Undercover conversations with agency staff reveal children arriving alone were often funneled into dangerous situations—sold, forced to work, or trafficked—while screening and sponsor checks frequently failed, exposing deep problems in how unaccompanied minors were handled during the Biden years.
Parents selling children. Kids owing cartels money and working off the debts. Nine-year-olds with sexually transmitted diseases. A child living in a factory and working 12 hours a day. These are the accounts taken directly from agency workers who handled a wave of unaccompanied minors and reported what they saw on the ground.
Explosive undercover recordings capture staff describing how sponsors and paperwork routinely slipped through with minimal verification. “I have called where it’s like, what do you mean ‘The sponsor was really not the parent? Or the cousin?’ or, ‘Wait, that was the parent, but they are going to sell them?’” one manager recounts, blunt and stunned by the system’s failures.
Frontline workers say case management often ignored basic checks and relied on flimsy documentation. “In the case managing department, we saw things like not asking the family member for certain documents to show that you can take care of the kid,” an administrator explained, pointing to a lax process that invited fraud and exploitation.
Those failures translated to clear harm for children who were supposed to be placed into safe care. “And then we get, ‘Well, I couldn’t go to school because I was forced to work…this was my full-time job. I work 12 hours (a day). My sponsor owns a factory and put me to work there, and they told me that in a year I can go to school, but that I need to pay them for the trip here,’” a staffer reports, describing forced labor tied to cartel debts.
Small details exposed huge red flags about who these sponsors really were. “That’s a red flag when a kid says, ‘Oh yeah, sometimes I go home with them, but I live in the factory.’” Photos and sponsorship checks were often manipulated, and even obvious fakes passed muster more than once.
One oversight advisor laid it out in plain terms. “Sponsorship checks was a huge one, and not having like, for instance, they’re clearly photoshopped pictures of like a sponsor and children, and I’m like, ‘How did this pass muster with anybody?’” She added that the fraud was blatant. “Like super egregious…literally, you could tell that person was like, stamped in the picture, like, that’s no way a real picture.”
The consequences were ugly: children trapped in labor, coerced into prostitution, or handed over to criminal actors. “Some of the children were having to work or were saved from, you know, this labor because they were paying back that [cartel] money or paying for their family,” an investigator said, explaining how repayment schemes funneled kids into abuse.
Caseworkers described kids disappearing from hotel rooms and returning with cash, phones, and signs of sexual exploitation. “We had a lot of (child protective services) cases because a lot of the clients would go out and say they’re working, but they didn’t come back to the hotel,” one supervisor recalled. “So they would go outside, sex traffic at a bar, leave the kids in the room, and not come back.”
When the undercover journalist asked, “Who would go to the bar?” workers answered without hesitation. “The parents. The mother. They were leaving them unattended in the hotel,” one said, then added more blunt reality. “They were being pimped. They didn’t have a lot of money when they came. They were looking for jobs. The bars, they knew the hustle.”
Agency staff warned some children were effectively being groomed and stolen once they turned 18. “You know, the kid’s 17,” a former HR chief explained. “Goes through the system, he’s going to be 18 in six months, and his ‘sponsor’ is the pimp. They’re figuring out the system. They’re not stupid. They’re like, ‘Okay, be a good boy for six months, and then I’ll call you, and then we’ll steal you.’”
Workers say routine screenings failed to flag sexual abuse, and indicators for trafficking surged during this period. Children were often AWOL from sponsors, or returned with unexplained resources and signs of exploitation, while very young kids tested positive for sexually transmitted diseases but screening did not catch the underlying abuse.
These accounts show how smug bureaucratic shortcuts and a permissive border policy created openings for malign actors to exploit kids. Staff testimony paints a picture of an overwhelmed system where paperwork and promises replaced genuine safety checks, and children paid the price.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left’s lies, new legislation wasn’t needed to secure our border, just a new president.
