some progress.
“The root causes work that I did as vice president, that I was asked to do by the president, has actually resulted in a number of benefits, including historic investments by American businesses in that region. The number of immigrants coming from that region has actually reduced since we’ve began that work,” she said.
But Trump slammed his rival Friday for allegedly fueling the crisis by allowing most unlawful entrants to stay in America — after Biden repudiated his predecessor’s “Remain in Mexico” policy requiring them to await asylum rulings elsewhere.
“She created a fast pass entry program to speed the admission of illegals into all of our ports of entry,” Trump charged in Johnstown.
“Now they have a new line, ‘We created a strong border’. They keep saying it over and over. The worst border in history, but they think, if they keep saying it over and over …”
Trump added that the influx of migrants could harm social safety net programs — especially if legislation proposed by Biden and Harris passed allowing a pathway to citizenship for most people present illegally.
“Kamala vowed to grant, remember, mass amnesty and citizenship to all of the millions of illegals that she let in, which will obliterate Medicare and obliterate your Social Security for seniors,” Trump said.
He also said migrants pose a threat to public safety, musing that “typically when you have tic-tac-toe boards [tattooed] on your forehead it’s not a good thing.”
Harris spokespeople did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Trump invoked the plight of migrant children after facing years of criticism for presiding over the forced separation of families, including about 5,000 children during then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ “zero tolerance” approach of prosecuting adults who illegally crossed the border.
As of last year, about 1,000 of those children remained separated from their parents, though just 81 of them had parents who hadn’t been located.
