Exploited Children | Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson

Exploited Children - Sharyl Attkisson w' federal whistleblower Deborah White 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.

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.

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