There was nothing good that came from President Joe Biden’s sanctioned invasion of the southern border. Perhaps the most heinous consequence was exposing already vulnerable migrant children to predators within the United States interior. Many of these unaccompanied kids were put in the hands of unvetted sponsors, and for some, that sponsor was a trafficker. Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) then lost track of the minors.
On July 16, the House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing that unveiled how deeply complicit Biden’s HHS was, as well as the nefarious doings of the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that Biden’s HHS used to deal with the influx of people — particularly unaccompanied minors — pouring over the border.
Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA) reported that Biden’s HHS and its NGOs were responsible for “setting up a pipeline of tender-age children into sex trafficking and slave labor.” The estimated number of children to whom this was done is over 300,000. President Donald Trump has made it his mission to use ICE raids and other methods to find and rescue these vulnerable kids. So far, 35,000 have been saved from trafficking.
“Be advised that we are building our criminal case files,” an impassioned Higgins vowed. “We’re interviewing these 35,000 kids, and we’re finding out exactly what the hell happened, how they ended up in the nightmare where they were. And we’re rescuing more — and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. We’re going to identify these children, locate these children, rescu[e] these children. … And many of these NGO employees are going to find themselves wearing orange.”
How did so many children get forced into this hellish situation? “Cartels infiltrated NGOs along smuggling routes to the southwest border, using them to facilitate in the smuggling or trafficking of children,” according to Ali Hooper, president of Guiding Understanding, Awareness, Research and Defense Against Trafficking (GUARD) and one of the witnesses in the House hearing. “By providing children with false documents and pairing them with adults to pose as family units, they placed the children in grave danger. According to an internal audit conducted by [HHS], approximately 70% of sponsor applications examined were found to be fraudulent, making child traceability and safety assurances nearly impossible.”
Biden’s HHS did give these kids some recourse by setting up a hotline for them to report abuse. But as I noted back in 2023, “Reporting has gone up 1,300% since 2018.”
According to Hooper, Biden’s HHS ignored calls on the unaccompanied minors’ hotline, leaving children in horrific situations. She recounted:
What this administration found was from August 2023 to January of 2025, 65,000 calls went unanswered. Those calls spanned from complaints about stale bread all the way to being abused. One case where a child’s call was reporting that grown men were coming into his room at night, and they were touching him. Nothing happened with that call. That call went unanswered — until this administration took office [and] went through those 65,000 calls, made follow-ups, conducted a welfare check, and now that child has been rescued and that sponsor has been arrested. These are the safeguards that were put in place — but accountability and oversight was not had.
It is one of the greatest scandals of the modern era, though, sadly, Democrats — to their shame and infamy — are virtually mum. Only one of the 13 Democrats on the committee had anything to say about the matter. Representative Delia Ramirez (D-IL) pointed to the fact that she “spoke against the [Trump] administration’s executive order to end the lawful access to seek asylum at the border, introduced legislation to protect the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, and introduced legislation to protect schools from ICE raids.” She also said she was in favor of the Family Reunification Task Force Act, which “would authorize the Family Reunification Task Force to continue its work to reunite the thousands of families torn apart by Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy that inhumanely separated children from their parents and prevent any further separation.”
None of these policies would have protected these lost children; none of these actions were pertinent to the scandal at hand. In fact, the policies she mentioned add to the vulnerability of these children who cannot advocate for themselves.
President Trump has been doing God’s work when it comes to righting the wrongs that the previous administration perpetrated by creating this humanitarian crisis with the border invasion. Rescuing 35,000 children is an amazing start, but there are still hundreds of thousands more.
