This is a special NTD International Roundtable two-part series: “Where are the Children? Crisis at the Border.”
Right now, roughly 500,000 illegal immigrant children are missing in America. At least, no U.S. authority can say for sure where they are.
In early 2021, unaccompanied children, some as young as toddlers, began arriving en masse at the southern border. It quickly overwhelmed the system. Emergency intake centers were set up and temporary staff were brought in. The mission was to quickly unite these children with family members, guardians, or qualified sponsors.
That’s where things went wrong. Criminal gangs saw an opening, a way to exploit the program and sell these children for sex and slave labor.
It sounds unbelievable, but EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” host Jan Jekielek and NTD’s Cindy Drukier had a rare chance to sit down with people on the front lines who told us exactly how it happens.
Two are whistleblowers: Tara Rodas, former deputy to the director of the federal case management team at Health and Human Services, saw red flags almost as soon as she arrived. Aaron Stevenson, a former intelligence research specialist for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was the first to notice a disturbing new pattern.
We also spoke with Mary Flynn O’Neill, executive director of the nonprofit America’s Future—which, among its other activities, works to educate and eradicate child trafficking—and Lara Logan, investigative journalist and board member of America’s Future.
What you’re about to hear is disturbing, but it’s real and it needs our attention.
This is Part 2, where we look at what our guests suggest and urge the incoming administration to do to stop the trafficking, prosecute criminals, and most urgently, rescue the children.
In Part 1, we looked at the scale of the problem, how it came to light, what these children may be suffering, and what our guests have tried to do to raise the alarm bells.