House Exposes HHS Role in Child Sex Trafficking; Dems Have Little to Say on Lost Kids

It was all Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) could do to contain his anger during the July 16 hearing testimony describing how federal officials worked with 15 U.N. agencies and an estimated 230 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) during the Biden administration in spending $6 billion in federal grants to aid illegal immigrants.

Higgins’s anger was focused especially on one heart-breaking fact — Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials have lost track of an estimated 300,000 Unaccompanied Migrant Children (UMCs) they turned over, with the help of the NGOs, to largely unvetted sponsors, many of whom experts say were linked to Mexican drug cartel sex and forced labor trafficking.

“It was a pipeline, man, we set up a pipeline of tender-age children into sex trafficking and slave labor,” Higgins finally exclaimed, fists clutched near his chest.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to find all of these children with the same controversial raids of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in which agents detain illegal immigrants with criminal records for deportation and often also find lost UMCs.

More will be found, and the persons responsible for their abuse will be prosecuted, according to Higgins, who told the hearing that 35,000 “tender-age kids” have been rescued so far under Trump.

“Be advised that we are building our criminal case files. We’re interviewing these 35,000 kids, and we’re finding out exactly what the hell happened, how they ended up in the nightmare where they were,” Higgins warned. “And we’re rescuing more — and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. We’re going to identify these children, locate these children, rescu[e] these children. … And many of these NGO employees are going to find themselves wearing orange.”

The key factor in HHS losing so many UMCs is federal officials relied too heavily on well-funded NGOs to provide supposedly screened sponsors to accept responsibility for the children while their cases went through the immigration system, according to Ali Hooper, president of Guiding Understanding, Awareness, Research and Defense Against Trafficking (GUARD), a non-profit investigative research group.

“In interviews with cartel members incarcerated for human trafficking, they explained how weak sponsor verification incentivized trafficking by enabling cartels to control children’s placement by supplying children with exact sponsor information, allowing control over their destination,” Hooper told the committee.

“Cartels infiltrated NGOs along smuggling routes to the southwest border, using them to facilitate in the smuggling or trafficking of children. By providing children with false documents and pairing them with adults to pose as family units, they placed the children in grave danger,” Hooper continued. “According to an internal audit conducted by [HHS], approximately 70% of sponsor applications examined were found to be fraudulent, making child traceability and safety assurances nearly impossible.”

Further worsening the situation, Hooper noted, was the failure of HHS officials to follow-up on information provided by more than 65,000 calls to a telephone hotline established specifically to aid in tracking UMCs from August 2023 to January 2025.

“For example, one call was received of a child reporting ‘a lot of grown men were coming into his bedroom and touching him.’ This call was ignored by the previous administration and only acted upon after this current administration took over, leading to a welfare check, the child being rescued, and the sponsor being arrested,” Hooper said.

As an example of the abuses GUARD has documented, Hooper cited the organization known as Endeavors, a San Antonio, Texas-based NGO, including:

• “Staff were hired without completed fingerprinting or thorough background checks.”
• “Male staff were found inside female dorms.”
• “A contractor led 150 teenage girls, minors in sexually explicit dance routines, teaching them how to ‘twerk.’ He did it twice — once at the facility’s ribbon-cutting, and again months later — before an on-site compliance officer demanded intervention.”
• “Children collapsed after being subjected to massive vaccination protocols with no parental consent and no clear medical follow-up.”
• “Two compliance officers discovered a female housed alone in a dorm who was over 18 years of age. Endeavors was shielding her from ICE. In other cases, UACs on the verge of turning 18 were released early to avoid ICE transfer.”
• “An Endeavors employee that raised concerns about too many children being sent [to] a single address was terminated.”
• “A former ICE employee with a background in case management, serving as a contracted compliance team lead was actively stonewalled from reviewing child placements.”

Hooper emphasized, however, that the problems her organization described at Endeavors were not unique to that NGO.

“To reiterate, it wasn’t just Endeavors. Across the country, NGOs became waystations — processing points in a steady flow of children. Federal contracts incentivized output over outcomes, prioritizing speed over safety. And the cartels took full advantage. They studied every gap and exploited them, sending children into a system they knew would fast-track them to cartel-controlled sponsors — without meaningful background checks, with addresses verified through postal databases, and IDs often accepted via WhatsApp or text with no facial match to the sender,” Hooper explained.

“This is how 70% of sponsor data became falsified or fraudulent. Post placement welfare checks were typically limited to two phone calls made to the sponsor’s home; if no one answered, the case was no longer followed up on. This broken process contributed to the staggering over 300,000 children who went unaccounted for,” she said.

At the outset of the hearing, Democrats offered motions directing the committee to issue subpoenas to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Biondi, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, FBI Director Kash Patel, White House border czar Tom Homan, and multiple other present and former federal officials were all defeated on party line votes.

When The Washington Stand asked spokesmen for the 13 House Democrats serving on the Homeland Security panel what each was specifically doing to find and rescue the 300,000 missing children, only one responded, Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois.

“Congresswoman Ramirez — during her committee hearing and legislation — has been clear about protecting asylum seekers, especially children. She spoke against the [Trump] administration’s executive order to end the lawful access to seek asylum at the border, introduced legislation to protect the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, and introduced legislation to protect schools from ICE raids,” insisted Jowen Ortiz Clintron, communications director for Ramirez.

“But in the reunification front, Ramirez led Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) and Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) in introducing the bicameral Family Reunification Task Force Act. The legislation would authorize the Family Reunification Task Force to continue its work to reunite the thousands of families torn apart by Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy that inhumanely separated children from their parents and prevent any further separation,” he said.

Among the Democrats not responding were Ranking Member Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, Eric Swalwell of California, Dan Goldman of New York, and LaMonica McIver of New Jersey. McIver was recently charged with three counts of impeding and interfering with federal officers by the Department of Justice for her involvement in physical assaults on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at a New Jersey detention center.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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