Guatemalan human traffickers may be taking advantage of the Biden administration’s resettlement program for unaccompanied alien children, records from Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) whistleblowers suggest.
The whistleblowers, who believed HHS routinely facilitated unsafe placements of children, provided documents to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Grassley used the documents to compile a detailed criminal referralto the FBI. The whistleblowers say the government has long been aware of red flags in the migrant resettlement program, but that HHS leaders press employees to simply quickly deliver children to adults to live with, not question whether those adults are really related or will provide a safe environment.
Together, the documents detail an organized operation wherein traffickers advertise on Guatemalan radio stations to convince parents to send their children to the U.S. alone in order to exploit the United States’ refusal to deport “unaccompanied alien children.” The administration quickly releases children who cross the border into the custody of “sponsors,” typically adult illegal immigrants.
But those sponsors may not be relatives, but part of the trafficking enterprise that brought them to the country.
One 16-year-old Guatemalan boy recounts being taken over the border and placed with a stranger posing as his cousin after his father responded to one such radio ad. Another teenage girl was placed with a 25-year-old man who claimed to be her brother, whose social media accounts were later found to contain child pornography and violent images. Another woman, after being placed in a sponsor’s home, was featured on a Facebook profile of a man who appeared to boast that he was a trafficker and advertise women for sale.
The whistleblower documents show the Biden-Harris administration’s lax border policies have induced the separation of intact families in Guatemala, calling into question Democrats’ claim that they want to “reunify” families, while former president Donald Trump’s deportation policies separated families. A large-scale, organized Guatemalan child trafficking operation could explain why Guatemalans have consistently comprised almost 70% of unaccompanied minors, but just 6% of illegal immigrants overall.
The Biden administration has loosened the vetting of sponsors and prioritized getting children out of holding facilities and into sponsors’ homes as quickly as possible, seemingly to avoid hypocrisy after calling the secure facilities used by previous administrations “cages.” Grassley said the Biden administration has stonewalled oversight efforts on what happens to children after that. The referral demanded that the FBI “work to determine if there is human trafficking or other crimes, and take immediate steps to locate and save these children.”
The 16-year-old boy told an HHS case manager that his father paid a trafficker $2,500 to transport the boy to the United States after responding to a radio ad. A 35-year-old woman who said she was a distant cousin of the boy asked to be his “sponsor,” even though the child did not recognize her.
To prove her address, the “cousin” provided a receipt showing money being sent to Huehuetenago, Guatemala. She claimed that was to send money to her mother. But the child said none of his extended family lived there, but that it was where the people behind the radio ads were based.
The woman’s husband, it turned out, was using five different addresses where a dozen minors had been placed. One of the houses was linked to an LLC that owned at least ten houses, several of which were used to sponsor children. The referral said many of the associated addresses were in a “farming community,” which could suggest labor trafficking.
Another case detailed in the referral shows numerous adults were attempting to sponsor children using a single address. One man at the address was granted custody of six children by the U.S. government. He claimed one of them was his daughter, but her photo from the HHS camp shows that she appears to be a middle-aged woman older than her purported father.
HHS accepted this woman’s claim that she is 17.
Nonetheless, the Biden administration accepted the woman’s claim that she was 17 years old, and transported her to her sponsor’s address. The man had texted pictures of two different, and contradictory, purported Guatemalan IDs to the government to establish his identity, which they accepted.
One of the adults at the address had previously been granted custody of three children by the U.S. government. The Biden administration knew that none of the children had enrolled in school, and one had run away. Nonetheless, it continued to send children to the address.
A picture of the alleged 17-year-old — bearing a different name than the woman had given the government — was later posted to a man’s Facebook profile, which appeared to show a catalog of young females, the documents said. One picture featured a girl wearing a number, as if she were merchandise at an auction. The profile described the man as “Boss at Trafficking of Love, Kisses.”
A girl poses wearing a number, as if being auctioned.
In another case, two neighboring addresses had a combined 329 sponsees or attempted sponsees, with sponsors often altering the spelling or order of their names or addresses to avoid raising alarm. Even so, they had “multiple flags due to document fraud, noncompliant home study reports, unresponsive to post-release services, and CPS reports filed following home visits.”
Another address had 11 red flags, yet 64 children were placed there, and 22 more had been requested. HHS caseworkers spoke with one of the sponsors, who lied about almost every aspect of the situation and made remarks that led HHS whistleblowers to suspect that the “sponsors” were people who paid a cartel in order to gain access to children to use for cheap labor.
Another instance disclosed by HHS whistleblowers concerned a teenage girl placed with a 25-year-old man who purported to be her brother. Although DNA technology could readily be used to verify whether that is true, the government has refused to employ such technology, whistleblowers say. Instead, caseworkers never even see the sponsors in person before they are approved, and merely have them send screenshots of purported foreign identification documents via WhatsApp.
The 25-year-old texted pictures of Guatemalan birth certificates that were accepted as proving the relationship. But after the girl was placed, case workers looking back at that WhatsApp exchange saw his picture on the app change to pictures that suggested that he was not her brother.
After HHS caseworkers noticed discrepancies in the sponsor’s documents, they examined his social media accounts, and found child pornography and a picture of “a female laying in a pool of blood with slash marks in various places on her scantily dressed body.” HHS did not notify law enforcement or child protective services of the discovery.
At a recent Senate panel on the topic, the whistleblowers recounted how HHS’ only follow up with unaccompanied minors by placing a single phone call 30 days after they are placed with sponsors, at which point a third of the children cannot be located. At least 85,000 children were missing by 2021, a figure that could now be closer to 200,000.
This month, the Biden administration paused a similar program for adult migrants from four countries after an inspector general audit found that sponsors routinely lied.
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