It wasn’t so long ago that the absolute worst thing the government could do to a child — according to pretty much every expert, NGO and media mouthpiece on the planet — was to put that child in a “cage.” That was, as you probably remember, a major line of attack during the first Trump administration. The consensus was that Donald Trump was so evil and so unhinged that, simply for his own personal amusement, he instructed immigration officials to incarcerate children in the worst conditions imaginable, like they were animals. Things were so bad that AOC wept outside of an empty parking lot near an immigrant detention facility. Lin Manuel Miranda sang a lullaby for the Mexican children. Oprah, Rihanna, John Legend, George Clooney — the luminaries of our time — came together to formally condemn the Trump administration.
In response, conservatives made the case that children weren’t actually being placed in “cages” of any kind. They also pointed out that the alleged “cages” predated the Trump administration. And that was all true.
The strongest argument, however, was actually pretty simple. Democrats couldn’t answer the following question: How exactly would a Democrat-run administration handle tens of thousands of children who are apprehended attempting to enter this country illegally at the border? If they weren’t going to deport the children, or use Obama’s “cages,” then what exactly would they do? What’s the alternative? We all knew that Biden couldn’t use the cages, because now Democrats are saying cages are evil. So what would Biden’s administration ultimately do?
As it turns out, a big part of their solution was to place unaccompanied minors inside the homes of people they called “sponsors.” So if a minor attempted to enter this country alone, or if their father was being prosecuted for a serious crime, the Biden administration would try to find someone for these minors to live with, inside of this country. They wouldn’t simply deport the children. They also wouldn’t put them in a secure government facility or a “cage.” Instead, they’d house them with an adult.
Of course, the “perverse incentives” in this situation are off the charts. The Biden administration was effectively encouraging children to cross the border without a legal guardian, because then they’d be allowed into the country instead of being deported with their families. And predictably, foreigners caught on to this situation. The number of unaccompanied minors attempting to enter this country increased by more than 100% under Biden, to more than 130,000 children per year. But it was all necessary, the Biden administration said, to avoid placing children in cages. Instead, they’d all be going to “sponsors.”
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
A year ago, the HHS secretary at the time was asked about this program. And he conceded that, once children were handed off to sponsors, the Biden administration had no idea what happened to them. They completely lost track of these children. And they knew this would happen, because they understood that they didn’t have any legal authority to follow-up on the whereabouts of the children. It’s almost as if they intentionally pawned these children off as quickly as they possibly could, to make them go away. They said this was supposedly the more “humane” approach. Watch:
It’s not exactly the most reassuring testimony. He’s admitting that the federal government has handed off tens of thousands of children to adults who, in many cases, are not even related to them. And then he’s acknowledging that the government has no idea what happened next. That’s because the HHS, which is overseeing this whole program, isn’t a law enforcement agency. They have no power whatsoever. They’re not remotely capable — legally or practically — of figuring out what actually happened to these children that the government relocated.
And on top of that, Kamala Harris and other Democrats made sure to block HHS from informing local schools about the children. In other words, because of the deliberate policy choices of the Democrat Party, there was no way for anyone, even school districts, to verify that the children were attending school. Teachers couldn’t check up on them. So what were all of the kids doing? What was happening to them?
Thanks to new reporting from the group “Illegal Alien Crimes,” as well as The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak, we now have some more clarity on this question. And the answer is far more horrifying than any “cage” could possibly be. It turns out that, in effect, the Biden administration launched a human trafficking operation. That was their solution to “kids in cages.” Instead, now we have “kids being forced to live with sexual abusers.”
The Daily Wire reports:
A 37-year-old illegal immigrant man was arrested for allegedly sexually abusing at least one teen girl who the federal government sent to live with him as part of the Biden administration’s scheme to place ‘unaccompanied alien children’ in the homes of unrelated, loosely-vetted ‘sponsors.’ …Wilson Manfredo Lopez-Carillo was arrested by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office in Florida on May 22 and charged with three counts of sexual assault on a minor.
This is the level of “vetting” that HHS conducted during the Biden administration, to make sure that the “sponsors” had the best interests of the children in mind. Of course, there wasn’t any way to vet this guy, or check his record or anything like that, because he was *also* an illegal alien. In other words, yes, the Biden administration housed a 16-year-old girl with a 37-year-old illegal alien, who had already broken our laws to enter this country. They put her with a known criminal who they could not vet in any meaningful way.
If you pull up the probable cause affidavit, you’ll find that these alleged sexual assaults took place in February of last year. The victim arrived in this country in August of 2023. So within about six months, she was attacked several times in the “home” that the Biden administration set her up with.
The other thing you’ll notice, as you look at this probable cause statement, is that at least a third of the document is redacted. There’s a lot of information that’s not being disclosed here. To be sure, there are probably legitimate reasons for these redactions in some cases. We’re talking about a very sensitive case involving a minor, after all. But it’s enough to make you wonder whether we’ll ever receive anything approaching a full accounting for what the Biden administration has done here.
What we know for sure is that the scale of this particular human trafficking operation is staggering. Late last year, the DHS inspector general under the Biden administration disclosed that something like 300,000 minors are unaccounted for. And even the minors who are “accounted for,” in some cases, are raising very obvious concerns.
For example, the inspector general pointed out that:
One ICE officer expressed concern with not being able to take action in a case involving an [unaccompanied minor] whose sponsor claimed the [unaccompanied minor] was in an inappropriate relationship with her husband.
In other words, the Biden administration placed this unaccompanied minor inside of a household, and then the husband start abusing the minor, causing the woman to complain to federal authorities. And in response, federal authorities did absolutely nothing. And this kind of thing happens a lot.
From the report:
ICE E.R.O. [Enforcement and Removal Operations] has no authority over [unaccompanied children] beyond managing their immigration cases. Therefore, even if ICE were to identify [unaccompanied children] in unsafe conditions, the agency has limited authority to respond. ICE personnel at two field offices affirmed this and explained they had identified [unaccompanied children] in unsafe conditions but were unable to intervene.
Unfortunately the report doesn’t go into any more detail on that point. You’d think that, if illegal alien children were suspected of living in unsafe conditions, after the federal government placed them in a household full of other illegals, it would be pretty easy to kick the door down and investigate. But apparently, these children have just fallen through the cracks. No agency wants to assert jurisdiction. And of course, whenever anyone in Congress tried to press for answers, the Biden administration stonewalled, because in the end, all of this was deliberate.
Last November, for example, Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy tried to conduct an audit into the status of these unaccompanied children. From The Daily Caller:
HHS would repeatedly take months to respond to [Cassidy’s] requests — and sometimes the department would not respond at all. … HHS officials also stonewalled state investigators when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis demanded answers. .. DeSantis — in response to findings that alien children smuggled into Florida were being sexually exploited or used for trafficking in drugs and weapons — petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to investigate criminal activity related to the smuggling of unaccompanied alien children from the U.S.-Mexico border into Florida. ..However, HHS allegedly ‘refused’ to provide witnesses or documents to a grand jury, ignored subpoenas and ‘actively encouraged’ Florida entities that contract with [federal immigration] officials to not cooperate with investigators.
Predictably, nearly a decade after the fake outrage over “kids in cages,” there has been no concern whatsoever from any political figure or media outlet on the Left about any of this. There’s no outrage about the fact that the Biden administration, fresh off the moral outrage over the “kids in cages,” constructed an elaborate human trafficking operation with a code of silence that rivals any mafia.
Keep that in mind, the next time you’re told that some policy you support is supposedly horrific or barbaric or racist or whatever. When people tell you that, ask them what the alternative is. And if they can’t answer, it’s a pretty good sign that, in their quest to score some political points, they’re willing to endorse evils beyond all comprehension. That’s the bargain Democrats made under Joe Biden. And now, locked away with “sponsors” who no one can track, there are tens of thousands of children who are suffering every day as a result.
If you needed another reason to support mass deportations, that’s a pretty big one. At the very least, deporting some of these sponsors would help break up one of the largest human trafficking rings ever created — the one the Biden administration spun up right here in the United States. In the end, the only sustainable solution is a secure border — one that’s ruthlessly enforced in a way that might make some liberal women uncomfortable. Unless we want tens of thousands more children to suffer untold horrors with their “sponsors,” we simply have no other choice.
