As the U.S. has been inundated with a record number of illegal immigrants, the unaccompanied children crisis has also spiked. Unaccompanied children are those who cross illegally without a parent or guardian. The government typically pays to send them to a sponsor. But whistleblowers say the sponsors are vetted through little more than an honor system, and the kids are sometimes trafficked into the hands of criminals and gangs. In August, the Inspector General seemed to confirm the worst. In an urgent report, it said the government has lost track of more than 32,000 children over the last five years.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

Sharyl: The implication of what you’re reporting is that the federal government is using taxpayer money to facilitate the end of the trip for the human traffickers?

Deborah White: Yeah. I mean, it’s nothing less than child, than taxpayer-funded child slavery. Nothing less.

Deborah White is a federal whistleblower. In 2021, she took an emergency assignment helping process the masses of unaccompanied immigrant children flooding illegally into the U.S., as President Biden took office and the border crisis exploded.

Sharyl: Do most of the kids that we’re coming across without a parent, do they have the name of somebody they already know is in the U.S. that will either take them or sponsor them? Is that a relative? How does that work?

White: Yes. So typically the children will come with information either pinned onto them, it can be Sharpied on their arms, sometimes, notes, but all of that information is then taken by the Border Patrol and then put into, their systems over at Border Patrol.

Sharyl: Is the goal that the federal government then tries to get those children to the place that’s written in Sharpie or pinned to their clothing?

White: Correct. That’s where we would do the vetting of the sponsor, right, to ensure that they were who they said they were. But this is all a self-certification process.

Sharyl: So the kids are going to illegal immigrants or undocumented people here?

White: Yes, that’s correct.

Sharyl: Where is the protection to make sure that you are not, as a federal agency, facilitating the trafficking of the child into the hands of somebody who’s mistreating them, or even a pedophile ring?

White: And that’s the crux of the matter, is that we didn’t have that ability.

She says the Biden administration halted DNA tests that tried to at least ensure the kids going to a relative. As she tried to do due diligence, she says she uncovered many suspicious indicators of child trafficking such as not just one or two children being sent to supposed sponsors in the same location but hundreds.

White: When you have, you know, 329 children and counting going to, you know, two buildings, right? And, you know, you can’t physically house all those children, then you’ve got a serious problem on your hand, then you’ve got something criminal.

Sharyl: Is that how many kids

White: So yeah, that was, that was in a case in Houston, Texas. Yes. 329 and counting.

She says one anxious boy confessed to her why he was pressing to be sent to his requested sponsor so quickly.

White: He owed money, right? And if he didn’t get to his sponsor and get to pay back that money, he was very fearful that something would happen to his family, specifically his father.

Sharyl: How did a kid become in debt?

White: That’s because the cartels— I mean, we know these kids don’t make it to the southern border unless, you know, there’s, there’s a coyote, a guide, right, that brought them that far, and that the cartels are paid for passage, right? We know that that’s typically what happens. And so that, that’s how he came about to say, ‘yes, I do owe about,’ I think it was $2,500.

Experts say children crossing illegally into the U.S. without a parent can find themselves placed in homes where they work exhausting jobs to pay smuggling fees and expenses to their sponsors. The potential for abuse has grown with the numbers. In 2020, Trump’s last year in office, 15,128 children who’d crossed the border illegally were sent for placement with sponsors.

In 2023, that number ballooned eight time to 117,789. The total over 5 years? More than 448,000 children.

We went to Michigan to speak with high school teacher Richard Angstman. He says he and his colleagues began noticing more immigrant students coming to school overtired and unfocused.

Richard Angstman: So a couple students had talked about to us that, you know, they had to come from work, from school, go home, take care of family for a little bit, and then get to the plant. Working from six at night, packing from Cheerios to any other food things, at the Hearthside plant. And, it was a intermediate that would hire them in there and they would promise to send money back to their homes.

Sharyl: What age are these kids?

Angstman: These kids range from 14 all the way up to 19 or 20.

Sharyl: Is it legal for a 14-year-old to work in a place like that?

Angstman: Not that many hours.

In fact, a New York Times investigation focused in part on the Grand Rapids area. It exposed children working on overnight shifts and dangerous factory jobs that can violate child labor laws.

Sharyl: Do you feel like there’s an organized network that finds these kids and knows that they’re in that situation?

Angstman: Yeah, we think there was at that time.

Sharyl: Did you get the sense any of them were being forced to work?

Angstman: Some after we reflected back after the story, we could kind of tell that some of ’em, yeah, probably were being forced. Especially, the younger sibling of one of the kids in the story, we were stunned that she was 12 years old and she was still working these hours, you know, living in a place that we couldn’t account for.

In July, Sen. Chuck Grassley released internal records showing the government knowingly sent some children to a “gang affiliated” sponsor and household with connections to the violent “MS-13” gang.

Then, in August, a stunning urgent report from the Inspector General. It said the government was “not able to account” for more than 32,000 children who’d entered the US illegally over the last five years.

At a hearing last year, Tim Ballard, also sounded the alarm. He’s a former federal special agent on a task force on Internet Crimes Against Children.

Tim Ballard (Sept. 13, 2023): A child can be sold up to 20 times per day, six days a week for ten years or even longer depending on when the abuse began.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX). Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: Would you agree that this is one of the worst human trafficking events of your lifetime?

Ballard: Absolutely.

McCaul: They don’t have a home, maybe they have a sponsor, but guess what happens to them.

Ballard: Well, they are exploited, labor, sex. Any kind of exploitation is available, and they have no name, no number, no identity. They are the perfect victim of any kind of exploitation within this country because no one even knows they exist.

White says she and a colleague were discouraged when they tried to get to the bottom of what was happening in 2021.

White: And when I did call a shelter to find out the status of a child, I was reprimanded. She told me it’s nice that you care about the kids, but it is not your responsibility. Once they leave here, they are gone. And you are not to call looking, inquiring about them at other shelters.

Sharyl: How do you explain that? Why the federal government and officials wouldn’t care about the ultimate outcome of these children are being trafficked?

White: Well, ultimately, if you want my opinion, it’s because what bureaucrats care about is keeping their program running. Because this is a program that is funded by billions of congressionally appropriated dollars.

After the immigrant child labor scandal in Michigan, the state imposed greater penalties for companies that violate the law.

Last year, 10 Republicans in Congress proposed a bill requiring stricter and more extensive background checks of sponsors and every adult in the house. Also periodic visits, and no children going to other illegal immigrants unless it’s a relative or legal guardian. But there’s been no action.

White: We are the United States of America. We have to do better than this. This is absurd. And it’s a stain on our nation. It is literally taxpayer funded slavery, and it has to stop.

Sharyl (on-camera): The companies accused in the Michigan scandal promised investigations. The Labor Department opened investigations, too.

Watch video here.