Documents Confirm Sex Trafficking ‘Fastest Growing Criminal Enterprise’ During Biden-Harris Open Border Administration
“The sex trafficking of minors, and human trafficking as a whole, is one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises in the U.S.,” said Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Mark Dawson, according to a special report last week by Madeleine Rowley at The Free Press.
The report follows the work of “an informant” named “Lisa” (not her real name), who runs a nonprofit foundation called Shepherd’s Watch – which uses technology “to disrupt and dismantle sex-trafficking rings.”
Lisa and her investigators at Shepherd’s Watch help to locate victims of sex trafficking and their pimps and then provide their data to law enforcement.
“Law enforcement is understaffed and stretched too thin,” says Lisa, according to the report. “That’s where we come in.”
Rowley posed a key question to Lisa:
I ask her if the sex trafficking of migrant girls had increased since the Biden administration threw open the border, leading to 8 million migrants crossing the southern border since 2021. “Yes,” she says. “Nearly all of my sex-trafficking rings now are migrant girls. The ads exploded within the first three months of the border being open. We started noticing new sites and ads in Spanish. That was very few before. Then sites dedicated to Latino girls popped up everywhere.” Since the border opened, Lisa added, over 90 percent of the ads are for migrant girls.
“If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes,” Lisa told Rowley. “It’s that easy.”
Supposedly, the mission of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office on Trafficking in Persons is “[t]o address human trafficking by supporting and leading systems that prevent trafficking and protect survivors, helping them rebuild their lives and become self-sufficient.”
The HHS trafficking office, Rowley wrote, provides migrant minors who have escaped from their pimps with “food assistance, medical benefits, and cash.” Once they become eligible for benefits, the minors receive a child eligibility letter.
Rowley noted that, while the number of child eligibility letters issued by the federal government “is supposed to be public information, she had to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in order for it to become available on the trafficking office’s website:
The numbers confirmed what Lisa had told me: Trafficking has increased—a lot—since Biden took office. During the four years of the Trump administration, the government issued an average of 625 letters per year to migrant minors who had managed to break free from their traffickers.
But in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration, that number jumped to 1,143. In 2022 it jumped again, to 2,226. Last year, the number stood at 2,148, but that was only through September; the fourth quarter hadn’t yet been counted. To put it another way, forced labor and prostitution among underage migrants more than tripled under President Biden, reaching record highs. And that only counted the handful who had escaped—not the thousands who were still held by the traffickers, the ones Lisa was searching for.
During a roundtable discussion focused on the crisis of trafficking at the border, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) heard testimony from Tara Rodas who, The Free Press report noted, wrote to a colleague that “our team discovered that human traffickers are exploiting the HHS Unaccompanied Children. ‘Bad actors’ are recruiting, harboring, and transporting minors; using force, fraud, and coercion; for the purpose of involuntary servitude, debt bondage, slavery, and potentially commercial sex.”
As a whistleblower, Rodas thanked Grassley “for being a trusted pathway to report the most horrific injustices against children that I’ve witnessed in my federal career.”
In her prepared testimony, she went on to describe her experience with HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR):
When I reported the MS-13 case and provided evidence that other MS-13 and 18th Street gang members were sponsoring children, ORR retaliated against me. In just 16 days after making my first protected disclosure to the Department of Justice Inspector General, the Honorable Michael Horowitz:
• I was taken off the MS-13 case by ORR’s Federal Field Specialist (FFS),
• The FFS told me I was under investigation,
• I was escorted off my job by the FFS & security, and
• My badge was taken.
• For my personal safety, my home agency offered to send armed agents to escort me from California back to Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, Rowley wrote about the Democrats’ response to Grassley’s roundtable discussion:
Democrats have been shamefully silent on the trafficking issue. At the roundtable Grassley held in July, not a single Democrat attended. Neither did Mayorkas. “Democrats didn’t come because they’re just too embarrassed to talk about the shortcomings of this administration on immigration,” Grassley told me. “Especially when you have HHS sending kids to MS-13 gang-related sponsors in Ohio. It’s hard to explain that.”
In September, Grassley introduced S. 5073, a bill that would deny future federal contracts to facilities identified by the Department of Justice as abusing Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs). The Iowa Republican asked the Senate to pass the bill with unanimous consent, i.e., without the requirement of a roll call vote.
“I think this is a very commonsense [solution] that no politician, no member of the Senate – Republican or Democrat – should stand against,” he said.
Nevertheless, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) effectively killed Grassley’s bill, proposing instead an amendment that would codify a Biden-Harris plan that Grassley argued would only put UACs at even more risk.
Grassley said on the Senate floor:
In Biden-Harris’s America, children disappear every day.
You won’t see their faces on any milk cartons, search parties aren’t sent for them and the Amber alert almost never sounds.
According to Justice Department’s filings, some of these children reappear years later in Emergency Departments with injuries from physical or sexual abuse. Others resurface as underage laborers, working jobs most adults won’t even take. Many are never heard from again.
These forgotten children are overlooked because they are unaccompanied migrant children.
Read Rowley’s entire stunning report at The Free Press here.