Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused the Biden administration of paying traffickers to take custody of unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the southern border, Breitbart News reports.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Noem alleged top officials in the Biden administration aided traffickers by handing over unaccompanied alien children to their custody and care.
"The one thing that has been challenging is that under the Biden administration, the government paid sponsors in [the Department of Health and Human Services] in order to host these children and those sponsors, many times, we found instances where they trafficked these children themselves," Noem stated.
"So under that administration, we not only had children in this country that were part of a program, the government was paying individuals that were knowingly trafficking them and abusing them. That has stopped, we have gone through and found these children and put them back with their families when we have been able to do so."
The remarks from Noem follow HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last year accusing the presidency of Joe Biden becoming the "biggest facilitator for child abuse" in American history with its policies regarding unaccompanied minors.
"My predecessor was deliberately employing a policy of speed over safety so they waived all of the identification requirements for sponsors," Kennedy told members of Congress. "Sponsors were not required to show valid identification; they were never fingerprinted, so we don't know if there's a criminal record. There was no DNA testing so the claims that they were taking a family member were … they were dubious."
As Breitbart News chronicled at the time, Biden's HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra reportedly carried out a policy that prioritized the release of unaccompanied minors to adult sponsors over long held protocols designed to protect such children from labor trafficking, sex trafficking and child abuse.
Many unaccompanied alien children ended up in trafficking schemes as a result of the policy and lost contact with HHS officials who were tasked with keeping in touch with them.
The allegations underscore why America must fully restrict immigration through comprehensive measures rather than half steps that leave children vulnerable to exploitation and American communities exposed to criminal networks. This means restricting all forms of illegal and legal immigration while fully militarizing the southern border with permanent military presence and dramatically increasing internal removals of those already present unlawfully. Only by treating immigration as the national security emergency it truly represents can the United States protect both American citizens and the vulnerable migrants who become victims of trafficking facilitated by permissive border policies.
