On a recent
episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek talked with Health and Human Services (HHS) whistleblower Tara Rodas. A federal employee for two decades, including 17 years in the inspector general community, she answered a call from the Biden administration to help with the border crisis and a surge in unaccompanied minors.
Mr. Jekielek: How did you discover what you’ve call government-sponsored, taxpayer-funded child trafficking?
Tara Rodas: At the beginning of 2001, the Biden administration made a call to federal employees to help with the crisis at the border. Specifically, they needed employees vetted to work with children to help place them with sponsors here in the United States. And that’s what I did. With my husband being from El Salvador, and being a Spanish speaker, I thought I would be that welcoming face for the children when they came. I had no idea that the children didn’t know who they were going to.
Mr. Jekielek: One statistic states that 85,000 children are unaccounted for. When did you first realize something was amiss?
Ms. Rodas: It only took a couple of weeks working in case management, looking at the cases, and seeing the children crying. The case managers were distressed and saying, “I don’t understand. This child doesn’t know the person they’re going to.” One case manager had to be hospitalized for stress because she felt so strongly that her child was being trafficked.
That’s when we started looking into the contract case manager’s work. I wanted to see the IDs and match them to this paperwork of where we’re sending the child.
That’s when I realized something was wrong. How could this be family reunification if the children didn’t know who they were going to? The children are safe with us. Then within 10 to 14 days we’re sending them to unvetted people and homes. It doesn’t make sense.
Here’s an example from one of the cases. We sent this 15-year-old girl to her 20-something brother. Later we find out that the documents he sent were birth certificates for a brother and a sister, just not for the two of them. He posts a photo of himself and his supposed sister all snuggled up together. Then he posts another where she’s by herself, all made up with her shirt unbuttoned. It’s clear she’s for sale.
Mr. Jekielek: So no one is actually checking who the sponsors are?
Ms. Rodas: As I said in the congressional hearing, it was baffling to me that no one is holding the sponsor accountable. The challenge for HHS is that over 95 percent of the sponsors have no legal presence here, meaning they’re not permanent residents and are here under false pretenses.
We’re incentivizing the traffickers because we’re delivering the child directly to their front door. The government is paying for the flights and bus tickets to deliver these children to people who view them as commodities, and they’re making millions of dollars off of them.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell us about your attempts to disclose this.
Ms. Rodas: With the first case we put forward as suspicious sponsor activity, people seemed excited that we’d brought this information to them. We identified an individual who had been a household member at six addresses, and over a period of time had started accumulating children.
We now knew we needed to look for people sponsoring multiple children and for different people sponsoring at the same address. This is in June 2021.
By July, I was talking to law enforcement. But after we identified this big case in Austin, one of the case managers came to me and said, “We’re sending another child to this place in Austin,” which we had already identified as an address where we shouldn’t be sending people.
I went running to the command center, which is where the executives were, and I said, “We have a child on this manifest going to a place we’ve already identified as trafficking.” She said, ”Tara, you do understand that we only get sued if we keep kids in care too long? We don’t get sued by traffickers.“ Then she leaned in and said, ”We don’t get sued by traffickers. Are we clear?” At that point, I knew that their position was about meeting the numbers, getting the children moved, and putting speed over safety.
I just hope that Congress takes action, because while we’re talking, children are being sold for sex. They’re getting off an overnight shift. We can’t allow these children to live in slavery.
Mr. Jekielek: HHS has trouble keeping the children because the volume is so huge, correct?
Ms. Rodas: Exactly. Hundreds of thousands of children have come across the border into the care of HHS and been sent to sponsors, some of them traffickers. That’s why I blew the whistle on HHS.
Mr. Jekielek: What’s been the reaction to these disclosures?
Ms. Rodas: Some people believe it’s a conspiracy theory, that there’s no such thing as child trafficking.
Fortunately, others are asking how we can rescue the children, who’s involved in this, and what laws we need to change. It really runs the spectrum, and it’s a hard subject to deal with. Once a case manager came to me in tears and said, “Tara, the boy whose case I’m working on is only 8 years old. He was prostituted the entire way across Mexico. He’s in diapers now because he can’t control his bowels.” This is the level of evil that is happening.
Mr. Jekielek: What are the immediate things that could remedy this?
Ms. Rodas: Turn the data over to the inspector general community. Analysts could crosscheck that data with criminal records. They could immediately rescue children and prosecute criminals.
They could also change the rules and stop releasing children without background checks. This is what any reasonable person would do.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
