The Horrific Immigration Scandal We Need to Talk More About | The American Spectator

It was sometime in late July that the House Committee on Homeland Security convened in one of the many hearing rooms in the Capitol complex with the goal of interviewing three witnesses about the somewhat boring topic of non-governmental organizations’ involvement in facilitating the Biden border crisis.

As a general rule, congressional hearings are humdrum. They tend to receive rather uninspiring titles and involve a lot of posturing and not a lot of listening. The most exciting moments generally end up on our X feeds, where they drum up a bit of hype before disappearing into the internet void. This particular hearing in July was, of course, not all that different — it should have been.

The newsworthy part of the hearing wasn’t that non-profit organizations working with the Biden administration had made the illegal immigration crisis at the border worse — if anything, that was entirely predictable. No, the newsworthy bite was that the Biden administration had allegedly missed 65,000 phone calls.

In 2023, the Biden administration had a problem: unaccompanied kids were showing up on our southern border in such large numbers that they threatened to drown the Department of Health and Human Services. The procedure for handling these kids was to get them out of government custody and into the homes of relatives and sponsors while the kids waited for a court date. The kids were told to call a hotline should they run into any problems.

On the one hand, the administration was pressuring HHS to get the kids out of government custody because it didn’t want to deal with the optics of children in Border Patrol cells. On the other hand, vetting sponsors and relatives properly takes a lot of time (ask anyone who has tried to help out with the foster care system), and time was something HHS didn’t have. (READ MORE: Importing the Rot: How the U-Visa Became a Fraud Bazaar)

So HHS skimped on the vetting process, and sex traffickers promptly took advantage of the system.

Ali Hopper, president and founder of GUARD Against Trafficking, told the House Committee in July in her official statement that an internal audit of HHS found “approximately 70 percent of sponsor applications examined were … fraudulent.” One field specialist from the Office of Refugee Resettlement visited a potential sponsor’s home only to discover that the alleged “mother” was “adorned in MS-13 tattoos.” ORR apparently placed the child in that home anyway. Three months later, the child had died.

The Biden administration not only missed phone calls from kids complaining about everything from stale bread to midnight sexual harassment, but its welfare checks were minimal at best. The government would allegedly call the sponsor’s home twice and, if nobody answered, would stop following up entirely. By the time the current administration stepped in, the government had reportedly lost an estimated 300,000 kids.

That brings us, of course, to the Trump administration, which has been trying to unravel the mess as best it can. During a Fox News segment on Friday, John Fabbricatore, a current HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement senior advisor, said that the team has found children who’ve been found in unimaginable situations. “We’re talking about debt bondage, where children are being made to work off debt — trafficking debt. We’re talking about children that were brought into situations and then treated like sexual slaves.”

To date, the administration has managed to track down just over 22,600 of these lost children and has arrested more than 400 of their sponsors. By the time it managed to intervene, 27 of those kids had died.

As more details emerge, it’s becoming clear that this may very well be the biggest scandal of the whole Biden administration. At this point, anyone who complains that Joe Biden lacked the mental capacity to run the country and that the media and his aides covered it up sounds like a broken record; we’ve known for quite some time that the Biden family dabbled in a fair amount of influence peddling with foreign nations; and yes, Biden does seem to have preferred an autopen to the physical thing. These are the kinds of scandals we expect from corrupt politicians, drunk on wealth and power, and from those who surround them. (READ MORE: Forget the Autopen. The Question Is Forgery.)

Aiding cartels in trafficking potentially hundreds of thousands of children as they poured across the border is something entirely different. We’re talking about levels of apathy and incompetence that blow the mind and raise questions about how much of it might have been intentional.

The most important thing, of course, is the work that Trump’s team is doing in a war room in D.C. to uncover the whereabouts of these lost children. Rescuing them is the most important thing. Then, it’s time to track down those responsible — either intentionally or through negligence — and hold them accountable.

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