American Thought Leaders - Whistleblowers Reveal the Reality of Child Trafficking in America and What Trump Could Do About It

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

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.Guests:Tara Rodas, HHS whistleblower and 20-year public servant, primarily working in the federal inspector general communityAaron Stevenson, DHS whistleblower and former intelligence research specialist for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration ServicesMary Flynn O’Neill, executive director of the America’s Future nonprofit

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special live stream of American Thought Leaders. We've overcome some gremlins and some technical difficulties. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek, and this is my co-host. Cindy Drukere. I'm the host of NTD's International Roundtable, and today we are co-hosting this special event. So 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. And we've learned some really troubling things, actually, from people who have put everything on the line to reveal these facts. So 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 U.S. House and the U.S. 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. And over here, we have Aaron Stevenson. And Aaron is a former intelligence research specialist for 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 America's Future, the nonprofit. They've been doing remarkable grassroots work, educating the public across America about the realities of child trafficking and how to make a difference. So this is a particularly tough topic,

and I think a lot of people don't really understand the scope of it. So let's start there. Tara, can you explain to us, just give us a sense of the scope of the problem, what we're actually talking about today? Sure. Well, 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. And what's happened is more than half a million children have come from their countries to the U.S. border. And then the U.S. government has a program that is white glove delivering them to people who we know are criminals, traffickers, and because of Aaron's disclosure, members of transnational criminal organizations. And the children have just disappeared. We don't know where they are. And that's very troubling that children are missing in America. What do you mean exactly by disappeared?

Yeah, so the U.S. government no longer can say where the children are. So 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 are the children. And just when you say over half a million, right, you kind of, I mean, surely not all these children have been trafficked, right? What is that reality? 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 a country into another country? I mean, 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? What happens? And we do know, due to some of the reporting, even at the New York Times, that less than 10 percent of the children are actually, in some zip codes, going to their parents. Less than 10 percent.

And, you know, Mary, Erin, please feel free to jump in here, right? Yeah. Well, there's a reality that I researched and saw being an advocate for children myself for years. But when you saw the, before the 2020 election, I was watching carefully the government statistics come out of HHS on CPS, on foster care, you know, kind of statistics, how many kids, you know, in the foster care system, so forth. And I was watching a very disturbing number come out of the government on foster care. And that was like a four, I believe it was like 400,000 children or so forth were missing in 2020 out of that system. Now that's before the new administration came in. Back up, before that new administration came in, Trump's administration,

you saw literally adults bringing children to the border. Okay? And that's all over the, you can watch those videos, and news reported those things. Now, after the new administration came in, you have these missing children prior to this new administration, 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 kind of really important factions were taken out.

DNA, 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. So, Aaron, what were you seeing at DHS? So, you know, our scope and our lens was looking at bad guys. So specifically representing USCIS, I was in this thing called the Transnational

Organized Crime Working Group. And that is a, you know, it's a government body. It was a whole government approach to combat transnational organized crime, cartels in other words. And, you know, we would be seeing with this thing started in like 2016 so been there for a while and you can see patterns over time of like you know what type of aliens what type of you know non-americans are on this watch list and it's typically it started off with like eastern europeans and then um some of the you know mexican cartels trump came in he puts on like ms-13 18th street gang you know the rest is Sinaloa, et cetera. Right. So in that time frame, we start seeing a lot more encounters to USCIS from like south of the U.S. border specifically because it's a land border. So they can cross over easily. And that's what 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 or 2021, you would see things like deportation flights. You would see things like, you know, DUI arrest, a court record, maybe like a travel record, but you never saw like, you know, an MSRT member is going to sponsor a child. And that's what was the first thing that I saw was a little code talking about how this alien on the watch list name you know date of birth we know who this guy is gave his fingerprints to hhs uh for the purpose of this little program and i it first one blew in my head and i was like whatever i don't know what that means can you can you just sort of flesh that a little more so you're looking at a sheet that basically says that an ms-13 member well yeah

so they're emails. They come across basically live feed. So when you put your fingerprints down, let's say to sponsor a child, that gets shipped out to a lot of government agencies, and it goes into their records, and then these things come out automated and kind of packaged. It goes to an analyst at the terrorist screening center, and then they do a little, okay, 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 6USC279USC sponsor. And I was just like, whatever. I don't know. I've never seen that before. So I didn't even really get into it. In March, I see another one. And again, I see that code. And I'm like, I saw that before. What is that thing?

So I copied and pasted it and looked throughout all my records going back to 2016 of all these encounters. And there was only two. So the one in February and then the one I'm looking at today. And that was just the beginning of my like, what is that? So I Google it because I'm an analyst. I don't know what it is. I'm gonna try to figure it out. And it's talking about this unaccompanied child program. And I was like, I don't know, you know, so I asked my coworkers, I'm like, Hey, you know what this thing is? Like, what is this thing guys? They're like, I don't know. We're USCIS. Which is run by health and human services, HHS, right?

Not DHS. Yeah. So I was like, okay, so that doesn't involve us. I'm hitting dead ends in my work. Okay, but I'll keep looking into this thing. I see another one in April. And it's three and three months now. That's weird. So I started asking the rest, like the TAC working group, the Transnational Crime Working Group.

So I'm hitting up DOJ, FBI, CBp um sorry department of justice the fbi of course um customs border protection you know enforcement minded people and there's a whole government approach there's a lot of people to call no one had any response to it and i was just like okay that's no one's tracking this thing that's it just seems kind of odd to me because this just started april we saw another one come through. Sorry, now in May, another one come through. It's four and four months. So I'm starting to really dig into the aliens then.

Okay, so who is the sponsor? Like, what's going on with that thing? And yeah, okay, we got the name, date of birth. Okay, this guy's MS-13. That person's AT Street Gang. She's MS-13. This guy's in a Balkan group. And I was just like, wait a minute, why?

This is a new thing that I'm seeing. We've never seen this before and this is happening in four four different nationalities have come over to do this in three different gangs and i was just like okay something's happening and i have no idea what it is but that's a problem now the complexity that will make sure people understand is this watch list right because that's a big word right this thing's capped at 40 000 people and it's not because of like 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 small like little box and there's bad guys coming in every four months to get a kid on top of that i'm going through the immigration history all these aliens first off are illegal but also they're all utilizing the asylum

process. And by doing so, they will be coming off that watch list eventually. It takes a manual review, but by US policy that they created themselves, they are to come off that watch list to where we can't see them. Because they're sponsoring the trial. Because they're going for asylum. Because they're going for asylum, so now they're off the- So now they're off.

Now it takes a little bit of time. It takes the analyst to go, okay, find the guy's name. Sounds like a loophole. Which is exactly what it was. And so it's like, okay, now I'm seeing a pattern, a regularly recurring pattern, and it's coming from more than one country, and it's coming from more than one gang. And 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, MSR team will be trading with the 18th Street gang.

That was enough for me to go like, there's something bigger here. I'm trying to query all the reporting I can find and no one's covering it. Department of Justice is not writing intelligence reports on this thing. DHS, Homeland Security, they're not writing intelligence reports.

Meanwhile, Tara, this is a good time for you to kind of give us a little bit of a thumbnail of what happened. Sure, sure. So 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. So I thought, I'm going on the humanitarian mission of my lifetime.

And I thought, what more better thing could I do than to be there, greet the children, play games, do puzzles? And 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, my team, in June of 2021. So he's seeing aliens, right, these transnational organized criminals sponsoring the kids, we're seeing what we were calling suspicious sponsor. So it was early June when we sent in the first suspicious sponsor, not knowing that one child had ever been trafficked through this program. What was the red flag that made it suspicious? The children.

The children were saying, yeah, I'm in the flood of all these kids, but then also the children saying, you know, 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 and that they had been being told stories because trafficking is force, fraud, or coercion. And that's what's happening. The children are being lured with a story, right?

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 know, you're only making $2.50 a day. But if you come to the United States, if you let your child come with us to the United States, we're going to pay the journey. You know, we're nice. We're going to pay the journey. Now, they're going to have to pay the debt off once they get here, but we're going to pay them $6 an hour. It's the recruiting. Yeah. So the children believe and the families believe they're going to be elon musk rich these children think they're hands yeah and in good hands because the government's doing it yeah the government it's the u.s government right and that comes into the ngos that are

recruiting so ngos are going to these families villages they're already working for the government, recruiting down in international areas, outside the border to recruit. Yeah. And there's also the – With these promises. They'll be taken care of. Now, those are faith-based, most of them. Most of them, which we know from the grand jury. That took place in Florida, which was amazing,

that these are faith-based. They were receiving money. They still receive money from the government. And that's this trusting of these families outside our country. And they're recruiting children because they're trusting, because they're Christian or other faith, you know, Christian, Judeo-Christian. There's a Jewish foundation. There's a Lutheran social services.

So there's other, you know, so they're in the trusting hands of, you know, they based. There's no reason to be suspicious. Right. Nice smelling people. Okay. You're going to take my child and my child's going to be safe. It's going to be, you know, making, they're going to make money up there. We're going to be getting them out of this poverty,

this world they're living in and so forth. And we're bringing them into America. So what do we know in terms of like what are, we have some information about what some of these kids have ended up with the situations they've ended up here, right, on the American side of the border. What's the range of things that can happen to them? Well, Hannah, I mean, we could start with the New York Times. Hannah Dreyer crisscrossed the country and interviewed children who were saying they were in forced labor conditions. The children are not only working

here overnight shifts in slaughterhouses, but they're dying on jobs here. They're in roofing jobs that they're not trained to do. They don't have the skills 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. And there was a girl 16 years old in Houston. She said, my sponsor. She 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, rape. Some are dying here and working in slave labor. We have children. We have child slave labor today. And a big caveat here too, is that's doors that we can actually find that they answer to. Because a lot of these places like in Florida and Virginia, they'd done like, it was only like 25 or 20 or 30 or whatever. And it's like what, 5% of the doors actually get answered. The person's actually there. So it's like, it's basically just a landing spot to then move the kid because within a week they're gone. Right. So that's what we found in Bonita with that one case, there were three houses. So when they bring the kids to one

house through a contractor, then they, they move the children to another house and to another house. And that's how they kind of, there's all kinds of behaviors that they, that the, that the traffickers, the Johns and the buyers and sellers and people that are in this whole, you know, this is a over $150 billion business. That's what we're specifically, the trafficking and child exploitation. I'm going to say child exploitation because it covers what you're trying to make a point to is that there are so many different things that they can use a child to make money off of. Pornography, slave labor, child sex, also breeding children for babies, young girls, that sort of thing that they do. Now we're finding another very disturbing piece is that I, and they're all priced at a different level.

What we're finding right now is that little boys can be, here we go, turned into a transgender. They can be a boy, girl. So there's these kinds of things that are going on that are very, very specific that buyers and sellers are doing with children, not only to the point where we end with a child's physical body they use, and I can say it, is this organ harvesting. And that is something, I spoke about this the other day about, you know, a child that's being raped 10 times being used over and over and over. A drug can be used once it's gone. A child can be used

over and over and over. But that lifespan is basically two years at that pace of making money off of a child. Sorry, meaning you're going to jump in there too. Yeah, no, that's fine. The kids don't live beyond tears? Right. Well, their life expectancy, their trauma, the physical trauma, the mental trauma, the whole piece of that child. Unless that child, which many of these children are brought to doctors that fix them and get them back working.

So, no, that lifespan is, you can't, you can't do that to a child 10 times a day and not expect that child to, uh, have, you know, the repercussions of that. This is what you're describing is just, you know, kind of a horrific reality, right? And we're talking about, you know, we're talking about 500,000 kids, like you were saying, that we don't really know at this point where they are. Is there some sense of like, how many of them are actually being trafficked according to the definition you gave earlier in some way? Since again, it's just, it's sort of incomprehensible how... Yeah, it is. It's very hard. Some must be being united with families and and there must be some legitimate program here.

Well, we have the data that says in some zip codes, less than 10% of the children go to their parents. And we also have HHS has changed. They've 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's no

screening to see is the sponsor a criminal. There's the dropping of protocols. Yeah. No screening to say. They don't meet them. There's no specific criteria to be a sponsor. No, they follow up. How are things doing once they go there? A phone call. 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. Yeah. They're basically saying, not my job.

Hey, we did what we had to do. We got the kid in. But then it ends up being nobody's job. I was just going to say, is it anybody's job? Well, I mean, yes, it is the American, if we're doing this, it is our, it's our duty to do it. The American governments are doing it. But as far as job, like the actual roles and responsibilities, no.

Because of, and this is the complexity of the problem. This whole thing is governed by like a layer of, you know, 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. And then, of course course you have administrative law in which HHS can determine like, okay, so now we have this program mission. So we're going to actually change some definitions and how we collect information and what's our system of

record in which we actually do case management and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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. And they do that very, very well because it takes, on average, 10-ish to 14-ish days, but they're capped at like 30. So within one month, they want this kid out the door. 30 days. They can't have them there any longer.

Yeah, Tara can talk on that. They move them to another facility. Yeah. So that it doesn't appear on a report that a child has been somewhere very long. So they were driving home 10 to 14 days, move this kid, move this kid. And so what that means is a child has presented alone. Remember, there's no parent involved here. A child presents at the border to our fine border patrol. They take down a U.S. point of contact. You may have seen in the news, the children have a little piece of paper. Sometimes they have a number sharpied on their arm. It's written in their clothes. So our border patrol takes down that U.S. 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 U.S. 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. So the child presents information that the U.S. government takes down and says, okay, we're sending the child to that person. And there's no scrutinization there. No screening. That's the gospel. Oh, that was stapled to this kid's leg? Got it.

That's the number we're calling them. And it's different from, like, so HHS has this Child Protective Services, you know, agency, a part of, there's lots of different agencies in the HHS. There's CASA, which is an attorney or a legal representative for a child. So in our system, family court system, there's CPS, there's CASA, there's all these agencies. So it's like, so when a child, when there's, you know, family court, there's a neglect charges as a parent, you know, they, they have different protocol than this system that does check or supposed to be checking on. Cause there's more, there's more checking on a child where this system in the same system, HHS is, is doing something really seriously wrong by not having to, they don't have any responsibility once they

move the child. This system is supposed to be doing that. That's the American system, right? This is this unaccompanied foreign, these children coming in and so they're lost. So what about, you start seeing that a sponsor is an MS-13 gang member. Do you contact HHS and say, hey, that kid that you've got, is someone there? Okay, so those notices specifically went out to, at the time, I believe the working group was like 116 people. So first thing I did was I go through all the URLs, make it like all the domains, and it's, you know, at dhs.gov, at HHS, you know, but there was no HHS though. So I know that they weren't receiving those notices um but i'm you know again

i'm law enforcement minded i'm intelligence minded so i'm calling up and going through reporting from every other entity of this working group which was and i'm not kidding it's about like 10 departments of agencies i can list them all but it's it's the government basically and um no one had any idea but also they had no care so i was like hey like cP, do you guys track like unaccompanied kids? I don't know this program, but anyway, like it's all classified. You know, some of these sponsors are like an MSR team and we can, it's verified and they're on the watch list and I can show you, I'll send you the thing. And they were like, no, man, it's not us.

No, we don't do that. And then there was like no entry. Like it wasn't like, whoa, we don't do not us. No, we don't do that. And then there was like no entry. Like, it wasn't like, whoa, we don't do that. But whoa, we should look into this. When I hear that same phone call throughout numerous departments, again, it's just like, okay, there's a major problem. This is a nightmare. And this really gets solidified for me in July 2021. So this is right before I go public.

DHS INA, intelligence and analysis, that is the component of DHS that's actually a representative of the intelligence community. They published, unclassified, a document called a collection primer. So nerding out. Intelligence as a enterprise, as an industry, it's very, very structured. It's very organized. It's not like just cloak and dagger. It's very top-down. The intelligence cycle is just straight up planning, collection, exploitation, analysis, and distribution. So step two is collection. And a primer is exactly how you think of it. It's like first coat on the wall, right? So their collection primer on this document was about international gangs. So they were focused on, this is the new

administration, and we want to know this information about, you know, organized international gangs, guns and drugs. That was it. Nothing about human smuggling, nothing about child trafficking, nothing about the enterprise of, you know, moving people for profit or exploiting kids for money. And that was like, okay, that's top down. That's coming from the executive office of the United States, through the departments, through DHS. We're not tracking this thing at all. So to me, it was like, yeah, this is going public because, you know, tell American people

that was a huge part of it. But like, there are people in the system that are seeing this thing there's there's just like there's gotta be a lot of feds out there right so like who who's looking at this thing and that was that was my my real goal was like i always say it as like throwing a flag in the air like kind of hoisting something up to where it's like someone sees it and goes like oh yeah i'm seeing that thing too like that's not good oh they're you know that was that was Debbie, Myra, and Pomona. And by the way, big thing, by the way, because I know we talked about this, you were in Pomona, and that was an emergency intake site.

Yes. So that was a short-term contract, a short-term work type thing. So just understand, like, that's how hodgepodge this operation really is. They moved how many kids in the time frame? Over 8,300 children in less than six months. Wow. And these are temporary employees doing the majority of the work. Yeah.

Most of them aren't feds. Most of them don't have a background in like. Well, just the, the vetting, right? Like you would want to have some kind of professional, like you're not just going to take someone's word for it. Right. Presumably. Right.

And that's like, that's a key part too too is this is where I go a little intense with vetting. So vetting is not a, it's not an ideology. I'm sorry. Vetting for child trafficking is not like vetting an ideology. You know, you can vet for Al Qaeda. You can look for extremist remarks. You can look for, you know, 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 so

the only real way that you can do these things is more of like a screening mechanism which is okay does the dna match the relationship okay does you know do we verify yeah do we positively identify who this person really is based on biometrics and actual information like a driver's license, not a library card? There's got to be a proper way to actually positively identify these people. That's all you can really do when it comes to that is a screening approach. Vetting for these kids in this instance should be what we call concurrent vetting, where it's not just it's not just here you go not my job it's okay we verified who you people are here you go and we're keeping eyes on you guys the entire time down we're gonna know where that kid's at we're not gonna do scheduled phone calls we will have authority jurisdiction over who this child is that's what

i mean we were familiar with adoption realities for example right like it seems like a very different onerous very, like kind of the opposite of what you're describing. And 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 in, 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 just a phone well well no government didn't want to yeah yeah 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 child that's child protective services they're supposed to be these people that identify if it's a neglect, if it's whatever these charges are on a parent or whatever. But this

system, they didn't even use any of these specifics. They didn't care. They just moved the kids. You just brought them in, moved them around. Could have been anyone in the federal government. And they were giving them to MS, their gang, to bad people. It just strikes me that there's, you know, it's a lot about the rules. You give a whole lot of rules that are so insane. And also the incentive

structures, the combination of those things, like just, I'm kind of looking at the ticking clock here. And, you know, 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. We've got, you know, 500,000 have come in. We don't know where many of them are. It's unclear. There's some data, but it's, you know, isn't being shared very well. And there's these weird, you know, rules and incentive structures. So let's, you know, just with that framework, let's start thinking about, you know, obviously you guys have been thinking about this a lot.

Yeah, we do. Well, and just to throw this on the table too, it seems like if you create a system in which there's loopholes to be exploited, bad guys are going to exploit those loopholes. So how do you close them? Way ahead of the law enforcement and the criminals. The way we structure our thought on this thing is, okay, 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 themselves. Like, it's not just a bad guy. Bad guy belongs to a gang. Gangs have, you know, a network, right? And then there's the actual infrastructure itself. So these are the NGOs. These are the, you These are the contracts involved.

That has to be dismantled. So there's like a three-prong approach to just that. And then you have, of course, the next huge part, which I have less of an answer of, which is, okay, what do these kids need? Now they need help and care, et cetera. But first, before we get there, we have to actually get these kids. You have to find them. Yes. And that's the key.

And that's the first thing that should be done is the kids, because then they'll find the bad guys. And there's two basic approaches. One of them, and again, this is like a federal mindset. And I'm not saying there's not local involvement, but this is the way I'm seeing it. And also like hearing about it, you know, in news, of course. Best way to find the kids is not to go like knock on doors where the kids aren't at anymore. We've seen too many times their kids moved out of the house. If we focus on that one avenue, it's like we're not going to find them.

But they did get handed to a trafficker. So if we focus on that guy who has a cell phone, who has information with, you know, throughout the government, it's an easy way to target these people as a whole. Right. information with you know throughout the government it's the easy way to target these people as a whole right so best way to look at these people the traffickers themselves the sponsors um is dependent on the president if he intends to continue the current course of transnational organized crime there's ways that this can happen you gotta you know like upload the watch list you gotta you know increase the um the priority on the national intelligence parties framework you know it's just the way government works expand the watch list beyond 40 000 right or they're actually not cartels and transnational organized criminals they're actually terrorists

that is a much more um i think at this stage appropriate but also like ready to go type thing. There is a framework, there is a structure and an inherent talent in the government that can already do this job. We've been doing that for 20 years. And that's like, okay, we actually do that pretty well, but there's meat on the bones in that system. If we classify these people as terrorists, the game changes. There's already laws also for like material support. That's right. So now you've got a host of options basically in which this can be handled. And finding the kids, if they go that route, it's not going to take that long. That is like a six, eight week type thing. First, it's going to stay in the networks.

Then it's like, yeah, go kick in doors. And that's, you know, I'm not telling the president what to do, but that's where the president has authority of we're going to be utilizing federal assets. We're going to be using U.S. attorneys. We're going to be using local law enforcement and sheriffs. That's where it's like, hey, door kickers, go kick doors. But that's not that complex also. And then you can then, of course, look at, okay, who was involved in this thing from NGOs and contractors? Because that was the true lifeblood and the lube in the machine that made this thing so efficient to begin with.

Right, the money. So it can be done. I know people say, oh my gosh, half a million missing kids. It's like, no, no, no, no. It's like, that's missing right now. I'm telling you very clearly, this is a very solvable issue of that. Yes. Aftercare and treating the kids, it's a problem because a lot of kids need a lot of care.

And I'm not going to say I know what that means exactly, but there's a lot of smart people. Right. Right. And there are people that are ready to do this. They've been doing this with care of children. Do what exactly? Dealing with the trauma of a child that's been trafficked or a child that's been slave

labored. I mean, 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. And, of course, I always talk about this real evil spiritual kind of. It is something that needs not just scientific ways you know, ways of helping a child. You need the spiritual end of this. There is trauma beyond we can, you know, talk about this piece of it being an evil thing.

These children are very traumatized. This is something. And they're not with their mothers and fathers. I mean, that's another thing. That's why we are so passionate, because we're thinking about little kids by themselves. They've been told a lie, a story. They're here. They've been released from their parents who are in a situation where they're very poor. I mean, I can't imagine.

These are kids that are coming from this trauma know, this trauma all their lives to this poor poverty, you know, maybe communism countries, maybe maybe countries with who knows, maze, massive corruption. And 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 how to deal with the trauma. And we have people that will that are that have been doing this. And it's a matter of getting this plan together. It can happen very fast. It can. They are ready to go, these people. Yes. And so to be clear, we believe that there's three main objectives, and that is to rescue children, to prosecute traffickers, and to dismantle the trafficking infrastructure. That's right.

And this new administration can do it simply. Right. All they need to do is designate child trafficking activity as terrorist activity. That's right. And as Erin explained, we have a system that's ready to just turn on, and these people can go after the traffickers. When they find the traffickers, they find all the children that they're trafficking. And just remind us again, trafficking, because this is very important, means? Force, fraud, or coercion. So when children have

been lured here with false stories, that they believe that they're going to be living the American dream, they're going to be 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. And then afterwards, they're coerced and exploited. And that's the whole picture. And the behavior is already happening. We're talking about, you know, unaccompanied and, you know, children coming from other countries. Remember, this is the way they work with grooming children in this country to get them to be trafficked or do what they are. It's total control.

So what's the intersection between these two? Well, they're just using the same criminal behavior for how to capture a child. But is it the same people? We dismantle them. Oh, yeah. We solve much bigger problems. These are, you know, gangs are doing this. I mean, so you got to remember,

so like the big moneymaker is child trafficking, is a child. That's the big moneymaker. So where guns and drugs, that's like secondhand now. Now it's, that's the money that they're making. That's the big, big buck is a commodity, is a child is a commodity. And that's the big money because you can just over and over use over and over again.

Is it really? I'm just trying to comprehend this, you know, because drugs are massive. We always talk about drugs. You're saying it's a bigger industry. Yes, it's a bigger industry. But they use drugs to drug the children, too. And guns are there. You know, I mean, that's what they do. You know, there's guns and drugs and, you know, keeping a child in a room with a gun at a table at their head and then drugged up as they are being used. This is all a part of this. But the big money is the buying and selling of a child. Right. And the question is is how is that

right because for me this was shocking and stunning i didn't know that this was happening until you know law enforcement explained me they're like tara if i sell a drug i sell it one time and 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 after day week after week year after year until that child is spent so they they're continually profiting there are evil people who view children as a commodity as a product to be sold yeah that's what it is okay so now that that's clear on the table you get that part right and this is when we talked about this um as far as like okay so this is the idea of um understanding then like the current administration's mindset of this thing because it's family unification right

okay so let's look at that really quick and this is where you get the trends of where the kids are coming from versus where the you know illegals are coming from to be unified with their kids right the uh the children in this program for like a long time have had a steady stream and like in order it's mostly guatemalan kids and then it's el salvador kids and then honduran and then like mexican and then like less than three percent is like everywhere in the world okay so now mirror that with what we see as far as people in the country that came illegally they want their kids back so we're saying that it's always people in the country that came illegally, they want their kids back. So are we saying that it's always 42% Guatemalan kids only or the parents want their kids back? Because this stream of numbers has been like constant and never changing.

The stream of kids. Yeah, it's always those numbers. Across these four countries. In that order, exactly. But when illegals come across, it's not mirroring the same thing. So it's not 42% of all illegals are Guatemalan. You're seeing people from all over the world at all different rates, all different times. So while this is like a straight line, just on one chart, you get this fluctuation of different countries and different peoples all throughout the world, which is then another indicator for

me being like, okay. Adults. Yeah. So it's like, there's a reason why we're not seeing a lot of African kids in this program or Indian or even South American. Right. This is coming from a population that's basically closest to us. So it's like, OK, those kids are basically right there. They're harvesting them, which is the recruiting, which is the trafficking part, and bring them in because it's the quickest and most exploitable resource basically for these networks. Because I hate looking at it economically.

But since, again, this is an event, there are economic indicators kind of showing these things. And that's what I try to understand by looking at it to look for the broad trends because it's a massive, massive problem. We talk about the number of children that are missing, and there's no curiosity from the federal law enforcement or television community that's even like considering it. So and I'm saying that one other little caveat real quick. So I go public, my story, whatever. And they find out it's me. And they're like, yeah, fired. Like you're done.

You're cut off the program, by the way. You're not getting more access to that thing. But nobody ever asked me like, OK, but what's going on? What did you see? What was the cause for your firing? What cause did they give you uh the government doesn't trust me anymore so and also they never said i lied and they never said i uh like made things up it was like yeah we don't pay you spilled some you know some damning things there so you're done he showed the face of gang members in his disclosure oh and they didn't like that that he revealed their photographs and he revealed the

email and i'll be clearing that one too i they were gonna um they were gonna do like the black bar over the face and i was like no no take it off show them the name and don't show my date of birth and don't go crazy with it but it's like no you can show the face of them i don't care these are traffickers we should know these people are if we're doing that with j6 prisoners on the manhunt that they were doing at the time, okay, then we can do this too with child trafficking guys. Well, we also do it with people that have sexually assaulted criminals. I mean, I used to get them in the church, all the pedophiles and the list of sexual offenders. And so they can do it with that, but they can't do it with the— You're just figuring it should be kind of equal treatment.

Like it's just not. It's just not. It's just not. Yeah. And he's blowing the whistle on a new and emerging threat that is a danger to children. Yeah. That's why it's important. And he got fired. That's why it's important to have them go as terrorists. They have to be designated as terrorists. It just has to be done. And there was a key word there, which is merging. And that was the thing.

Like this, we had never seen like MS-13 putting their fingerprints to the American government saying, can I have this kid, please? That never happened before until February, 2021. And all of a sudden we're seeing a constant flow of it. And it's happening. You know, it's not just a click from El Salvador. This is happening of international gangsters. What do you make of this? You know, I've heard that the Guatemalan government has

actually come looking for some of these kids because I believe that's the number one, right? So what's happening with that? Well, so Robbie Starbuck did a very in-depth interview with the Attorney General of Guatemala. And 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? Well, Attorney General Paxton doesn't have access to the data that HHS has. HHS won't give it to anyone.

So they won't give it to foreign governments who are wanting 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's like, okay, you won't go after them. But if you tell me who their sponsor is, I'm going to go knock on the doors. They won't give it. They won't give it. They won't give the information to Congress, not even with subpoena.

Will they give the data? HHS has the data that today could lead to the rescue of children and the prosecution of criminals, and they won't give it. So it sounds like you have a policy recommendation here. Absolutely. Day one, Secretary Kennedy can release the data to every other agency who needs it. That's right. But if it's designated, if we designate child trafficking as terrorist activity, then all the data gets to be sucked up and they'll go. Yeah. And there's extensions there because you get okay so now it's now it's terrorism so now you bring in ofac right the office of you know foreign

asset control you bring in um you bring in your telecommunications you can start doing a lot quickly oh big time yes it's it's and it's not just like okay here you go guys go for it there's going to be people there like willing to carry out mission. There's got to be policy as personnel, I'm trying to say is. But these are simple fixes. That 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. So 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. Fix this problem.

What about changing the policy? What would you recommend in terms of changing the policy for unaccompanied children? What would that look like? I'm going to say really quickly, mandatory DNA matching across the board. That has to be done. So first off, it's going to be, it's in, I understand like the rates and the numbers and percentages, but 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. Cool. But guess what? We're going to still find everybody else. So, um, number one though're with a good parent, awesome. Yeah. Cool. But guess what? We're going to still find everybody else, too. So number one, though, is DNA matching.

That's required. And I think definitely that concurrent vetting. Like, we'll be doing checks up on you guys quite a bit. Now, I'm not going to say more as regard, like, because part of the problem, too, is, again, it's that layered, like, you know, courts have some say, and then there's the administrative state has some say, and then you've got, you know, just federal executive memos happening all the time. So that has to get unbuckled and somehow unpackaged and unzipped. That takes smart minds, lock them in a room, you know, kind of kick them behind. Right, and the company program was just very bad.

It was just a very bad system. And there's got to be, there has to be a congressional approach, too, because this is law now. And it's like, okay, guys, there's some problems here. If I may say it, one thing is the definition of an unaccompanied child. That's right. So this is a child, so under 18, who has no immigration status and no family in the country. No family in the country. Okay, so category one sponsor is no family in the country. Right. No family in the country. Mm-hmm.

Okay, so category one sponsor is the parent of the child. Wait, wait. Yeah. It's not contradictory. Isn't that contradictory? It's entirely contradictory. It's entirely contradictory. Yes.

And this is what I'm saying. Absolutely. So it's like, and if they just want to read it works in definitions, they're going to do what they're going to do, but Congress has to be able to understand then, like, the entire system of the way this thing operates. That's it. And their law itself.

So there's, like, there are some things that are just kind of overlapping and not overlapping, and it has to get clarified because this thing's running out of control. Yes. And my worry is, like, okay, cool, we can do this thing in four years. Then what? I don't want it to happen again. Yes. So there's got to be an approach to that. I'm not allowed to say to mind, so I can't speak more on that part.

But the designating of it being terrorist is very key. Yes. And it's very important that people understand HHS is not a law enforcement agency. It's not an investigative agency. So Aaron was able to easily see at DHS, oh my goodness, these are criminals, these are gang members. And everyone over at HHS is like, la la la, let's reunite. This would even be an HHS program. Yes. Considering what it entails.

Exactly. And because they're not capable, they simply don't have the knowledge, skills, ability, or tradecraft to go after traffickers. Okay, 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. If you've lost 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. But when the first report of 85,000, to me, that was it. I'm like, that's it right there. That's lost control. How do you do that? That's a lot of children, 85,000 that was reported. And that stuck in all the American people's heads, that number. Yeah, and that was 2023. And he's reporting in early 21.

We reported in 2021. They could have done something, but they're not capable. And then they wouldn't share the information. So there are simple fixes. There truly are simple fixes. What was the rationale for not sharing the information? What is the rationale? They either don't want to or they suck.

Pardon my French, but it's one or the other. Yeah, well, they value the anonymity of the sponsor. This is just a fact. They value the anonymity of the criminal sponsor over the safety of the child. Yeah. Well, there's another, you know, maybe they also don't want to be held accountable. Again, I don't think anybody would think this is a successful program. Right.

And they saw that testimony. And given the establishment and how that operates, there's like a revolving door between this program and other ideological components. So current director of ORR is Robert DeMarco. Right, Marcos. Prior to that, it was a guy in the Obama administration. I forgot his name.

It escapes me. He's now working for some sort of stink tank called the Open Society Foundation or something weird like that. So there is a private protection bracket going on with friends in that element of our government society where it's, know 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 any different than the defense industry where it's like hey i'm gonna retire from the pentagon or whatever and my friends now out here get a huge right hand contract and i think and i believe this uh if if if they do this process properly

if they designate the terrorist the way they should be designating these people, the beauty of I believe this strongly that it will lead to a lot of finding of the corruption that's so deep seated in this country. And the American people know this. It's in the local communities. It's deep seated to the local communities. So I believe it will open up a huge, you know, just a huge can. It'll just blow off the top. And it's going to be beautiful for the American people because it's really the problem. I mean, the issue of child trafficking has been actually in the headlines, you know, in the last week, the whole, you know, P. Diddy and all of that.

So maybe the time is right, but it all. Yeah. And so I'm just struck, you know, Tom Holman has said he wants to go after the criminals first. So this strikes me as highly compatible, this activity that you're talking about. You could kind of help the children while going after the criminals. Well, we 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, they'll find it.

And it's a very manageable problem. It is. Having worked in the vetting operations for CBP and DHS, having done intelligence work for the government, military, and also contracting, etc., this is not a problem that they can't handle.

There's no floor of analysts right now that can start it themselves. They're there to do a job. But again, it's just information. So now it's like, okay, guys, you look for bad guys. Well, there's a new class of, sorry, you look for terrorists. There's a new population of terrorists coming in and they're called these cartels. Bam.

They have the tradecraft and development. They know their best practices. They know how to do this. It's just a matter of like actually doing that transfer of data and the assignment of I want to understand what these things are. And that's again why we're bringing up things like the National Intelligence Party's framework, the NIPF, which is a real thing. Right. And that's just top down from the president. So he wants to know certain things about certain places. Elevate that, designate these things at certain criteria. He's got smart people lined up. He's got his people ready. Now it's just like fire off and go.

Yeah. And Tom, I will say that I've heard Tom speak very passionately about these children. And Tom Holman has a huge heart for these kids. He's witnessed at the border children who are no longer alive, who have been brutalized in ways that most people just can't imagine. I've seen him through tears tell stories about what's happened to 18-month-old children. And I do believe that Tom Holman is the border czar, along with Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard and Kristi Noem under the new President Trump. They are going to go after this. And this is a mess. This is horrible.

But this is solvable. And I believe this team is going to do it. So we just have a few minutes left. And actually, I did want to jump to you, Mary. I want to connect the Americans. Please. I want to connect the Americans. I want to connect the fact that this isn't just like MS-13 just 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,

and these children, 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. These people that do this will take any child, will do anything to a child. It's all money, right? It's commodity, right? 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 children. We're going to save American children. And 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 Krogan. You just talked about P. Diddy. This girl's been terrorized since she opened Pizzagate. I mean, I'm not, I'm going to bring that up because the FBI has proven that. New York Times has, we already know these symbols, these symbols. There are things that are going on that we can identify. But this team has worked so, so carefully together in all areas doing their, their, 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. And that's what we've been doing is teaching people how to identify certain behaviors, little things like a 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 every state is a border now. It's a border state. Every state has children.

Mary, how can people, you know, request a training seminar, for example, from America's Future? Right. So 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 have gone into eight states and trained and brought this whole piece, even a legal piece, the legal piece that we've been doing, the legal libraries, the resources. These communities get exactly what they need to know their policy, know their laws, know their resources. They get a full picture of what they're dealing with. Even they learn how to legislate, 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

we're trying to push this grooming bill. The grooming bill is used like the NASA, remember the Olympic, the little girls with the gymnast, okay? Now, they had to prove, in order to prove the assault, they had to prove the grooming, how 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 and so forth. You're seeing all kinds of grooming going on. So 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. But I mean, the resources are phenomenal that we have brought to the table. And we're making an impact. We're making an impact in this country. The website. Yes. It's americasfuture.net. And 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. And then the PDPC project, and it's called Get in the Fight. And it's going to, this year and the next, we're going to back this administration up with all the education, including citizenry. The law work we've been doing is phenomenal. The law work we've been doing, we don't just focus on abortion issue or personal property issue or First Amendment. We have taken cases like the Chevron case. We've taken the Fisher case, the J6. We take big, risky cases to the Supreme Court and win these cases. Our wins, 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. That's it. I believe you.

If your organization has this fire in it, you'll be affected. So, I mean, we've come to the end of our live stream here. We're running a tiny bit late, but maybe just a final 30 seconds from Tara and Erin. Yeah, well, I just want to thank you again for having us on to talk about this critical issue. And there is a war on children, and I do believe this administration,

with Tom Holman, 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. Yeah. I always hear people say things like, you know, they affirm us and they back us up. And they always say, like, you know, 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, you know, incoming president, incoming administration, I believe they heard that.

They understand it. And I think it's going to be quicker than people realize. And you have to be comfortable with understanding what that means. Like, oh, we have been doing that. This is now a reality. So just accept it and learn how to be an adult. This is our country. We should be acting like we actually own it. Well, thank you.

And thank you all for joining us. Cindy, perhaps you'd like to sign off for the roundtable. All right, that ends our roundtable. And I also would like to very sincerely thank you all for coming today and sharing with the audience what's happening. Yeah. And thank you for joining us on this special American Thought Leaders Roundtable Crossover. And we'll see you next time.