Senate Republicans charged the Biden administration with covering up how the government has handled wide-scale child trafficking at the southern border and accused authorities of using taxpayer money to fund “slavery” in America.
Government whistleblowers and Republican lawmakers blasted President Joe Biden and senior officials across the government for refusing to cooperate with a Senate investigation into the whereabouts of as many as 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children who have been apprehended at the southern border under Biden.
“Please understand this is taxpayer-funded child slavery sanctioned by our government and brought to you by [nongovernmental organizations],” Department of Health and Human Services whistleblower Deborah White said at a congressional roundtable Tuesday.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, accused HHS and the Department of Labor of covering up how the government and contracted companies have failed to properly care for 500,000 parentless immigrant children in government custody at the border.
“This blatant lack of transparency with the American people is reprehensible,” Cassidy said during a Senate roundtable with whistleblowers Tuesday afternoon. “Frankly, it is hard to see this as anything other than an effort to cover up and shield the Biden administration from scrutiny for its mistreatment and mishandling of unaccompanied children, particularly in an election year where the president is behind in the polls.”
White told the panel that what she witnessed while working with migrant children in government custody was “the biggest failure in government history that I have ever witnessed.”
“Despite raising case after case of trafficking, HHS [Office of Refugee Resettlement] leadership and the contractor allowed children to be trafficked on their watch and the taxpayers continue to fund it,” White said.
Over the past 17 months, Cassidy has led Republicans on the Senate HELP Committee through a winding journey that has widened to encompass not only how children were detained but also the companies using child workers and the federal departments that have shirked their responsibilities to screen, vet, and place adults who offer to house unrelated children.
In March 2023, Republicans on the Senate HELP Committee launched an oversight investigation following a New York Times report that revealed that the Biden administration had lost track of 85,000 unaccompanied children who had come across the southern border during Biden’s tenure. The large majority of children who arrive without a parent were released into the United States, as Cassidy found in his investigation, an alarming pace where screening protocols were relaxed in order to get more children out the door.
The newspaper uncovered that children who were released to adults in the country were being trafficked and forced into working in abhorrent conditions and that these types of horrific situations for children entrusted to the government to be released to fit adult sponsors were far more the exception.
Another HHS whistleblower, Tara Lee Rodas, told senators Tuesday that she was aware of a 16-year-old girl from Guatemala who had been released to an adult in North Carolina.
“She appeared in a photo on his social media. He was touching her inappropriately. It was clear her sponsor was not her brother. Later, Carmen appeared on her sponsor’s social media again — this time she was alone and all dolled up: Her hair was styled; her makeup was done, and her shirt was unbuttoned,” said Rodas. “ORR’s federal field specialist said Carmen looked drugged and that she was for sale. It was discovered that Carmen’s sponsor had other social media accounts containing child pornography. What keeps me up at night is wondering if Carmen is safe.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), former Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chairman, lambasted HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for not cooperating with Senate investigators for more than a year.
“Have they hopped on this? Have they put all hands on deck to dig into this — make sure this doesn’t happen, these children are protected? No. They won’t even respond to oversight letters. That’s what we’re dealing with here,” Johnson said. “They’re well aware of the inhumanity of the degradations being visited on the people that they claim to have a claim open border policy for.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has separately written to two dozen HHS contractors and grantees who have received “billions of taxpayer dollars” for answers about how children’s sponsors are being vetted, but not received responses, he said on Tuesday.
Republicans started out focused on individual companies that were reported for employing children. States vary with laws for employing minors, but certain dangerous jobs are off-limits to people under the age of 18.
In April 2023, Cassidy expanded the committee’s investigation into the Labor Department itself over claims that acting Secretary Julie Su “repeatedly ignored warnings and downplayed the exploitation of migrant children for cheap labor.”
Lawmakers learned that four children in HHS ORR care had recently died in separate incidents while in ORR custody. That federal office detains children at the border for an average of 30 days before placing the child with a family member in the country or unrelated adult sponsor.
The committee’s Republicans expanded the investigation in mid-2023 following reports that the HHS ORR had released children with latent Tuberculosis to sponsors in 44 states across the country.
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Investigators hope to wrap up the matter by the year’s end, according to a committee aide.
The Washington Examiner reached out to HHS for comment.