As much grief as Donald Trump got for separating migrant children from adults at the border, at least he didn’t put out a sign inviting human traffickers to take the kids under the guise of “sponsorship.” But that is apparently now the case, as numerous reports of underage kids being forced to perform manual labor after being picked up by what we now know to be human traffickers have surfaced.
Recall the circumstances at the border early in the Biden administration. Unaccompanied minor children were showing up at a rate of 12,000 to 15,000 a month, with no place to put them. But this was the stage of the administration where they were playing the “Trump opposite” game, trying madly to differentiate Biden’s “grown-up” actions at the border from Trump’s.
But the shelters for these kids were full to bursting. So the administration began to frantically empty them. They did it by taking huge shortcuts in the program that was supposed to vet sponsors who promised to care for the minor children. Biden was terrified of the media snapping pictures and capturing video of the horrible, deplorable conditions of these shelters for kids — some were little better than cages.
Many of us warned at the time that the chances of adults pretending to be sponsors taking the children for nefarious purposes were very high, given the lack of vetting for sponsors. Now the New York Times has blown the lid off this scandal, and it will probably mean the end of Biden’s incompetent HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Related: More of Biden’s Illegal Immigrant Minors Discovered as Child Laborers in U.S. Factories
In the Spring of 2021, Linda Brandmille was working to vet sponsors in the San Antonio area. She says she had been trained to look out for possible traffickers and, indeed, she flagged two probable traffickers in the applications.
She immediately contacted supervisors working with the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency responsible for these children. “This is urgent,” she wrote in an email reviewed by The New York Times.
But within days, she noticed that one of the children was set to be released to the man in Florida. She wrote another email, this time asking for a supervisor’s “immediate attention” and adding that the government had already sent a 14-year-old boy to the same sponsor.
Ms. Brandmiller also emailed the shelter’s manager. A few days later, her building access was revoked during her lunch break. She said she was never told why she had been fired.
Mrs. Brandmiller wasn’t the only vetting staffer to be fired. The Times reports “At least five Health and Human Services staff members filed complaints and said they were pushed out after raising concerns about child safety.”
In a way, the incompetence is heartbreaking. Young kids — some as young as 14 — were promised entry into the United States — a new life — under the Biden administration. That lasted all of six months until Biden realized the hell he had created at the border.
Related: A Florida Grand Jury Accuses the Biden Administration of Abetting Human Trafficking
Some of the bureaucrats at HHS tried to tell their superiors of the unfolding tragedy. They were ignored.
Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk. The Labor Department put out news releases noting an increase in child labor. Senior White House aides were shown evidence of exploitation, such as clusters of migrant children who had been found working with industrial equipment or caustic chemicals.
As the administration scrambled to clear shelters that were strained beyond capacity, children were released with little support to sponsors who expected them to take on grueling, dangerous jobs.
In interviews with The Times, officials expressed concern for migrant children but shifted blame for failing to protect them.
This is a horrific scandal, beyond just the incompetent management of the vetting program. As always, the coverup turns out to be worse than the original screwups. Any HHS staffer who raised a stink was either fired or moved.
“I feel like short of protesting in the streets, I did everything I could to warn them,” said Jallyn Saulog, the HHS official formerly in charge of the department’s response to unaccompanied migrant children. “They just didn’t want to hear it.” HHS moved Saulog to a different position in 2021, several months after she filed a complaint with the department’s inspector general.
The main casualty of this tragic stupidity will be Becerra, who has presided over a botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the fiasco over monkeypox, and a leadership position that has sometimes seen him disappear from view.
But will Biden dare fire him? Becerra is the poster child for Hispanics in government and Biden has previously hesitated in getting rid of him. Perhaps now, that his latest idiocy has been exposed, Biden will pull the trigger and rid us of him.
