On Tuesday, watchdog group Project Veritas released a disturbing story documenting how human traffickers may be using the federal government and U.S. taxpayer dollars to force migrant children into sex slavery.
The Project Veritas video tells the story of Tara Lee Rodas, a whistleblower who worked with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] at their Emergency Intake Site in Pomona, California.
Rodas says she’s been an employee of the federal government for 19 years. She volunteered to work with HHS in 2021 to assist with processing unaccompanied minor children.
In an interview with Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, Rodas spoke of myriad troubles with the treatment and placement of unaccompanied migrant children.
“I’ve seen that there are large numbers of children who are being sent to the same location. In some areas, within a few square miles there are over 300 unaccompanied children who have been released,” Rodas said. “It’s just strange that HHS knows there’s a lot of children going to one area, and yet they’re not doing anything to say, ‘there’s going to be a mandatory home study before we send one more child here.'”
It’s galling to note that such negligence is being supported by our tax dollars.
“The tax dollars of people who are listening are paying to put children in the hands of criminals,” Rodas told O’Keefe.
For one thing, Rodas reports that, typically, people who sponsor the children are not even U.S. citizens.
“Our sponsors typically are not citizens. They’re not permanent residents. They don’t have a legal presence,” Rodas claimed.
She further claimed that some “sponsors” may hold the threat of deportation over children as a way of making them comply with whatever that “sponsor” may want.
“The sponsor can hold up an ‘Order of Deportation’ to a [migrant] child and say, ‘This is your Order of Deportation. If you do not do what I say, when I say, I’m going to call ICE on you myself,’” Rodas explained. “We are paying to put children in the hands of criminals.”
When she confronted DHS officials about one case where children were, repeatedly, being sent to a single address in Austin, Texas, Rodas says she was treated dismissively.
“I said [to superiors at the facility], ‘We’re getting ready to send another child [to Austin, Texas],’ and they said, ‘Tara, I think you need to understand that we only get sued if we keep kids in care too long. We don’t get sued by traffickers. Are you clear? We don’t get sued by traffickers,’” Rodas related.
“So, that was the answer of the United States federal government. HHS did not want this information to get out,” Rodas concluded.
Rodas said that the superiors eventually retaliated about her “too caring” attitude and removed her from the program. As of this writing, she remains employed by the federal government.
“They knew I had made protected disclosures and they retaliated against me as a whistleblower and had me kicked off the site so I could no longer research the cases,” she told O’Keefe.
Project Veritas, which has been under investigation by the FBI since it obtained a diary, allegedly written by President Biden’s estranged daughter Ashley, sent investigators into the field to check on some of the addresses where suspicious numbers of children were sent.
“What we found was shocking,” Okeefe said. “Young children living with multiple, older, unrelated men.
Particularly heartbreaking was the story of an unnamed female who told the story of an alleged “aunt” using her in the sex trade.
“An aunt [sponsored me], but she kicked me out of her house. She was pimping me and I didn’t like that. She would pimp me to men,” the young female said in Spanish.
The girl eventually escaped, only to face the wrath of ICE agents: “I just escaped one night. I told [the “aunt”], ‘I’m going to the laundromat.’ She went to the laundromat and didn’t find me there. Later on, she called Immigration.”
The young girl said she had been forced to have sexual relations with so many men she couldn’t remember the number.
Indeed, the girl wasn’t even certain that her “sponsor” was even her aunt: “She said that she knew me since I was a young child, but I didn’t know her.”
Such malfeasance, according to Rodas, is at least partially due to specific actions taken by the Biden administration.
“One of the things that has occurred in this administration, is that they have relaxed a lot of the stringent vetting by creating these additional field guidances,” the whistleblower pointed out. “And there’s a focus on ‘move the children’ as opposed to ‘place children in a safe home.’ Right now, it is speed over safety. Move the children — 10 to 15 days.”
Project Veritas promises more videos on this story in the coming days.
During the Trump administration, the left bemoaned “kids in cages” as a mantra describing horrific treatment of illegal migrant children. Perhaps the mantra of the Biden administration should be “kids working as sex slaves — but at least they aren’t in cages.”
