Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee are probing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over thousands of migrant children ending up in a labor trafficking pipeline after being released into the United States.
For over a year, the Biden-Harris administration has grappled with a labor trafficking pipeline that has flourished across the U.S. as hundreds of thousands of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) are released into the U.S. interior with adult sponsors — most of whom are not their biological parents.
Last year, for example, the New York Times reported that some 85,000 UACs had been released into the U.S. interior to adult sponsors who ended up lost in the system.
RELATED: Whistleblower: Federal Government Facilitating “Multi-Billion-Dollar Child Trafficking Operation” at U.S. Border
Reps. Mark Green (R-TN), Clay Higgins (R-LA), and Dan Bishop (R-NC) have since sent a letter to Biden and Harris’s top HHS officials requesting information on UACs released into the U.S. interior and to adult sponsors since early 2021.
“UACs remain highly vulnerable to human trafficking, and many are placed into the hands of human smugglers and cartel members in their journey to illegally cross the southwest border,” the congressmen write:
The statistics and data surrounding UACs is extremely disconcerting. In February 2023, media reported that over 85,000 UACs processed by [Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)] in a two-year timeframe were unable to be contacted. Reported as “lost,” these youth represent a growing humanitarian crisis. From February 2021 through June 2024, over 500,000 UACs were encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection along the southwest border. From October 2020 through June 2024, ORR released over 430,000 UACs to sponsors. [Emphasis added]
As record numbers of UACs are encountered, media reported the correlating and devastating reality of child labor exploitation UACs are subjected to in the United States. The sheer number of UACs encountered and subsequently released to sponsors and the inability to contact these “lost” and severely vulnerable children, the Committee finds [it] imperative to examine ORR’s screening capabilities for both children and sponsors. Additionally, the HHS IG released multiple reports highlighting the lack of thorough vetting of sponsors and failure to follow up with children placed with sponsors, and many concerns remain. [Emphasis added]
Most recently, HHS Inspector General (IG) Christi Grimm published a report revealing that in 22 percent of cases, the agency did not conduct proper and safe follow-up calls to check in with migrant children released to adult sponsors.
In one particular case, Grimm detailed, HHS officials did not follow up with a migrant child until almost 325 days after they had been released to their adult sponsor.
The Department of Labor, in Fiscal Year 2023, found an 88 percent increase in child labor trafficking compared to Fiscal Year 2019. Last year, nearly 6,000 children, many UACs, were discovered illegally working brutal and often life-threatening jobs.
To date, Harris has not commented on the influx of labor trafficking of UACs.
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@energyandcommerce / YouTubeJohn Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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