President Donald Trump is spotlighting the federal government’s failure to safeguard more than 300,000 young migrants it has admitted via the “Unaccompanied Alien Child” (UAC) program.
“Under this administration, 325,000 migrant children are missing,” Trump said at a September 13 press conference on the California coast. “Take the biggest stadium in California and you can fill it up five or six times. Those are all missing children. Many of them are dead. Many of them are sex slaves and slaves of [a] different nature.”
“There could be no bigger scandal than this,” he said.
The federally backed labor trafficking program is a political risk for Kamala Harris, who used her role as a senator in 2018 and 2019 to minimize protections for migrant youths in the United States.
It is also a powerful GOP response to the Democrats who gleefully accused Trump of putting a small number of “kids in cages” and “separating families” during his presidency.
The missing youths are part of a vast inflow of roughly 350,000 children and youths since 2021 via the 2008 loophole for “Unaccompanied Alien Children.” Many of the children are brought to the United States border by smugglers under contracts with illegal migrant parents who want to be reunited with their left-behind children.
But at least half the migrants are male youths looking for jobs in the United States, at pay rates far above what their parents can earn south of Mexico.
The vast majority of the missing youths and young men are missing because they refuse to contact their supposed guardians at the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency has the legal task of delivering the young migrants from the border to the volunteer “sponsors” throughout the United States, pending eventual court decisions on the youths’ legal status.
Many of the sponsors are labor traffickers who force young men into dangerous and abusive jobs. Some also force teenage girls and young women into prostitution. Nearly all the youths want to work, partly because they have to pay off the loans to the smugglers. Breitbart News has covered the scandals, including some of the sex trafficking.
In August, the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security reported that many of the UACs are “at risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
The huge population of untracked migrants implicates Vice President Kamala Harris, who shut down federal checks of people who serve as “sponsors” for the young migrants when they cross the border.
The shutdown took place when Trump was President and Harris was a Senator from California.
In 2018, Trump deputies arrested more than 150 would-be sponsors, many of whom were illegal migrants. The arrests were “outrageous,” Harris responded.
She subsequently inserted a rider in the spending bill barring the Department of Health and Human Services from sharing sponsor-related information with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. This rule made it easy for labor brokers to import youths for work in the United States via the UAC program.
Subsequently, the New York Times showed that many young migrants were abused in workplaces, and some were killed. Democrats ignored the scandal, partly because the UAC program is intended to reunite illegal migrants in the United States with their left-behind children and wives.
“Cristian works a construction job instead of going to school. He is 14 … Carolina packages Cheerios at night in a factory. She is 15 … Wander starts looking for day-labor jobs before sunrise. He is 13,” said the newspaper’s captions in photographs showing young teenagers admitted via the unsupervised UAC process.
The youths usually work for staffing companies at low-wage subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies, such as PepsiCo, General Mills, Walmart, Target, and Ben & Jerry’s. The report by journalist Hannah Dreier said:
These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.
In August Breitbart News reported:
The Department of Labor, in Fiscal Year 2023, found an 88 percent increase in child labor trafficking compared to Fiscal Year 2019. Last year, nearly 6,000 children, many UCs, were discovered illegally working brutal and often life-threatening jobs.
In April of last year, an HHS whistleblower testified before Congress and warned that the agency is operating a “multi-billion-dollar child trafficking operation” where UCs are being mass released to unvetted adult sponsors.
“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,” the whistleblower said.
Republican legislators in the House are investigating the child labor business. But Democrats and their allies in the establishment media have tried to ignore, downplay, and hide the child trafficking scandal since it started to worsen in 2014.