Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem says President Joe Biden’s administration was paying traffickers to take custody of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) who had crossed the southern border and needed to be resettled in the United States.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Noem accused top officials in the Biden administration of aiding traffickers by handing over UACs to their custody and care.
“The one thing that has been challenging is that under the Biden administration, the government paid sponsors in [the Department of Health and Human Services] in order to host these children and those sponsors, many times, we found instances where they trafficked these children themselves,” Noem said:
So under that administration, we not only had children in this country that were part of a program, the government was paying individuals that were knowingly trafficking them and abusing them. That has stopped, we have gone through and found these children and put them back with their families when we have been able to do so. [Emphasis added]
The remarks from Noem come after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., last year, accused the Biden administration of becoming the “biggest facilitator for child abuse” in American history with its UAC policies.
“My predecessor was deliberately employing a policy of speed over safety so they waived all of the identification requirements for sponsors,” Kennedy told members of Congress. “Sponsors were not required to show valid identification; they were never fingerprinted, so we don’t know if there’s a criminal record. There was no DNA testing so the claims that they were taking a family member were … they were dubious.”
As Breitbart News chronicled at the time, Biden’s HHS Secretary, Xavier Becerra, reportedly carried out a policy that prioritized the release of UACs to adult sponsors over long-held protocols to protect such children from labor trafficking, sex trafficking, and child abuse.
Many UACs, as a result of the policy, ended up in trafficking schemes and lost contact with HHS officials who were tasked with keeping in touch with them.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
