Earlier this week John A. Zadrozny, who served as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Acting Chief of Staff at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Trump Administration, published an editorial at The Federalist explaining the horrible problem of “unaccompanied alien children” (UACs) being trafficked across the border into the United States.
It is a non-partisan problem, as it has been documented just how horrific this problem has been since the Obama Presidency, and plagues all administrations, whether Democratic or Republican.
He correctly identifies the problem that allows human trafficking, and specifically the horrible child sex slavery trafficking, which is the U.S. Federal Government.
And while the Trump Administration publicly stated that they wanted to end this problem, it never happened because career bureaucrats run most federal agencies, and it is business as usual no matter which political party occupies the White House.
Human trafficking, and specifically the trafficking of children, is just too profitable. Zadrozny reports:
In 2020, the Trump administration instructed ICE’s Homeland Security and Investigations Division to conduct an audit of some of ORR’s UAC sponsor placements in fiscal year 2019 to try and get a sense of the fitness of existing sponsors. Horrifyingly, hundreds of UACs out of an overall sample of a few thousand could not be located or were no longer with the sponsors with whom they were originally placed. They were just gone. This was a sample of a much larger UAC population across the United States, which means the actual number of missing UACs was likely much, much higher.
Were these missing individuals really MS-13 members who went on to join fellow gang members? Were they sold into hard labor or sex slavery to pay off a debt to the cartels? Were they put on a plane and “recycled” as part of another cartel fake family unit? We ran out of time before we were able to find out, but the answer to these questions is likely all of the above.
But children coming across the border is not the only supply chain to child trafficking. The State Department publishes an annual “Trafficking in Persons” report, and in 2019 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that “over 300,000 of America’s young population is considered at risk for sexual exploitation.”
Fox News covered the press conference, and reported:
“We have a major issue here in the United States” Geoff Rogers, co-founder of the United States Institute Against Human Trafficking (USIAHT), said in an interview with Fox News. “The United States is the No. 1 consumer of sex worldwide. So we are driving the demand as a society.”
“We’re also driving the demand with our own people, with our own kids,” Rogers said. “So there are tremendous numbers of kids, a multitude of kids that are being sold as sex slaves today in America. These are American kids, American-born, 50 percent to 60 percent of them coming out of the foster care industry.” (Source.)
And according to the 2021 Trafficking in Persons report, things have only become worse since the COVID-19 “pandemic.”
The COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis with unprecedented repercussions for human rights and economic development globally, including in human trafficking. COVID-19 generated conditions that increased the number of people who experienced vulnerabilities to human trafficking and interrupted existing and planned anti-trafficking interventions.
Governments across the world diverted resources toward the pandemic, often at the expense of anti-trafficking efforts, resulting in decreased protection measures and service provision for victims, reduction of preventative efforts, and hindrances to investigations and prosecutions of traffickers. At the same time, human traffickers quickly adapted to capitalize on the vulnerabilities exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic. (Source.)
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the federal agency that facilitates child trafficking, as they are the funding source for the Foster Care and Adoption system where all these children end up, whether they are coming across the border as a UAC, or being medically kidnapped from their families right here in the United States.
As Zadrozny reports:
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is statutorily responsible for handling the housing and resettlement of dependent foreign nationals who enter the United States, including so-called unaccompanied alien children, or UACs. A UAC is a child whom employees of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) encounter at a U.S. port of entry or along the border not in the custody of a verifiable parent or guardian.
Last year we reported that the Biden Administration’s “open borders” policy resulted in an unprecedented number of migrant children needing to be placed with foster parents, and that some licensed foster parents in California were being asked to take in as many as 26 UACs into their foster homes. See:
The third lucrative pipeline to child trafficking is the overseas adoption industry. Again, this system would not be able to function without the U.S. Federal Government.
In 2019 we reported on the arrest of Arizona Maricopa County Assessor Paul Petersen, who was indicted in 3 states on federal charges of running an illegal adoption business out of the Marshall Islands.
Petersen was part of the Mormon Church and had completed his “missionary training” in the Marshall Islands where he learned the local language and culture.
Other Mormon U.S. Senators visited the Marshall Islands while this was going on, and the trail led to judges and other government officials that allowed this continue for so many years.
And yet only Petersen was arrested, while Arkansas State Senator Linda Collins-Smith was found murdered after she began to look into these illegal overseas adoptions.