The Biden-Harris administration has lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children who crossed the border without parents, according to a shocking new report.
Untold numbers of the children — who were released into the US to “qualified sponsors” — are now at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor and other forms of exploitation, a Homeland Security Inspector General’s report released Monday said.
As of May 2024, there are 291,000 migrant children who arrived in the US as unaccompanied minors who were set free and never given a date to appear in immigration court — meaning there is no way to track their whereabouts.
That is in addition to the 32,000 children that Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities released into the US with hearing dates but then failed to show in court, according to the 14-page report — which tracked a period from October 2018 to September 2023.
One federal whistleblower said that she believes many of these vulnerable kids could already be in the hands of criminals and sex traffickers.
Tara Rodas, who was recruited as a federal government employee to help the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with an influx of migrant kids in 2021, believed she would be doing noble work. However, she told The Post she was shocked to find she was handing those children to “traffickers, members of transnational criminal organizations, bad actors, bad, bad, bad people.”
When migrants cross the border illegally as children and are apprehended by border agents, they are released to HHS, which helps them connect with their sponsor in the US.
That sponsor doesn’t have to be a family member and during their vetting process are never required to meet with HHS officials in person. The vetting is typically done over the phone, said Rodas.
“At the very beginning of the Biden administration, they stripped all the vetting out of the process,” Rodas said.
Rodas told a House panel last month that one case she saw involved a 16-year-old migrant girl who was sponsor who claimed to be her older brother.
“He was touching her inappropriately. It was clear her sponsor was not her brother,” Rodas said, noting that the girl “looked drugged” and as if “she was for sale” on her sponsor’s social media postings.
Some non-family sponsors have even been found to be sponsoring multiple children released by HHS, which Rodas described as a “red flag.”
Hundreds of such cases were reported in 2023, where it was found that 344 unaccompanied migrant kids released by the Biden administration were living with non-family sponsors who were hosting at least three migrant children, according to NBC News.
Dr. Jason Piccolo, a retired federal agent who blew the whistle in 2015 on the government releasing unaccompanied children to potential criminals, said the latest revelations about the missing children are “deeply concerning.”
Some of the children the federal government has released into the US are working in exploitative conditions in slaughterhouses and factories, according to multiple media reports.
“There needs to be an immediate standard operating procedure put in place to track the status and whereabouts of every single unaccompanied migrant child across all involved agencies,” said Piccolo.
“One child lost to trafficking is one too many. This systemic failure demands immediate attention and reform to ensure the safety of all children in our care,” Piccolo added.
Rodas also said the children themselves are not “vetted” and she’s seen cases of adults fraudulently claiming they’re minors going through the process.
Over a period of less than six months, Rodas observed dozens of such cases.
“It’s fraud on the part of the adult who’s pretending to be the unnacompanied child, but it’s also fraud on the part of the sponsor attempting to sponsor them. This is very serious.”
Only one of eight audited ICE offices “attempted to locate” the missing migrant kids, according to the government watchdog report.
“Nobody at DHS is actually looking,” said Rodas.
Tragic cases of migrant crime in the US have also been tied to illegal migrant children released by the federal government to sponsors.
One of those was an MS-13 gang member, who allegedly brutally raped and killed Kayla Hamilton, a young autistic woman in Maryland in July of 2022.
Her mother, Tammy Nobles, has blamed HHS for “operational neglect” that “further sealed my daughter’s fate.”
At the border, federal authorities failed to check the alleged killer for gang tattoos and also failed to call counterparts in his home country of El Salvador, she testified to Congress in January.
“Had they done so, El Salvador government officials would have confirmed that the assailant was a known MS-13 gang member with a prior criminal history,” she said at the time.
HHS employees later “neglected and recklessly failed to verify a legitimate family member of the assailant or sponsor before allowing him to enter U.S. soil,” Nobles said, adding that HHS “allowed the MS-13 gang member, as a minor, to rent a room in a trailer park from another individual who was also an illegal immigrant.”
