“The U.S. lost track of 1,475 immigrant children last year. Here’s why people are outraged now.”
That was a Washington Post headline from May 2018, one of many such pronouncements in nearly every mainstream news outlet – all decrying these missing children as evidence of the “cruelty” and “inhumanity” of President Donald Trump’s border security policies.
“It’s just wrong. It’s wrong,” Joe Biden said at one point. “Cruelty is the point. It’s their only point.”
But under President Biden’s allegedly more humane border security policies, the federal government has lost track of 85,000 children who crossed the border unaccompanied by their parents. Worse, many of them ended up in the hands of traffickers, not family or friends.
The scale is far bigger today because the number of children crossing the border has exploded under Biden. Since he took office, border agents have “encountered” more than 354,000 unaccompanied minors. In just the past six months, the number exceeds 71,000, which is twice what it was in all of 2020.
The response from the press? Crickets. For example, the Washington Post isn’t outraged at all. In fact, the only mention of the 85,000 figure so far has been in a commentary by brain-dead columnist Greg Sargent, who used it as an excuse to attack Republicans.
It gets worse. Congress last week heard from a whistleblower who told lawmakers that not only has the Biden administration lost contact with these unaccompanied border-crossing children, it hasn’t been properly vetting the sponsors with whom the federal government places them after they get here.
Tara Lee Rodas told lawmakers at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing that she’d volunteered to help the Biden administration deal with the flood of illegals, but then saw first-hand what she described as a “sophisticated network” of child migrant smuggling.
“Some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of transnational criminal organizations,” she told lawmakers. “Some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income – this is why we are witnessing an explosion of labor trafficking.”
Rodas went on to say, “it can be argued that the U.S. government has become the middleman in a large scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children.” (Emphasis added.)
And then there’s the explosive New York Times article that says the Biden administration has known all along that it unleashed a human trafficking nightmare, but has done little about it. It’s done the opposite, in fact.
The Times tells the story of Linda Brandmiller, who was supposed to vet sponsors. But she was fired after sending urgent warnings to her supervisors about possible child traffickers posing as sponsors. She wasn’t the only one whose warnings were ignored.
“Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk,” the Times reports. “Senior White House aides were shown evidence of exploitation, such as clusters of migrant children who had been found working with industrial equipment or caustic chemicals.”
The government’s response, according to the Times, was to wash its hands of the problem. “The agency’s legal responsibility for children ends once they are released,” an HHS spokesperson said. (Some might recall that when the Trump administration said the same thing about the relative handful of children it had lost track of, it prompted howls of protest.)
Last week, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee Republican, sent a letter to Becerra, telling him she was “deeply concerned regarding the recent reports that the Department of Health and Human Services has mishandled unaccompanied migrant children by placing them with unvetted sponsors, leading to their exploitation and forced labor.”
“President Biden’s border crisis has placed illegal immigrants in dangerous — and often deadly — situations, and the over 250,000 unaccompanied minors who have crossed our southern border over the last two years are no exception,” Blackburn wrote.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, has called on FBI Director Chris Wray to investigate this crisis.
“Reporting reveals that HHS loosened vetting processes for sponsors and retaliated against whistleblowers who raised these concerns,” Hawley’s letter reads. “As a result, thousands of children have been handed over to modern-day slave traders. They are forced into factory work under punishing conditions. They are forced to make auto parts, process meat in slaughterhouses, and reroof houses,”
If Biden is aware of this situation – and there’s no telling what he’s aware of these days – he doesn’t care. Neither does his administration. Nor, apparently, does anyone else who wore their hearts on their sleeves about migrant children during the Trump administration. The news about 85,000 lost migrant children got minimal press coverage. There was no follow-up to the Times’ blockbuster story. Fox News was the only TV news outlet to cover Rodas’ testimony, and we couldn’t find any coverage of her statement in any newspaper.
This is a massive scandal, one for which Biden is directly responsible. So, where’s the outrage? It’s as if the fate of these children no longer matters. Or, rather, it matters only when it serves the interests of Democrats and the far left.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Yes, I clearly recall the outrage, the caterwauling and rending of hair from all the main media editors and the big deal reporters and commentators on the screens earnestly and so righteously decrying the inhumanity of immigrant children being held in “dog cages” by the evil and cruel Trump.
Pictures of all that third world inhumanity shown hundreds of times to all of us. The evil Trump!! “Endless inhumanity” by the Trump administration, they screamed blue in their faces until….
It was pointed out that the chain link fences containing big rooms, not dog cages anywhere, had been put up by the Obama admin to keep dangerous gang types from the children, especially away for the female children. To protect the children, for heavens sake.
Oh!
Any reporter or main media editor ever say, “Oops, I am very sorry for our mistakes and for maligning our President.”
Do they ever?
Where are those rending their hair and screaming “inhumanity,” when we, the nation and and the truth (and the immigrants) need them in a much more depraved situation at the border, this time caused directly and purposely by a truly irresponsible man in the White House?
I think there are probably millions of people who care and would like to be able to do something but like me have no power and I’m not rich so no one would care about anything I would have to say and the one’s that are supposed to do something are the ones helping this abomination to take place.
It’s not that nobody cares, it’s that the left (CCP) controls EVERYTHING in
Amerika. Therefore, it they don’t cover it or prosecute somebody or crucify them in the court of social media it, then it simply didn’t or doesn’t happen
The Biden administration has reunited 400 children with their parents after they were separated as migrants crossing the southern border under the Trump administration, said Michelle Brané, the executive director of the Family Reunification Task Force.
More than 5,000 families were separated under Trump’s 2018 “zero tolerance” policy and a 2017 pilot program and advocates estimate over 1,000 remain separated. Because the Trump administration did not keep records of which children were separated and where they were sent, the task force and lawyers working on behalf of separated families have had a difficult time identifying families to offer them the chance of reunification.
Yea, another scandal in which not a darn thing is going to happen. How many scandals is that now? And tell me who has be held to account?
Speaking of child abuse what happened to the story about Joe taking inappropriate showers with his daughter? The evidence all in detail in Biden’s daughter’s diary. Another scandal thrown in the waste paper basket.