At the start of 2023, the U.S. economy showed signs of recovery from a pandemic that had killed millions of Americans. President Joe Biden had successfully pushed key parts of his agenda through Congress during his first two years in office, including a celebrated $1.2 trillion package that aimed to rebuild the country’s decaying infrastructure and provide a massive economic stimulus.
But in February, the New York Times published an expose – Alone and Exploited – that found widespread use of immigrant child labor by U.S. companies. The investigation also found that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which operates under the U.S. Health and Human Services, “could not reach” 85,000 children who crossed the border unaccompanied and were released into the custody of host families, something federal officials have denied.
Republicans on Capitol Hill seized the moment, calling for public hearings while accusing the Biden administration of letting 85,000 children disappear into a world of child labor and sex trafficking.
“If you vote against this, you’re supporting child rape,” Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., said during a press conference about legislation Republicans soon proposed on the issue. “If Biden vetoes this, he’s supporting child rape. We have 85,000 children in this country that are unaccounted for.”
Stoking the furor about it on right-wing media outlets and social media was the surprise box office success of “Sound of Freedom,” a widely-discredited movie that played upon QAnon conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking to raise a similar alarm.
“While H.H.S. checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children,” the Times report said.
In March, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra told Congress the 85,000 number was incorrect and misleading because his department is not responsible for tracking children after they leave their custody. Basically, it’s U.S. policy not to.
“Congress has given us certain authorities. Our authorities essentially end the moment we have found a suitable sponsor to place that child with. We try to do some follow-up but neither the child nor the sponsor is actually obligated to follow up with us,” Becerra said during a U.S. House committee hearing.
All these hearings culminated in a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol in September where Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., introduced the Safeguarding Endangered Children, Unaccompanied and at Risk of Exploitation or SECURE Act of 2023, a proposed measure that would require the Biden administration to locate the 85,000 missing unaccompanied children.
“The Biden Administration must be held accountable for its failed open border policies that have put tens of thousands of children in grave danger and at great risk of death, child sexual exploitation and abuse,” Smith said.
The Center for Public Integrity reached out to Smith and some of the 30 Republican cosponsors of his bill, including three Latinos – Mario Diaz-Balart and María Elvira Salazar, both of Florida, and Tony Gonzales of Texas.
No one has responded.
A spokesperson with HHS would not provide clarification to Public Integrity pertaining to the 85,000 number cited in The Times story, other than responding that ORR “reached more than 80% of households in 2022” during follow up calls made after the unaccompanied children left federal custody to live with sponsors.
Jennifer Nagda, chief programs officer at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, called Smith’s bill “disingenuous,” adding the bill doesn’t address any of the problems that make these children vulnerable to exploitation.
“To suggest that immigrant children who don’t answer phone calls from unknown officials within 30 days of their release from federal custody have ‘disappeared’ is to engage in an overly simplistic assessment of the complex reality of child trauma survivors,” Nagda said.
More than 600,000 unaccompanied minors have been processed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement since Congress approved the laws governing ORR in 2002, HHS data shows. The laws were updated in 2008 under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA).
Rep. Smith was a co-sponsor of the TVPRA, and that particular update outlines the government’s current requirements that each child must “be promptly placed in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.” The act doesn’t require HHS to track unaccompanied minors after being released from federal custody.
Robert Carey, who served as ORR director from 2015 to 2017, said that when Congress made the decision in 2002 to move the care of unaccompanied children from Immigration and Naturalization Services (a predecessor to the Department of Homeland Security) to HHS, it was because it wanted these children to be under the care of a social service agency, not law enforcement.
But since the move, ORR has followed a policy to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 24 hours before and 24 hours after the release of all unaccompanied minors, including the sponsor’s name and current address, according to the HHS website.
Back in 2017, unaccompanied minor sponsor information was used for immigration enforcement purposes, and this, Carey said, had a chilling effect on the willingness of sponsors who might also be undocumented to come forward or answer phone calls from the government.
“What I’ve seen in recent hearings is that we have Congress asking for answers on many of these issues, including losing children, and the fact is that Congress is the one who actually mandates these things,” Carey said.
Republicans team up with Hollywood
On opening day, July 4, the movie “Sound of Freedom,” a Christian thriller about child sex trafficking produced by right-wing activist, actor and Mexican presidential hopeful Eduardo Verástegui, made $14 million at the box office.
The partially crowd-funded film released by Angel Studios, an independent media company from Utah established in 2021, ranked first that day, surpassing “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” and Pixar’s “Elemental.”
Since then, total sales have risen to $184 million in the U.S.
“That is the miracle: That in a world of lies and attacks, the truth makes its way, takes first place, and many lives will be saved thanks to this. Because in times of universal lies, Orwell said, telling the truth constitutes a revolutionary act,” Verástegui said to ACI Prensa, a Spanish publication of the Catholic News Agency, shortly after the premiere.
In addition to and partially overlapping with success among mainstream Christian moviegoers, the film has been embraced by QAnon conspiracy theorists who believe a cabal of Satan-worshiping politicians and celebrities engage in pedophilia and human trafficking while harvesting the blood of abused children.
The lead actor in the film, Jim Caviezel, has repeated several of the conspiracy’s talking points on conservative talk shows and at QAnon-organized events, including that he believes in “adrenochroming” — a term referring to “the falsehood that traffickers torture children and drain their blood to harvest an elixir of youth,” a report by the Guardian said.
Sound of Freedom’s storyline centers on and follows Tim Ballard, a former U.S. federal agent who embarks on a rescue mission to Colombia to free victims of child trafficking. Ballard is the former CEO of Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), an anti-sex trafficking organization.
Ballard resigned from OUR on June 22 amid accusations of sexual misconduct, according to Vice News. Five days later, a week before the premier of the movie, the organization published a post on its website titled, “Sound of Freedom: Based on a true story (Except for the parts that aren’t).”
“The film also depicts children in shipping containers. It is important to note that Hollywood took creative license in portraying the different ways that children can be trafficked. While cases exist where children are transported in various vehicles, most trafficking happens through a manipulative grooming process,” the post reads. OUR has since removed that post.
Multiple attempts to reach OUR by Public Integrity were unsuccessful.
Former President Donald Trump held a screening of the film at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and praised the movie, calling it “incredible.” Then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. Smith, the primary sponsor of the SECURE Act, hosted a screening of the film at the Capitol in late July.
The same week, Smith announced he was working on legislation in collaboration with Verástegui and Roger Severino of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank that supports policies to hinder access to abortion and promote discrimination against LGBTQ communities.
A divided Congress
Rep. Smith’s SECURE Act of 2023 would require HHS and the FBI to submit joint reports every 60 days on their efforts to find and investigate any suspicion of human trafficking related to the 85,000 unaccompanied minors who crossed the U.S. southern border, were released from federal custody and with whom contact has been lost.
“These children show up unaccompanied, over 300,000 over the last several years. Where are they?” Ballard asked during the September press conference promoting the bill.
“Eighty-five thousand, according to Health and Human Services, who had them at one point, disappeared into the belly of the country that consumes more exploitation material than any other country on the planet,” he added. “This should horrify every American.”
Jennifer Podkul, vice president for policy and advocacy at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), called the 85,000 number a “red herring” and noted that providing legal representation to these children is the best way to ensure unaccompanied minors don’t get lost or fall through the cracks. KIND is the largest U.S.-based nongovernmental organization providing legal services and advocating for the protection of unaccompanied minors.
“I think generally, people being concerned about child protection is a good thing and I hope these hearings will elevate the conversation beyond just this ridiculous partisan immigration rhetoric,” Podkul said.
Smith and other proponents of the SECURE Act blame a lack of border security for the recent influx of unaccompanied minors. But Latin American children have migrated alone to the U.S. for more than 100 years, according to Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, a postdoctoral research associate and award-winning immigration historian at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Through her research, Padilla-Rodríguez has documented children from Mexico coming to the U.S. in the late 19th century when the U.S. was experiencing large-scale migration from places all across the world in spite of exclusionary legislation that was meant to stop immigrants from entering the country.
“Among these immigrants were children,” Padilla-Rodriguez said. “They ended up working in places as diverse as railroads, mines, factories, domestic service and agriculture as minors.”
February’s Times investigation and other recent press accounts covered multiple industries’ illegal use of migrant child labor, including examples of 12-year-olds working in automobile factories, 15-year-olds packing cereal boxes and hundreds of minors cleaning meat processing plants with dangerous chemicals in the cover of night.
But changing the U.S.’s long history of exploitative child migrant labor would require a vigorous whole-of-government approach, according to Podkul of KIND.
Widespread gaps in legal and social services for these children as they navigate adversarial immigration proceedings and transition into new communities, lack of economic security, language barriers and U.S. labor shortages are just some of the underlying factors that contribute to labor exploitation of unaccompanied minors in the U.S., Podkul said.
Rollbacks in state protections against child labor and underfunding of the Department of Labor’s enforcement of child labor standards are also to blame, Podkul said.
In February, the White House announced a nine-step initiative to prevent child labor violations and protect immigrant children. The initiative led by HHS included information sharing with the Labor Department, increased fines for employers illegally using child labor and expanded post-release services.
But despite bipartisan attention to immigrant children’s exploitation, there is little bipartisan support to establish lasting protections.
More than 20 bills introduced this year in the U.S. House of Representatives mention unaccompanied minors. Most are stagnant in committees and have few supporters. And the two bills getting the most support are divided by party lines.
The “U.S. Citizenship Act” aims “to provide an earned path to citizenship, to address the root causes of migration … and to reform the immigrant visa system.” The bill was introduced in May with 114 Democrats and no Republicans as cosponsors.
On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Smith’s “SECURE Act of 2023 has 30 cosponsors, all Republicans.
Things are a bit more bipartisan in the U.S. Senate, where lawmakers are considering at least a dozen bills relating to unaccompanied minors. That includes the Preventing Child Labor Exploitation Act introduced by Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo. Sens. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. The proposed bill would establish a children’s court for unaccompanied minors.
“The child exploitation in our country that we have seen reported is stunning and shameful and truly extraordinary when you think that this is the United States of America,” Booker said during a committee hearing about unaccompanied migrant children on Oct. 25, a day before introducing his bipartisan bill. “This should horrify everyone. But given what we know, it should not surprise us.”
The article featured in this post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity and parts of it are included here under a Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.0
