Many Unaccompanied Minors Sent to Traffickers, Not Family Members: HHS Whistleblower Tara Rodas Breaks Down Red Flags
American Thought Leaders
The Epoch Times
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 July 2023
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
“We’re incentivizing the traffickers … The United States government is paying for the flights and the bus tickets to deliver these children to people who view children as assets,” says Health and Human Services (HHS) whistleblower Tara Rodas.
A federal employee for two decades, including 17 years in the inspector general community, she was among a number of people who answered a call from the Biden administration to help with the crisis at the border and a surge in unaccompanied minors.
“Everybody just believed we were reuniting children with families … I thought I would be able to help, you know—be that smiling, welcoming face to the children when they came. I just had no idea that the children didn’t know who they were going to,” Rodas says.
Large numbers of unaccompanied minors are being sent by HHS to sponsors that are not being properly vetted, Rodas says. In some cases, kids are being released to apartment buildings where dozens of other children have also been released. In other cases, there are sponsors using multiple addresses to sponsor children, she says. And in some cases, sponsors are submitting fake documentation—that no one is checking.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How could this be family reunification if the children didn't know who they were going to? |
| 0:04.7 | In this episode, I sit down with HHS whistleblower Tara Rodas, |
| 0:08.8 | a federal employee for two decades. She was among a number of people who answered a call from the |
| 0:13.7 | Biden administration to help with the crisis at the border. Honestly, if I had not seen this with |
| 0:19.4 | my own eyes, I could not believe that the U.S. government is taking a child from the border. |
| 0:26.4 | They're safe with us and then just simply sending them on buses and planes within 10 to 14 days |
| 0:34.3 | to people who are unfettered. Who's checking their backgrounds? No one. |
| 0:39.2 | Tonight she breaks down the red flags she noticed why she decided to blow the whistle on HHS |
| 0:44.4 | and what steps are needed to fix the system. Cocaine can be sold one time, but a child can be sold |
| 0:51.6 | over and over again multiple times a day, year after year. They're making millions of dollars |
| 0:59.4 | off of the lives of the children. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Yanyuk Kelly. |
| 1:06.5 | Tara Rodas, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. |
| 1:11.0 | Yann, thank you so much for having me on to talk about government-sponsored taxpayer-funded |
| 1:16.7 | child trafficking. I appreciate it. When you say those words, |
| 1:21.0 | it's really kind of hard to comprehend. I watched your testimony in Congress |
| 1:28.0 | not a couple of months ago and it blew my mind and how did you come to |
| 1:35.8 | discover the beginnings even of what you just said? Sure, sure. So I'm a federal employee. |
| 1:43.9 | I've been a federal employee for more than 20 years and 17 of those years have been in the |
| 1:49.4 | inspector general community and the IG for those people who know combat fraud, waste, |
| 1:55.4 | and abuse in government programs. Now today I'm just talking to you as an average citizen, |
| 2:00.4 | right, who witnessed through a detail at the Department of Health and Human Services |
| 2:08.0 | trafficking. And so I volunteered to help. You may recall that the Biden administration |
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