The Biden administration’s Office of Refugee Resettlement
failed to vet sponsors responsible for caring for unaccompanied children apprehended crossing the border, whistleblowers told Senators Tuesday, describing several cases of apparent human trafficking involving the minors and their sponsors.
“What I discovered was horrifying: children were being trafficked with billions of taxpayer dollars by a contractor failing to vet sponsors and process children safely, with government officials complicit in it,” Deborah White, a federal employee detailed to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, ORR, told Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee.
White revealed that she and her colleague, Tara Rodas, first discovered a
case of trafficking involving minors crossing the border in June 2021, but even after reporting it, “children continued to be sent to dangerous locations with improperly vetted sponsors.”
“Children were sent to addresses that were abandoned houses or nonexistent in some cases,” White said. “In Michigan, a child was sent to an open field, even after we reported making an 911 call after hearing someone screaming for help, yet the child was still sent.”
“When I raised concerns about contractor failures and asked to see the contract I was told, ‘You’re not gonna get the contract and don’t ask for it again.’ So I took it upon myself to create trainings for significant incident reports of sexual abuse and for flagging trafficking, in order to equip case managers,” she added.
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