Biden and Mayorkis Created Largest Child Trafficking Ring in US History Says Senator
By Joe Guzzardi
Unaccompanied alien children (UACs) who cross the border represent a crisis within a crisis, a devastating, contentious illegal immigration subcategory. Many millions of illegal aliens have crossed the border— the unofficial Customs and Border Protection estimates total more than 10 million, including gotaways. As record numbers of illegal aliens continue to arrive, border authorities are also seeing higher numbers of minors traveling without a legal guardian. In response to the surge in unaccompanied youth, the Biden administration is releasing children to sponsors on an average of every 28 days. Prospective hosts can fill out their paperwork remotely and case workers rarely visit their home to evaluate the children’s safety. Officials are required, within one month, to follow up with the child via a phone call, a clear security risk. Lax monitoring has led to 85,000 UACs unaccounted for—lost in the federal system.
Among the 10 million border surgers are about 430,000 illegal alien minors who have crossed the Texas/Mexico border since President Biden’s inauguration. The Congressional Research Service once estimated that 75 to 80 percent of unaccompanied minor immigrants are smuggled into the U.S. Others make the dangerous journey alone. Because U.S. immigration law requires CBP agents to transfer unaccompanied children who are not from Mexico to HHS custody, usually within 72 hours, parents entrust brutal cartel operators to deliver their children to the border where they assume the federal government will care for them and place them safely with family members.
After Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), UAC arrivals spiked. Section 235 of the TVPRA divvied up UACs into two separate groups: (1) children from contiguous Canada and Mexico and (2) minors from all other nations. Predictably, the number of UACs from non-contiguous countries soared, as parents and astute smugglers realized that section 235 virtually assured that any child who could make it illegally into the U.S. would be released into the U.S. to rejoin his family.
Look at the stats: the Congressional Research Service reported that in FY 2008, the fiscal year before the TVPRA was passed, CBP encountered fewer than 10,000 UACs at the Southwest border, mostly Mexican nationals. By FY 2009, when the TVPRA bill was signed, the UAC number grew to around 20,000, 82 percent of them Mexican nationals, and just 17 percent from the non-contiguous Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The number of UACs entering illegally kept growing thereafter, with Border Patrol apprehending more than 68,500 of them in FY 2014. By then, however, just 23 percent of UACs came from Mexico and 77 percent from the Northern Triangle.
UAC arrivals rose dramatically in 2021 when President Joe Biden exempted unaccompanied minors from Title 42, the COVID-19 no-entry policy that allowed immigration authorities to immediately return illegal immigrants to Mexico. In August, border officials referred an average of 431 children per day to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) which forced the Biden administration to reopen a former work site in Carrizo Springs, Texas to house children as traditional shelters reached capacity. This marked the second time in less than two months that HHS reopened a so-called “influx care facility” for unaccompanied children. Last month, HHS restarted housing migrant children at another former work camp for oil workers in Pecos, Texas, shuttered in 2021.
The number of children placed with distant relatives increased between 2021 and 2022, according to a June 2023 HHS audit. The audit also found that HHS released 344 children to sponsors who were already hosting three or more unaccompanied minors, contributing to advocates’ fears that some patrons allow children to be exploited for cheap labor, a concern that a New York Times investigative report confirmed. Among the jobs the minor children were tasked to perform, The Times found, were dangerous slave labor positions like mopping up on slaughterhouse floors, operating heavy machinery, and prostituting their under-age child prostitution. The minors obtained their industrial jobs by presenting stolen Social Security cards or falsified Social Security numbers.
Last year in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Josh Hawley grilled ORR director Robin Dunn Marcos about UAC exploitation. Hawley pressed for answers about the ongoing child migrant crisis at the southern border and the 85,000 children that the Biden Administration cannot locate. Marcos could not answer any of Hawley’s questions. But the hearing revealed that ORR routinely failed to perform background checks on the adults in the homes, does not do home visits, and that Xavier Becerra, HHS secretary, ignored and then fired subordinates who warned of risks in the placement process. The secretary told Marcos that if she “could not increase the number of discharges, he would find someone who would,” and “This is not the way you run an assembly line,” an inference that the priority is placing children, and their safety is secondary. Senator Hawley expressed dismay over the administration’s criminal neglect of UAC’s. He said “The kids are in danger. The kids are in slavery. They are being exploited. And it should not happen in the United States of America.” The senator concluded that the U.S. is, to its shame, the biggest child trafficker in the world, Last year, Senator Hawley introduced the Corporate Responsibly for Child Labor Elimination Act of 2023” and wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding that his agency locate the missing 85,000 children. But congressional hearings, investigative reports, and proposed legislation will not end the child border crisis. While Biden dawdles on border security, his administration will continue to allow criminal child abuse, human trafficking, and the enrichment of Mexican cartels.
Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org
Biden and Mayorkis Created Largest Child Trafficking Ring in US History Says Senator
