They Called It ‘Compassion’ — But it was Child Trafficking, by Kevin Finn

By Kevin Finn, American Thinker, December 9, 2025

Catholic NGOs accepted millions in federal tax dollars trafficking unaccompanied children.

In the history of American governance, few chapters will stain the pages as darkly as the utter failure of the Biden-Harris administration to safeguard unaccompanied migrant children. I must ask this question: If their goal was to intentionally traffic children into sexual slavery and forced labor, how would their actions have been any different?

For four catastrophic years, vulnerable minors poured across the Rio Grande and were funneled into a system riddled with incompetence, willful blindness, and flat-out negligence. A report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) landed like a bomb and exposed the tragedy: the administration lost track of over 320,000 of these children, releasing them to unvetted sponsors without so much as a whisper of accountability. These were terrified kids, fleeing poverty or violence, only to vanish into the shadows of sex trafficking, forced labor, and unimaginable abuse.

I must also ask this question: Why would parents send unaccompanied minor children on a trip across hundreds or thousands of miles, knowing the likelihood that they would be raped, otherwise abused, and forced into slavery? Were they greasing the skids for chain migration?

RELATED: Border Czar Says 62,000 Illegally Smuggled Children Rescued So Far

The human cost defies comprehension. Young girls, 16 years old or younger, drugged and pimped out by alleged “brothers” or “uncles.”  This was the very definition of dereliction of duty that prioritized open borders over innocent lives.

HHS stripped away rigorous vetting at the onset of Biden’s “reign of error,” opting for phone calls instead of in-person checks, permitting non-family sponsors — many hosting multiple children — to whisk away minors unchecked. Addresses provided to ICE were wrong 80% of the time, incomplete for over 31,000 kids, or downright fictional. 34 children were dumped at two nonexistent locations by one field office alone. Even worse, a 2021 interagency pact handcuffed information-sharing, blocking DHS from sponsor biometrics to shield potential criminals from scrutiny.

Law enforcement officers likened prying data from HHS to “pulling teeth,” as bureaucrats fretted over deporting sponsors with rap sheets or immigration status because… racism. The result? Over 233,000 children unenrolled in immigration proceedings since January 2021, plus 43,000 no-shows in court — prime targets for cartels surging in trafficking.

Whistleblowers like Tara Rodas, a former HHS recruit, exposed the horror: handing kids to “traffickers, members of transnational criminal organizations, bad, bad, bad people.”

In a final insult, the administration’s vaunted safety hotline for these kids ignored 65,000 desperate calls from August 2023 to January 2025 — pleas that spanned complaints about “stale bread” to nightly assaults by adult men in bedrooms. Of course, it was hard to answer all those calls when there was only a single staffer assigned to the task! One boy’s unanswered cries for help were finally reviewed after Trump took office and led to his rescue and his sponsor’s arrest.

Continue reading at the American Thinker

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