The Patriot Post® · Exploitation of Biden's Migrant Children: Part II

Hannah Dreier of The New York Times broke a story back in February that exposed the levels of exploitation and trafficking of migrant children and teens who have been permitted to stay in the states under Joe Biden’s deliberately open border.

Our own Nate Jackson, who analyzed her findings, noted that Dreier did the best she could to downplay the severity of the largely Democrat-created border crisis.

However, Dreier’s most recent deep dive into this horrific state of affairs has brought the focus squarely on the malfeasance of the Biden administration’s open border and lack of regulation for border jumpers.

Dreier says: “Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk. The Labor Department put out news releases noting an increase in child labor. Senior White House aides were shown evidence of exploitation, such as clusters of migrant children who had been found working with industrial equipment or caustic chemicals.”

Concerns, cries, and even protests are being ignored. Part of the problem, according to Dreier, is that there are simply too many unaccompanied minors due to the open border, which just this week Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed is secure. Shelters are filled to capacity, and farming these children out to sponsors to create more space in the shelters is a top priority. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “vets” the sponsors, and the Department of Labor (DOL) is supposed to follow up on the children. But they are overwhelmed by the sheer volume.

In the past two years, more than 250,000 illegal minor children have crossed the border into the U.S., and many of them get “lost.” As political analyst Jim Geraghty reports, “According to the Department of Health and Human Services, as of February 2023, out of 108,981 ‘safety and well-being calls’ conducted for children discharged from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 17,926 sponsors could not be reached.”

In other words, adults who oversaw these children entering the country and released them to a “sponsor” (sometimes that means “trafficker”) have turned a blind eye to the suffering and exploitation. Dreier sums up the government’s general attitude: “An H.H.S. spokeswoman said the department was aware that some migrant children worked long hours because they are under intense pressure to earn money, but the agency’s legal responsibility for children ends once they are released.”

This is the same government run by a president who recently said: “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child. … Our nation’s children are all our children.”

We know Joe Biden is lying about caring and loving our kids to the level that parents love, care for, and protect their own, but the way the executive departments have allowed for the conditions for these migrant kids to work in — dangerous factories, overnight shifts, and other trafficking circumstances — might clue in the rest of the country to how little the government cares about children as a general rule.

These kids only have one recourse, a hotline to report abuse, and — surprise, surprise — reporting has gone up 1,300% since 2018. Other than that, the “generous” bureaucrats who ushered them into the country and farmed them out to greedy sponsors and allowed them to be treated with abuse and neglect have nothing legally to do with these kids.

This story should be one of the bigger scandals in the travesty that is the Biden White House, but few are even talking about it anymore, much less truly care. As usual, this is getting memory-holed by the mainstream media.

Geraghty underlines this point: “Americans have intense disagreements about illegal immigration and what should be done in the situations of unaccompanied minors who cross the border. But no one with a lick of sense, an ounce of compassion, or an iota of respect for the law would contend that exploiting those poor kids in dangerous workplaces is the right answer. Any way you slice it, this outcome is just about the worst — much worse than a system that catches migrant teenagers and puts them on flights or other transportation, returning them to family members in their home countries.”

The real truth is that the exploitation of migrant children only gets attention when a Republican is commander-in-chief. The real shame is that using children as a tool for political bludgeoning doesn’t help these children, doesn’t stop the border crisis, and doesn’t deter traffickers from continuing business as usual. These kids have no one to advocate for them, as they are often here without any family. They are still working in dangerous conditions, still putting in long hours, still having their education and opportunities put on hold while they work.

How can the Left even deign to call these children “Dreamers” when it has allowed for and facilitated the fracturing of the American Dream?