Hundreds of thousands of migrant children are working illegally in America, and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra is not merely doing nothing to stop it but is actively encouraging it.

Everyone involved in the daily violation of national sovereignty at our southern border deserves sanction, but Becerra’s efforts to accelerate the victimization of children merit impeachment.

The Department of Health and Human Services had very little to do with immigration policy until 2008, when President George W. Bush signed the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. Until then, migrant children were treated equally when apprehended at the border, no matter what country they came from. Nearly all were returned to their country of origin.

After the Wilberforce bill, children from countries other than Mexico and Canada were guaranteed not only a hearing from an immigration judge but also an automatic transfer from Border Patrol custody to HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which would release them to a sponsor, usually a family member.

Central Americans quickly learned about this loophole, and by 2013, researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso warned that if the catch-and-release policy continued, Border Patrol facilities would be overwhelmed by migrant children. That is what happened in 2014, leading to the first pictures of children in cages at the border.

President Barack Obama solved the problem by getting Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to make it harder for immigrants to cross into the United States. When Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the current president, fulfilled his campaign promise to guarantee immigrants safe passage through Mexico, the border crisis resumed in 2019. President Donald Trump solved that with his "Remain in Mexico" policy.

President Joe Biden then undid all the policies that worked, which had discouraged mass migration. The number of migrant children arrested for illegally crossing the southern border exploded, with over 250,000 released into the U.S. in Biden’s first two years.

Instead of pushing for policies that would decrease the number, Becerra has done the opposite. He has undone safeguards normally used by HHS to make sure children are placed with safe sponsors.

He has also pressured his staff to process migrant children as fast as possible. The director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement quit after Becerra threatened to fire her if she didn’t discharge children into the U.S. faster.

“If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants,” Becerra told staff at a meeting last summer, according to the New York Times, “he would never have become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line."

To be clear, Becerra compared HHS’s resettlement duties and the care of children to an assembly line. He wants it faster and doesn't even care if it is done right, which is why many of the children end up on actual assembly lines. They are being put to work full time, illegally exploited, at food processing plants in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Kia factories in Alabama, and at other industrial plants elsewhere across America.

“I didn’t get how expensive everything was,” said 13-year-old Jose Vazquez, who works 12-hour shifts six days a week on a Michigan egg farm. “I’d like to go to school, but then how would I pay rent?”

Since 2008, migrant children have been pushed across the southern border to exploit a loophole in U.S. immigration law. Obama and Trump tried to minimize the damage by stepping up enforcement so migrant children would not be released into the U.S. It is bad enough that Biden has chosen the opposite course. It is worse that Becerra, in his haste to get children into the country as fast as possible, has loosened protections so that children are being forced into labor.

Becerra is unworthy of his office and should be removed.