There is an unprecedented child trafficking crisis in America today. Large numbers of unaccompanied migrant children are being released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to sponsors that are not thoroughly vetted, including individuals associated with dangerous criminal organizations like MS-13 and the 18th Street gang, whistleblowers say.
Many migrant children now work backbreaking shifts in slaughterhouses, restaurants, or factories. Others are being sold for sex.
From 2019 to 2023, immigration authorities transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied minors from the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the HHS. A recent watchdog report found that ICE is unable to account for more than 32,000 unaccompanied children who failed to appear for court hearings. Another 291,000 unaccompanied children simply did not receive notices at all.
So how many children in America have fallen victim to trafficking? To what extent are international actors facilitating this? What can the incoming administration do to stem child trafficking? What will be the greatest challenges they must tackle?
Join me for this special live crossover episode with NTD’s International Roundtable program, hosted by Cindy Drukier. The two of us will be sitting down with three key individuals who have been at the forefront of exposing child trafficking and demanding policy change.
Watch the video:
Guests:
Tara Rodas, HHS whistleblower and 20-year public servant, primarily working in the federal inspector general community
Aaron Stevenson, DHS whistleblower and former intelligence research specialist for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Mary Flynn O’Neill, executive director of the America’s Future nonprofit
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Welcome to this special live stream of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host Jan Jekielek, and this is my co-host Cindy Drukier.
Cindy Drukier:
I’m the host of NTD’s International Roundtable and today we are co-hosting this special event. We’re going to be covering a pretty tough subject today and that’s child trafficking in America, and particularly the question of what’s happening to these unaccompanied migrant children that are crossing the border. We’ve learned some really troubling things actually from people who have put everything on the line to reveal these facts. Let me introduce our guests today.
First, we have Tara Rodas. Tara has been on American Thought Leaders before. She’s a whistleblower who has testified both in the US House and the US Senate about what she witnessed firsthand while on a temporary assignment with HHS. She’s a 20-year public servant and has worked most of her career in the federal Inspector General community.
We have Aaron Stevenson. Aaron is a former intelligence research specialist at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who became a whistleblower when he uncovered some very troubling truths.
And finally, we have Mary Flynn O'Neill, who’s the executive director of the nonprofit, America’s Future. They’ve been doing remarkable grassroots work, educating the public across America about the realities of child trafficking and how to make a difference.
Ms. Drukier:
This is a particularly tough topic. Many people don’t really understand the scope of it, so let’s start there. Tara, can you explain to us the scope of the problem, and what we’re actually talking about today?
Tara Rodas:
Jan and Cindy, thank you so much for having us here to talk about what we now know is government-sponsored, taxpayer-funded child trafficking. More than half a million children have come from their countries to the U.S. border. Then the U.S. Government has a program that is white-glove delivering them to people who we know are criminals, and traffickers. Because of Aaron’s disclosure, members of transnational criminal organizations, and the children have just disappeared. We don’t know where they are. It’s very troubling that children in America are missing .
Ms. Drukier:
What do you mean by disappeared?
Ms. Rodas:
The U.S. government can no longer say where the children are. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General has said the children aren’t showing up for their immigration hearings, so they have no way to check on them. Some of them haven’t even received a notice to appear, so no one will ever know where the children are.
Mr. Jekielek:
When you say over half a million, surely not all these children have been trafficked. What is the reality?
Ms. Rodas:
Well we know they were all smuggled to the border, because who at seven or eight-years old is going to be able to cross from one country into another country? Anyone can see that children can’t make it to the United States of America on their own, so everyone agrees they were smuggled here. The question is what happens to them after that? What happens? We do know, due to some of the reporting, even at the New York Times, that less than 10% of the children in some zip codes are actually going to their parents—less than 10%.
Mr. Jekielek:
Mary, Aaron, please feel free to jump in anytime.
Mary Flynn O’Neill:
There’s a reality that I researched and saw, being an advocate for children myself for years. Before the 2020 election, I was carefully watching the government statistics come out of HHS on CPS, on foster care with how many kids in the foster care system. I was watching a very disturbing number come out of the government on foster care. I believe it was like 400, 000 children were missing in 2020 out of that system.
Now, that was before the new administration came in. Before that new administration came in, during Trump’s administration, you saw literally adults bringing children to the border. You can watch those videos and the news reported those things. Prior to this new administration, you have adults bringing children to the border. Now you just see children being brought to the border without adults. We witnessed that.
And we also now, and I believe that what was happening with this now we talk about this number that’s phenomenal you know over 500 right 350 whatever that amount is it is a new supply of children to buy and sell so what changed exactly was it a rule that changed or was it lots of things changed lots of things changed first of all simply for the people to understand DNA stopped being done and then vetting stopped being done on the sponsors.
So it was happening prior to the election in 2020, but now you see all holds barred. Everything’s gone. All those really important factions were taken out. DNA was one thing. It’s very important to understand that these kids were not being given or being brought by their parents or their relatives. The DNA wasn’t there. And then, of course, as we talk on, is the DNA, excuse me, the vetting was gone. There was no more vetting of people.
Ms. Drukier:
Aaron, what were you seeing at DHS?
Aaron Stevenson:
Our scope and our lens was looking at bad guys. Specifically representing USCIS, I was on this thing called the Transnational Organized Crime Working Group, a government body. It was a whole government approach to combat transnational organized crime, cartels in other words. This thing started in like 2016, so I’ve been on there for a while. You can see patterns over time of what type of aliens, what type of non-Americans are on this watch list.
Typically, it started off with Eastern Europeans and then some of the Mexican cartels. Trump came in, he put on MS-13, 18th Street Gang, and the rest of Sinaloa. In that timeframe, we start seeing a lot more encounters to USCIS from south of the US border specifically. It’s a land border, so they can cross over easily, and that’s where we see the records.
But February 2021 is the first time that I see one of the records coming over of what’s actually happening with the sponsors and these kids. So prior to February 2021, you would see things like deportation flights.
You would see things like DUI arrest, a court record, or maybe a travel record.
But you never saw that an MS-13 member is going to sponsor a child. The first thing that I saw was a little code talking about how this alien on the watch list name, date of birth. We know who this guy is. We gave his fingerprints to HHS for the purpose of this little program. The first one blew my head up. I said, I don’t know what that means.
Mr. Jekielek:
Can you flesh that out? You’re looking at a sheet that basically says that an MS-13 member is sponsoring a child?
Mr. Stevenson:
Yes. They’re emails. Basically, they come across live feed. When you put your fingerprints down to sponsor a child, that gets shipped out to a lot of government agencies. It goes into their records. Then these things come up automated and kind of packaged. It goes to an analyst at the terrorist screening center.
Then they do a little, let’s fill in the blanks here. Here’s the guy’s name. Here’s the date of birth. Format it correctly. Where’s the guy’s other government information? And then you go from there basically. So when these emails come in, because they’re just emails, it just says, for the purposes of 6-USC-279-USC-SPONSOR. I said, I’ve never seen that before, so I didn’t even really get into it.
In March, I see another one again. I see that code and say, I saw that before, what is that thing? I copied and pasted it and looked through all my records going back to 2016 of all these encounters and there were only two, the one in February and then the one I’m looking at today.
That was the beginning. So I googled it because I’m an analyst. I don’t know what it is, but I figured it out. It’s talking about this unaccompanied child program. I asked my co-workers, what is this thing? They said, we’re USCIS.
Ms. Drukier:
And that is run by Health and Human Services, HHS, and not DHS?
Mr. Stevenson:
Yes, so I said, that doesn’t involve us. I’m hitting dead ends in my work okay, but now iIll keep looking into this thing. I see another one in April and it’s like it’s three in three months now. That’s weird. So I started asking the rest like the top transnational crime working groups. I’m hitting up the DOJ, FBI, and Customs Border Protection, enforcement minded people.
There’s a whole different approach. There’s a lot of people to call, but no one had any response to it. I was just like okay, no one’s tracking this thing. It just seems kind of odd to me because this just started. In May we see another one come through sorry now in naysay another one come through it’s four in four months. So I’m starting to really dig into the alien set.
Who is a sponsor? What’s going on with that thing? Okay, I got the name, date of birth. Okay, this guy is MS-13, that person is in the 18th street gang. She’s MS-13. This guy is in a Balkan group. I was like, wait a minute. This is a new thing that I’m seeing. We’ve never seen this before. This is happening with four different nationalities that have come over to do this in three different gangs. Okay, something is happening. I have no idea what it is, but it’s a problem.
Now, the complexity that I want to make sure people understand is the watch list. Because that’s a big word. This thing is capped at 40,000 people. It’s not because of technology. It’s not like we can’t handle more. It’s because the government caps it at 40,000 people. So I’m looking at a very little box, and there are bad guys coming in every four months to get a kid.
On top of that, I’m going through their immigration history. First off, all these aliens are illegal. But also, they are all utilizing the asylum process. By doing so, they will be coming off that watch list eventually. It takes a manual review, but by U.S. policy, they are to come off that watch list.
Ms. Drukier:
Because they’re sponsoring the child?
Mr. Stevenson:
Because they’re going for asylum, so it takes a little bit of time. It takes the analyst a while to find the guy’s name.
Ms. Drukier:
Sounds like a loophole.
Mr. Stevenson:
Which is exactly what it was. Now, I’m seeing a regularly occurring pattern, and it’s coming from more than one country, and it’s coming from more than one gang. That was my big alarm bell, because rival gangs don’t share resources. They will never share the same pool of how they can make money.
If this is a new drug, the MS-13 team will be trading with the 18th Street Gang. That was enough for me to go like, okay, there is something bigger here. I’m trying to query all the reporting I could find, but no one is covering it. The Department of Justice is not writing intelligence reports on this thing. DHS, Homeland Security, is not writing about it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Tara, this is a good time for you to give us an overview of what happened.
Ms. Rodas:
At the beginning of 2021, he’s starting to see this. And at the same time, the federal government makes an all call to all federal employees and says we have a crisis at the southern border. We need help with people to come and place these children with family here in the United States. So I believed, I was looking at an announcement, saying, hey, we need federal employees.If you have language skills, that’s great. I’m a fluent Spanish speaker, and we need you guys to come help these children.
I thought, I’m going on the humanitarian mission of my lifetime, and I thought, what better thing could I do than to be there, greet the children, play games, do puzzles. Sadly, once I ended up getting on the ground and working in case management, seeing what was happening with the children, we started to see this with my team in June of 2021. We are seeing aliens, these transnational organized criminals sponsoring the kids. We’re seeing what we were calling a suspicious sponsor. It was early June when we sent in the first suspicious sponsor, not knowing that one child had ever been trafficked through this program.
Ms. Drukier:
What was the red flag that made it suspicious?
Ms. Rodas:
The children, the flood of all these kids. But then also children on their own, revealing they weren’t going to their parents, and that they didn’t actually know who they were going to. That they were coming for work. They had been told stories, because trafficking is force, fraud, or coercion. That’s what’s happening.
The children are being lured with a story. They’re being told, hey, you’re only making $2.50 a day in your home country. And they’re telling the child and the parent, you’re only making $2.50 a day. But if you let your child come with us to the United States, we will pay for the journey. Now, they will have to pay the debt off once they get here. But we will pay them six dollars an hour. That’s the recruiting. So the children believe and the families believe they’re gonna be Elon Musk-rich. These children think they’re in good hands, because the government is doing it. It’s the U.S. government.
Ms. O’Neill:
And that comes into the NGOs that are recruiting.
Ms. Drukier:
So the NGOs are going to the villages of these families?
Ms. O’Neill:
They’re already working for the government, recruiting down in international areas, outside the border to recruit with these promises, they'll be taken care of. Now, those are faith-based, most of them, which we know from the grand jury that took place in Florida which was amazing. These are faith-based. They still receive money from the government.
They’re recruiting children because they’re trusting, and because they’re Christian. There’s a Jewish foundation. There is a Lutheran social service. They think they’re in the trusting hands. They have no reason to be suspicious. The families think, you will take my child and my child will be safe. They’re going to make money up there. We’re going to be getting them out of this poverty and they will be bringing them into America.
Mr. Jekielek:
We have some information about the situations they’ve ended up in on the American side of the border. What is the range of things that can happen to them?
Ms. Rodas:
We could start with the New York Times. Hannah Dreier crisscrossed the country and interviewed children who were saying they were in forced labor conditions. The children are not only working overnight shifts in slaughterhouses, but they’re dying on jobs here. They’re in roofing jobs that they’re not trained to do. Some children are dying like their first week here in the United States. We also know because reporters who’ve taken the addresses of suspicious addresses we had they’re knocking on the doors.
There was a 16-year-old girl in Houston who said, my sponsor says she’s my aunt, but I’ve never met her. She’s pimping me out for sex in the house where I’m living. The children are telling stories of abuse and rape and some are dying. They are working as slave labor. We have child slave labor today.
Mr. Stevenson:
These are the doors we can actually find where they answer. Because a lot of these places like in Florida and in Virginia they’ve done it, only five percent of the doors actually get answered, where the person is actually there. It’s basically just a landing spot to then move the kid on because right within a week, they’re gone.
Ms. O’Neill:
That’s what we found in Bonita, FL., with that one case with three houses. They bring the kids to one house through a contractor. Then they move the children to another house. There are all kinds of behaviors from the traffickers, the johns, the buyers, and the sellers. This is an over $150 billion business.
Ms. Drukier:
What business specifically?
Ms. O’Neill:
The trafficking and child exploitation. I’m going to say child exploitation. There are so many different things that they can use a child to make money off of. Pornography, slave labor, child sex, and also breeding young girls for babies. Now, we’re finding another very disturbing piece, and they’re all priced at a different level. Little boys can be turned into a transgender. They can be a boy or a girl.
These things are very specific for what buyers and sellers are doing with children. It is not only to the point where a child’s physical body they use, it is also this organ harvesting. A child that’s being raped ten times being used over and over and over. A drug can be used once and it’s gone. A child can be used over and over and over. But that lifespan is basically two years at a pace of making money off of a child.
Ms. Drukier:
Are you saying that the kids don’t live beyond two years of this?
Ms. O’Neill:
These children have physical trauma and mental trauma. Many of these children are brought to doctors that fix them and get them back working again. Yes, if they are exploited, their lifespan is short. You can’t do that to a child ten times a day and not expect that child to have repercussions from that.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is a horrific reality. We’re talking about 500,000 kids that at this point we don’t know where they are. How many of them are actually being trafficked, according to the definition you gave earlier?
Ms. Drukier:
There must be some legitimate well program where children are being reunited with their families.
Ms. Rodas:
We have the data right that says in some zip codes less than 10% of the children go to their parents. The HHS has created a new position called a unification specialist, not reunification. So it’s no longer family reunification. This is just unifying the child with a sponsor here in the United States. There doesn’t have to be any relationship. You don’t have to have proof that you are related to this child. You don’t have to have proof that you have the financial resources to care for this child. There is no screening to see if the sponsor is a criminal?
Ms. O’Neill:
That is the dropping of protocols.
Ms. Rodas:
Yes, there is no screening. They don’t meet them. There’s no specific criteria.
Ms. Drukier:
Is there a follow up on how things are going once they get there?
Ms. Rodas:
A phone call. That’s it. Because the U.S. government has no legal obligation, and HHS has said this before Congress many times, we have no legal obligation once the child is out of our custody. So once the child has been turned over, there are no legal ways to check up.
Mr. Stevenson:
They’re basically saying, not my job. We got the kid in. It’s the American government’s job to follow up, but no one takes responsibility. This is the complexity of the problem. This whole thing is governed by a layer of procedure and law. The Florida Settlement Agreement dictates certain things. The Homeland Security Act of 2003 dictates certain things. The TVPRA of 2008 dictates certain things.
You have administrative law in which HHS can determine like, okay, so now we have this program of mission, so we’re gonna actually change some definitions and how we collect information and what’s our system of record in which we actually do case management. If the goal is to not traffic children, that’s not what this thing is.
The goal of this thing is to get kids from A to B, out of the country, into the country. They do that very well, because it takes on average 10 to 14 days, but they’re capped at 30 days. Within one month they want this kid out the door. They can’t have them there any longer.
Ms. Rodas:
They move them to another facility, so that it doesn’t appear on a report that a child has been somewhere very long. They were driving home this 10 to 14 days, move this kid, move this kid. That means a child has presented alone. Remember, there are no parents involved here.
A child presents at the border to our fine border patrol. They record a US point of contact. You may have seen in the news where the children have a little piece of paper. Sometimes they have a number sharpie on their arm, it’s written on their clothes. So our border patrol takes down that US point of contact, and then they have 72 hours to transfer the children from DHS to HHS, our care.
Once we get the child, we take that US point of contact that came with the child, we’re calling them, hey are you expecting someone? And our goal was to then move the child to that person in 10 to 14 days. The child presents information that the US government takes down and says, okay, we’re sending the child to that person.
Mr. Stevenson:
There’s no scrutinization there. No screening, that’s the gospel. Oh, that note was stapled to this kid’s leg? Got it. That’s the number we’re calling then.
Ms. O’Neill:
HHS has this Child Protective Services agency. There’s lots of different agencies in the HHS. There’s CASA, which is an attorney or a legal representative for a child. In our family court system, there’s CPS, there’s CASA, there are all these agencies. In family court, when there is a neglect charge, there’s a parent involved.
They have different protocols than this system that is supposed to be checking on the child. HHS is doing something really seriously wrong by not having any responsibility once they move the child. This American system right is supposed to be doing this for these unaccompanied foreign children coming in who are lost.
Ms. Drukier:
If you see that a sponsor is an MS-13 gang member, do you contact HHS and say, hey, that kid that you’ve got, don’t send him there?
Mr. Stevenson:
Those notices specifically went out to a working group of 116 people. The first thing I did was to go through all the URLs, all the domains. They were all at DHS.gov. There was no HHS though, so I know that they weren’t receiving those notices. But again, I’m law enforcement minded, and I’m intelligence minded. I’m calling up and going through reporting from every other entity of this working group, which was from 10 departments and agencies. I can list them all, but it’s the government, basically.
No one had any idea, but also, they had no concerns. I said, CBP, do you guys track unaccompanied kids? I don’t know this program, it’s all classified. Some of these sponsors are MS-13. It’s verified, they’re on the watch list, and I can show you. I'll send you the thing. They said, no, that’s not us, we don’t do that. There was no curiosity. It wasn’t like, we don’t do that, but we should look into this. I made that same phone call throughout numerous departments.
Again, there’s a major problem. This is a nightmare. This really solidified for me in July, 2021, right before I go public. At that time, DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis [I&A], a component of DHS that’s actually a representative of the intelligence community, published an unclassified document called a collection primer. Intelligence as an enterprise and an industry is very, very structured. It’s very organized. It’s not just cloak and dagger. It’s very top-down.
The intelligence cycle is just straight up planning, collection, exploitation, analysis, and distribution. Step two is collection, and a primer is exactly how to think about it. It’s like the first coat on the wall, right? So their collection primer was about international gangs. This is a new administration and we want to know about organized international gangs, guns and drugs. That was it.
There was nothing about human smuggling, nothing about child trafficking, and nothing about the enterprise of moving people for profit or exploiting kids for money. And that was okay and that’s top down. That’s coming from the Executive Office of the United States through all the departments and through DHS. They were saying, we’re not tracking this thing at all. So I said, I am going public with this and telling the American people. That was a huge part of it.
But there are people in the system that are seeing this thing. There has to be a lot of feds out there who are looking at this thing. For me, it was like hoisting a flag up to where someone can see it and say, I’m seeing that thing too and it’s not good. That was Tara, Debbie, and Mayra at the emergency intake site in Pomona, CA. That was a short-term contract, a short-term work type thing. Just understand, that’s how hodgepodge this operation really is. How many kids did they move in that time frame?
Ms. Rodas:
Over 8,300 children in less than six months.
Mr. Stevenson:
And these are temporary employees doing the majority of the work. Most of them aren’t feds. Most of them don’t have a background in vetting.
Mr. Jekielek:
You would want to have some kind of professional experience, like you’re not just going to take someone’s word for it.
Mr. Stevenson:
Vetting for child trafficking is not like vetting an ideology. You can vet for Al-Qaeda. You can look for extremist remarks, you can look for ISIS flags, you can find indicators and warnings being like that guy’s probably Al-Qaeda based off of XYZ. Child trafficking is an event, not an ideology. The only real way that you can do these things is with a screening mechanism.
Does the DNA match the relationship? Okay. Do we positively identify who this person really is based on biometrics or a drivers license? There has to be a proper way to actually positively identify these people. That’s all you can really do when it comes to that. It’s a screening approach.
Vetting for these kids in this instance should be like concurrent vetting where we verified who you people are. We’re keeping eyes on you guys the entire time now. We’re going to know where that kid’s at, we’re not gonna do scheduled phone calls, we will have authority and jurisdiction over who this child is.
Mr. Jekielek:
We are familiar with adoption realities. It seems like the opposite of what you’re describing.
Ms. O’Neill:
There are experts that know the behavior, that do specific work with child trafficking. That’s what we do, that’s what America’s Future does. That’s what our training is about. That’s why we’re training people. You can take a small course for a couple hours or you can go to be certified with our Association of Recovery of Children, the oldest recovery of children there is in this country. And these are the things that we have to do.
But there are behaviorists. There are people that are specifically, they can identify traffic. They didn’t care. Do you have to actually meet these people? Because it sounds like they’re not even being talked to or met, right? Or at least just a phone call.
Well, the government didn’t want to get involved. They didn’t want to use anybody that was an expert. And because- Obviously. Where the CPS, that’s my point with this different system within the HHS, they’re supposed to be these experts in the American foster care system. They’re supposed to be these people in the American foster care system. That’s Child Protective Services. They’re supposed to be these people that identify if it’s neglect.
But in this system, they didn’t even use any of these specifics. They didn’t care. They just moved the kids. They just brought them in, moved them around. Could have been anyone in the federal government. They were giving them to MS-13, their gang, to bad people.
Mr. Jekielek:
A big part of what we’re doing today is to try to, you know, offer some ideas about what could be done in the future to deal with this. This feels like a massive problem with 500,000 children that have come in. We don’t know where many of them are. It’s unclear. Obviously, you guys have been thinking about this a lot.
Ms. Rodas:
It seems like if you create a system in which there’s loopholes to be exploited, bad guys are gonna exploit those loopholes. How do you close them way ahead of the law enforcement criminals?
Mr. Stevenson:
The way we structure our thoughts on this thing is, first, you have to rescue the kids. You have to get a kid out of that environment. Two, you have to then destroy the actual trafficking networks. It’s not just one bad guy. That guy belongs to a gang and gangs have networks. Then there’s the actual infrastructure with the NGOs and the contracts involved. That has to be dismantled. There’s a three-prong approach. The next huge part which I have less of an answer for is what do these kids need now? They need help and care. But before we get there, we have to actually find these kids.
Ms. O’Neill:
That’s the key. The first thing that should be done is find the kids, because then they'll find the bad guys.
Mr. Stevenson:
There are two basic approaches. One of them is like a federal mindset. I’m not saying there is no local involvement, but this is the way I’m seeing it, and also hearing about it in the news, of course. The best way to find the kids is not to go knock on doors where the kids aren’t even staying anymore. We’ve seen that too many times where the kids have been moved out of the house. If we focus on that one avenue, we’re not going to find them.
But they did get handed to a trafficker. If we focus on that guy who has a cell phone, who has his information held by the government, it’s an easy way to target these people as a whole. The best way to look at these people, the traffickers themselves, the sponsors, depends on the president and if he intends to continue the current course of transnational organized crime. There’s ways that this can be handled. You have to upload the watch list and increase its priority on the national intelligence priorities framework. That’s just the way the government works.
Mr. Jekielek:
Should they expand the watch list beyond 40,000?
Mr. Stevenson:
Yes. And you could not designate them as cartels and transnational organized criminals anymore, but as terrorists. At this stage, that is a much more appropriate way, but also a ready-to-go type thing. There is a framework, a structure, and inherent talent in the government that can already do this job. We have been doing that for 20 years and actually do that pretty well. There’s meat on the bones in that system. If we classify these people as terrorists, the game changes. There are already laws and you can get material support. Now, you’ve got a host of options where this can be handled.
Finding the kids, if they go that route, is not going to take that long. That is a six to eight week type thing. First, it’s getting on the networks, then kicking in doors. I’m not telling the president what to do, but that’s where the president has authority to be utilizing federal assets, using U.S. attorneys, and using local law enforcement and sheriffs to go kick doors. It’s not that complex. Then you can look at the NGOs and contractors, because that was the true lifeblood and the lube in the machine that made this thing so efficient to begin with.
So it can be done. I know people say, oh my gosh, half a million missing kids. I say, no they are missing right now. I’m telling you very clearly, that is a very solvable issue. Aftercare and treating the kids is a problem because the kids need a lot of care. I don’t know what that entails exactly, but there are a lot of smart people who do.
Ms. O’Neill:
Right, and there are people that are ready to do this. They’ve been doing this with care of children, doing exactly what dealing with the trauma of a child that’s been trafficked or a child that’s been slave labored. There are people that are healing and working with these children. It’s a different kind of trauma. It’s a different kind of entity as far as what we’re dealing with. It is something that needs not just scientific ways of helping a child. You need the spiritual end of this. There is trauma beyond which we can talk about, this piece of it being an evil thing.
These children are very traumatized. They’re not with their mothers and fathers. That’s why we are so passionate, because we’re thinking about abandoned little kids. They’ve been told a lie. They’re here and have been released from their parents who are in a situation where they’re very poor. These are kids that are coming from this trauma all their lives, this poor poverty, maybe from communist countries, and maybe countries with massive corruption.
They’re coming into this country, and you think they’re going to assimilate in this society? No, we’ve traumatized them. Now we’ve got to deal with their trauma. We have people that have been doing this.
It’s a matter of getting this plan together. It can happen very fast and these people are ready to go.
Ms. Rodas:
To be clear, we believe there are three main objectives; rescue children, prosecute traffickers, and dismantle the trafficking infrastructure.
This new administration can do it simply. All they need to do is designate child trafficking activity as terrorist activity. As Aaron explained, we have a system ready to turn on, and these people can go after the traffickers. When they find the traffickers, they can find all the children being trafficked.
Mr. Jekielek:
What is the actual definition of trafficking?
Ms. Rodas:
Force, fraud, or coercion. Children have been lured here with false stories and they believe that they will be living the American dream, going to school, getting an education, and then being able to get a good job to send money back home. That is not what’s happening.
Mr. Jekielek:
Then when they get here, they’re coerced and exploited. That’s the real picture.
Ms. O’Neill:
The behavior is already happening. We’re talking about unaccompanied children coming from other countries. Remember, this is the way they work with grooming children in this country, to get them ready to be trafficked. It’s total control. So what’s the intersection between these two? They’re just using the same criminal behavior for how to capture a child.
Ms. Drukier:
But are they the same people? Do we dismantle them?
Ms. O’Neill:
Yes, the gangs are doing this. The big money maker is child trafficking. That’s the big money maker. Guns and drugs are secondhand now. The big bucks are from the child as a commodity. That’s the big money, because you can just do it over and over again.
Mr. Jekielek:
Is that really the case? Because drugs are massive, but you’re saying it’s a bigger industry.
Ms. O’Neill:
Yes, it’s a bigger industry, but they use drugs to drug the children too. There’s guns and drugs involved. You’re keeping a child in a room with a gun at a table at their head, or they are drugged up as they are being used. This is all part of it. But the big money is in the buying and selling of a child.
Ms. Rodas:
Right. The question is, how is that? Because for me this was shocking and stunning. I didn’t know that this was happening until law enforcement explained it to me and said, Tara if I sell a drug, I sell it one time. Then I have to go make more. But if I have a child I get to sell them over and over again, day after day, week after week, year after year, until that child is
Spent. They are continually profiting. These are evil people who view children as a commodity as a product to be sold.
Mr. Stevenson:
Okay, so now that’s clear, and we get that part. The current administration’s mindset is family unification, so let’s look at that really quickly. And this is where you get the trends of where the kids are coming from versus where the illegals are coming from to be unified with their kids, right? The children in this program for a long time have had a steady stream and in order. It’s mostly Guatemalan kids and then it’s El Salvador kids and then Honduran and then Mexican and then less than 3% is everywhere in the world.
Okay. So now mirror that with people in the country that came illegally wanting their kids back. Are we saying that it’s always 42% Guatemalan kids? Because this stream of kids across these four countries has been constant and never changing. But when illegals come across it’s not mirroring the same thing. It’s not 42 percent of all illegals are Guatemalan.
You’re seeing people from all over the world at all different rates at all different times. While this is like a straight line that’s not one chart you get this fluctuation of different countries and different peoples all throughout the world, which is then another indicator for me that they are adults. There’s a reason why we’re not seeing a lot of African kids in this program or Indian or even South American kids, right?
This is coming from a population that’s basically closest to us. Those kids are basically right there. They are just harvesting them, which is the recruiting and trafficking part, and bringing them in, because it’s the quickest and most exploitable resource for these networks.I hate looking at it economically, but there are economic indicators showing these things. That’s what I try to understand by looking for the broad trends, because it’s a massive, massive problem.
We talk about the number of children that are missing. But there’s no curiosity from the federal law enforcement or television community that’s even like considering it. I go public with my story and they find out it’s me. They said, You’re fired, you’re done. By the way, you’re cut off from the program and you’re not getting any more access to that thing. But nobody ever asked me, what’s going on? What did you see? What was the cause for your firing?
Ms. Drukier:
What cause did they give you for your termination?
Mr. Stevenson:
The government just didn’t trust me anymore. They never said I lied and they never said that made things up. They said, you showed some damning things there, so you’re done.
Ms. O’Neill:
He showed the faces of gang members in his disclosure. They didn’t like that that he revealed their photographs and he revealed the emails.
Mr. Stevenson:
They were going to do it with the black bar over their faces. I said, no, take it off. Show them the name, but don’t show the date of birth and don’t go crazy with it. You can show their faces, I don’t care. These are traffickers. If we’re doing that with J6 prisoners during the manhunt that they were doing at the time, then we can do this too with child trafficking guys.
Ms. O’Neill:
We also do it with criminals that have committed sexual assault. I used to get the list of sexual offenders and pedophiles at the church all the time. They do it with that, but somehow they can’t do it with these suspects.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re saying that it should be equal treatment.
Ms. O’Neill:
Yes. It’s just not equal treatment.
Ms. Rodas:
He’s blowing the whistle on a new and emerging threat that is a danger to children. That’s why he got fired. It’s unacceptable.
Ms. O’Neill:
That’s why it is important for them to be designated as terrorists. That just has to be done.
Mr. Stevenson:
That’s a key word which is emerging. We had never seen MS-13 putting their fingerprints to the American government saying, Can I have this kid, please? That never had before until February 2021. All of a sudden we’re seeing a constant flow of it. It’s not just a click from El Salvador, this is happening with international gangs throughout the region.
Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve heard that the Guatemalan government has actually come looking for some of these kids. What’s happening with that?
Ms. Rodas:
Robbie Starbuck did a very in-depth interview with the Attorney General of Guatemala. The Attorney General had actually written to Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas, to say, hey, we have all these reports of these terrible things happening to our children. We want to help find our children. Can you help us? Attorney General Paxton doesn’t have access to the data that HHS has. HHS won’t give it to anyone. They won’t give it to foreign governments who are needing it. They won’t give it to the Attorney Generals.
I’ve worked with my Attorney General, Jason Miyares, in Virginia. He’s asked for the data, because children are missing. He said, you won’t go after them, but if you tell me who their sponsor is, I will knock on their door. HHS won’t give it. They won’t give the information to Congress. Not even when subpoenaed will they give the data. HHS has the data that today could lead to the rescue of children and the prosecution of criminals, but they will not provide it.
Mr. Jekielek:
It sounds like you have a policy recommendation here.
Ms. Rodas:
Absolutely. Give the data. On day one, Secretary Kennedy can release the data to every other agency who needs it. But if we designate child trafficking as terrorist activity, then all the data gets utilized and they will go get them.
Mr. Stevenson:
Yes and there’s extensions there, because now it’s terrorism. Now, you can bring in OFAC, the Office of Foreign Asset Control. You bring in your telecommunications. You can start doing it a lot quickly. It’s not just like, okay, here you go guys, go for it. There has to be people willing to carry out the mission. But these are simple fixes. This is not a complex problem to solve. That’s like, okay, bad guys have kids. How do you find that out?
By doing this process. It’s really, really not that hard. We’re talking about information, that’s all it is. It’s not like we’re lifting up heavy stones with ropes. We’re talking about taking information from one database, ensuring the integrity of it throughout the government, and then doing what the government can do in this case, which is identify networks, identify trends, and then use it for enforcement as the president wishes to do.
Ms. Drukier:
What would you recommend in terms of changing the policy for unaccompanied children? What would that look like?
Mr. Stevenson:
Mandatory DNA matching across the board. For all the 500,000 kids, every kid that’s in this program right now has to be found. That’s just like, even if, oh cool, you’re with a good parent, awesome. But guess what? We’re still going to find everybody else. Number one though is DNA matching. That’s required along with concurrent vetting. Courts have some say, and then there’s the administrative state that has some say, and then you’ve got federal executive memos happening all the time. That has to get deconstructed. That takes smart minds. Lock them in a room and kick them in the behind.
Ms. O’Neill:
Right. The unaccompanied program was just very bad. It was just a very bad system.
Mr. Stevenson:
There has to be a congressional approach too because this is law and there’s some problems here. One thing is the definition of an unaccompanied child. This is a child under 18, who has no immigration status and no family in the country. So category one sponsor is the parents of the child.
Ms. Drukier:
Isn’t that contradictory?
Mr. Stevenson:
It’s entirely contradictory. Absolutely. They need to agree on some definitions. Congress has to be able to understand them. There are some things that are overlapping. This has to get clarified because this thing’s running out of control. We can do this thing in four years, but then what? I don’t want this to happen again. There’s got to be an approach we can take.
Ms. O’Neill:
The designating of it being terrorists is very key.
Mr. Stevenson:
It’s very important that people understand HHS is not a law enforcement agency. It’s not an investigative agency. At DHS, Aaron was easily able to see that these are criminals and gang members. Everyone over at HHS says, let’s reunite.
Ms. Drukier:
It seems strange that this would even be an HHS program, considering what it entails.
Ms. Rodas:
Exactly. They simply don’t have the knowledge, skills, ability, or tradecraft to go after traffickers. That’s just a fact. They’ve lost control of the program.
I don’t think there’s anybody who would deny they have lost control of the program. It’s not 35 children, not 350, not 3,500, but we’re talking upwards of 350,000 children that you can’t put your hands on, that you don’t know where they are. Okay, you’ve lost control of your program. Period.
Ms. O’Neill:
But when the first report of 85,000 came out, to me that was it. That’s lost control. How do you do that? That’s a lot of children. The number of 85,000 was reported and that stuck with the American people.
Ms. Rodas:
Yes, and that was 2023. He’s reporting in early 2021. We reported in 2021. They could have done something, but they’re not capable. Then they wouldn’t share the information. There are simple fixes. There truly are simple fixes.
Ms. Drukier:
What is the rationale for not sharing the information?
Ms. Rodas:
They value the anonymity of the sponsor. This is just a fact. They value the eminent anonymity of the criminal sponsor over the safety of the child.
Mr. Jekielek:
Maybe they also don’t want to be held accountable. I don’t think anybody would think this is a successful program.
Mr. Stevenson:
Right. Given the establishment and how that operates, there’s a revolving door between this program and other ideological components. The current director of ORR is Robert Dunn Marcos. Prior to that, it was a guy in the Obama administration, I forgot his name, it escapes me. He’s currently working for a think tank called the Open Society Foundation.
There is a private protection racket going on with friends in that element of our government society where it’s, okay, I’m going to go make sure that policies are good, and then we can go make sure that this program can happen. How is that any different than the defense industry where it’s like, hey, I’m going to retire from the Pentagon, and my friends out here now get a huge contract.
Ms. O’Neill:
If they do this process properly, and if they designate them as terrorists, I strongly believe it will lead to uncovering the corruption that’s so deeply seated in this country. The American people know that it’s deep-seated in the local community. It will open up a huge can and blow the top off. It will be beautiful for the American people, because it has been a problem.
Ms. Drukier:
Maybe the time is right, because the issue of child trafficking has actually been in the headlines.
Mr. Jekielek:
Tom Holman has said he wants to go after the criminals first, so this is a highly compatible activity that you’re talking about. You could help the children while going after the criminals.
Ms. O’Neill:
We’ve got to help the children first, because then they‘ll find everything else. They’ll find the NGOs. They‘ll find everything. They’ll find everybody that’s been doing this. If they just go designate the terrorists and find the children first, then they'll find everything else.
Mr. Stevenson:
It’s a very manageable problem. Having worked in the vetting operations for CBP and DHS, having done intelligence work for the government, military, and also contracting, this is not a problem that they can’t handle.
There’s no floor of analysts right now that can actually start it themselves. They are there to do another job. But again, it’s just information.
You could say, look for terrorists now. There’s a new population of terrorists coming in, these cartels. Bam. They have the tradecraft and development, they know the best practices, and they know how to do this. It’s just a matter of doing that transfer of data.
Again, we’re bringing up things like the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, the NIPF, which is a real thing. That’s top down from the president. He wants to know certain things about certain places. Elevate that and designate these things on certain criteria. He’s got smart people lined up. He’s got his people ready now. Just fire off and go.
Ms. Rodas:
I’ve heard Tom speak very passionately about these children. Tom Holman has a huge heart for these kids. He’s witnessed children at the border who are now no longer alive. They have been brutalized in ways that most people just can’t imagine. I’ve seen him tell stories through tears about what has happened to 18-month-old children.
I do believe that Tom Holman, along with Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kristi Noemn under President Trump will go after this. It is a horrible mess. But this is solvable, and I believe this team is going to do it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Mary, can you discuss the American children?
Ms. O’Neill:
I want to connect this to Americans. I want to connect the fact that MS-13 doesn’t become a sponsor for just the foreign kids, the kids that are coming in. You’ve got to understand, when they go find children in this unaccompanied program, they’re also going to find the nest, which means it’s going to have American children that are being trafficked. They’re not just a group of foreign children in this house. The people that do this will take any child, will do anything to a child. It’s all money and it’s a commodity.
So they’re going to open up a massive amount of these networks and these nests, and we’re going to save more than just the unaccompanied foreign children. We’re going to save American children. This is a huge thing to what America’s Future has been doing, because that’s this component that Tara has done, this champion here.
There’s people that are in this team that have investigative journalists, like Liz Crokin. This girl has been terrorized since she investigated Pizzagate. I’m going to bring that up because the FBI has proven that. The New York Times has proven it. We already know about these symbols. There are things that are going on that we can identify.
But this team has worked so carefully together in all areas doing their different gifted work that the biggest thing that I need to do that America’s Future has been doing is going around the country and training and teaching people in their communities, especially in churches, because we can do a lot in the, that’s where the people are, in the churches. That’s how I feel that the American people really are.
We’ve been teaching people how to identify certain behaviors, little things, like the color of a house, like a door switch in a house that’s inside the house, not outside the house, like a trap door. Certain things, behaviors, these things people need to understand that this is going on in their, every border, every state is a border now. It’s a border state. Every state has children.
Mr. Jekielek:
Mary, how can people request a training seminar from America’s Future?
Ms. O’Neill:
Our project, Defend and Protect Our Children, was kicked off here at Mar-a-Lago a couple of years ago. We have gone through eight states this past year. We’ve trained about their policy, know their laws, and know their resources. They get a full picture of what they’re dealing with. Even they learn how to legislate. We have a grooming bill that we’ve passed in Florida and several other states. We’ve got five more states that are trying to push this grooming bill.
The grooming bill that is used is like one with the girls that were training to be Olympic gymnasts. In order to prove the assault, they had to prove the grooming. The children came into this to prove the attack, the actual assault. So this grooming piece is extremely important. We’re seeing grooming in public school systems and books with CRT. You’re seeing all kinds of grooming going on. This is the kind of thing that we have been bringing to the states, and we’re going to get through every state, every community we can.
I’m thinking of ways that I can get in this team into smaller days of training. The resources that we have brought to the table are phenomenal, and we’re making an impact. The website is americasfuture.net. You can go into our legal resource libraries. There’s election integrity libraries. There’s citizenry libraries. These are all important to protect children and defend children.
The PDPC project is called, get in the fight. We’re going to back up this administration with all the education necessary. The law work we’ve been doing is phenomenal. The law work we’ve been doing doesn’t just focus on the abortion issue, or a personal property issue, or the First Amendment. We have taken cases like the Chevron case. We’ve taken the Fisher case, and J6. We take big risky cases to the Supreme Court and win these cases. We’ve filed over 100 amicus briefs, but they’re big cases, and that’s where we go.
We’re gutsy, we’re risky, and we’re going to do this for the American people, because that’s what we’re doing. We have to help them keep this strength and fearlessness up, keep them on. Look what they just did with this vote. They just told whoever’s listening that they’re not going to put up with this anymore. This is who they put in office. They gave them the Senate, the Congress. We’re turning this country back into a nation of God. That’s what we’re going to do.
Ms. Drukier:
I believe you. If your organization has this fire in it and people will be affected.
Mr. Jekielek:
We’ve come to the end of our live stream. Let’s have a final 30 seconds from Tara and Aaron.
Ms. Rodas:
I want to thank you again for having us on to talk about this critical issue. There is currently a war on children. I do believe this administration with Tom Homan, Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Kristi Noem, under the leadership of President Trump is going to solve this problem. The problem is solvable. I believe this administration is going to solve it, and we’re going to stand behind them as they do that.
Mr. Stevenson:
I always hear people say that they affirm us and they back us up. They always say that we have to be a voice for the children. The children are saying, come get me, come help me, come save me. That’s what they’re saying. I believe the incoming president and administration heard that and understand it. I think it’s going to be quicker than people realize. You have to be comfortable with understanding what that means. This is now a reality. This is our country. We should be acting like we own it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you, Aaron. Thank you all for joining us on this special American Thought Leaders Roundtable crossover. We'll see you next time.
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