EXCLUSIVE: Whistleblower Alleges Federal Government Acts as ‘Middleman’ for Cartel Child Trafficking

Young unaccompanied migrants, that range in age from 3 to 9, sit inside a play pen at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley, in Donna, Texas, on March 30, 2021. (Dario Lopez-Mills/Pool via Reuters)

The U.S. government is taking an active role as “middleman” for international child trafficking, according to explosive allegations from a whistleblower.

The whistleblower, a federal employee named Tara Rodas who has worked in various government sectors, told The Epoch Times in an interview that she had direct experience with trafficked children while working at a processing facility in Pomona, California. While there, she learned that the program had become a front for a massive human smuggling ring driven by Mexican drug cartels.

The United States currently operates a network of processing facilities for migrant children along the southern border. Many children who enter the United States illegally come on the dime of drug cartels, who in turn sell the children into sex slavery or child labor.

At the processing facilities, Rodas explained, case managers would work to reunite illegal children with family members inside the United States.

But in reality, Rodas said, many “sponsors,” people already inside the country willing to take and care for the children, had no relationship to them at all.

Rodas has spent the past 20 years working for various government agencies, including the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE). She is set to testify about her allegations at a hearing before the House of Representatives on April 26.

In 2021, President Joe Biden sent out an urgent call to federal employees, telling them that Spanish speakers were needed at the border to help process the influx of illegal immigrant children. In 2021, 120,000 illegal migrant children were processed by the federal government, a massive increase over previous years. The purported goal of the reunification program was to ensure the children’s safety by helping transport them to sponsors.

Rodas, the wife of a Spanish-speaking immigrant from El Salvador, said, “When I learned they needed Spanish speakers to help and that it was going to be working with the children, I volunteered. I volunteered to help the Biden administration place these children with sponsors here in the United States.”

Asked why she agreed to answer Biden’s call, Rodas said it was for the children.

“I wanted to help the children get reunited with their families,” she said. “And as a Spanish speaker, not all federal employees speak Spanish and they had an urgent need. It was a humanitarian crisis. And that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to help.”

After volunteering for the detail, Rodas was brought to the Pomona-Fairplex emergency intake site, a site overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for the processing of illegal immigrant children.

Rodas reported that, early in the assignment, things were calm: the numbers of illegal immigrant children coming to the facility were relatively low, “a few hundred max,” and vetting requirements for U.S. sponsors were much more stringent. But as the influx of illegal aliens into the United States picked up, so too did the influx of migrant children into the Pomona site and other processing facilities.

“I thought all I was going to be doing was essentially coloring, talking with, and maybe teaching the children,” Rodas said.

But over time, Rodas, aided by her experience as a government watchdog, said she began to pick up on serious ethical concerns in how migrant children were being shuffled out of the facility to questionable sponsors.

Eventually, Rodas said she came to the realization that, in prioritizing speed over safety for the children, HHS may have been ultimately enabling and facilitating a massive cartel human smuggling operation.

U.S. Government ‘Absolutely’ Crucial to Cartel Human Smuggling

In her interview, Rodas explained that the U.S. federal government has become a crucial “middleman” for cartels in their human smuggling operations.

Asked how it took on this role, Rodas explained, “The easiest way to describe it would be beginning with something people are familiar with, which is drug trafficking.”

When it comes to drug trafficking, cartels have to track and protect the product from the point of origin in Central America up until the end user in the United States. Cartels regularly lose huge amounts of narcotics on the border due to customs and inspections. And even when they get the drugs over the border, a lot can go wrong before the product reaches the end user.

Not so with smuggled children, Rodas said.

“So now when we think of child trafficking, what happens is the trafficker leaves [Central America] with the child. They only have to guard the ‘product’ to the U.S. border,” she said. “So then they hand their asset to the U.S. government, who guards their product. They don’t have to worry about losing any product as they cross the border because the U.S. is taking their product and protecting it.”

Later, she emphasized again that “Once they’re over the border, they hand the child to the government. So we then take the ‘product’ so we are securing their investment. We then ship their product to the end user. This is something that I just find so very hard to even to accept.”

Asked whether this process has become a crucial aspect of cartel smuggling operations, Rodas replied “Absolutely.”

“I absolutely believe they see us as part of their business model,” she said. “We saved them a ton of money. We keep them from losing what they consider—I mean, to me, it’s horrific—but that they consider products or assets. We guard their products and their assets and we deliver them directly. It saves them a lot of money, and we are the middleman because we accept their product from the smuggler at the border. We then turn around and deliver the product to the trafficker on this side.”

But when she flew out to Pomona, California, Rodas had no idea that this was happening, in part due to the government failing to warn its agents about that prospect.

One Sponsor Hosted 6+ Children

Rodas’ suspicions were first aroused while handling the case of two migrant children. In her investigation into the matter, Rodas learned that a sponsor had hosted at least six other children.

In part, the confusion was due to the nature of case managers at the facility: they were independent contractor volunteers, with little in the way of training in vetting or security, she said.

“When we talk about vetting sponsors, these are these case managers. They’re just regular people,” she said. “They are not experts in fraud. They are not law enforcement. It’s not like there’s investigators on the site. These are just regular caseworkers.”

And in the beginning, Rodas reported, the case managers didn’t even have proper supervisors: “It was just like a free-for-all.”

The case, involving a brother and sister, was difficult due to conflicting stories from the home country and the sponsor, and Rodas was brought in to assist.

In that case, Rodas said, “It was clear there wasn’t a real relationship between the children and the sponsor.”

The sponsor gave conflicting accounts about where the children would be living, leading Rodas to grow suspicious. But at the time, she emphasized, she had no idea that the program she was a part of had enabled trafficking in the past—nor did her colleagues, independent contractor volunteers with minimal experience in security and vetting.

“The thing that’s important to understand is I had no idea one child had ever been trafficked through this program,” Rodas said. “So HHS knew but ... I did not know and neither did many of the other people there on the site.”

After four days of digging, Rodas and her colleagues learned that the same sponsor had hosted at least six other addresses, suggesting that, as suspected, she had no relationship to the children.

After investigating further, Rodas made a chilling discovery: with the assistance of the U.S. government, five sponsors alone had taken in 18 children.

Immediately after learning about the problem, Rodas in June 2021 submitted a report alleging that the sponsor in question was “suspicious.”

“I laid out all the information in a logical manner,” Rodas said, adding, “I do work in the [inspector general] community after all.”

When she first presented the case, Rodas was optimistic that it would be resolved. But over time, she realized that HHS knew about the problem—and had no intention of addressing it.

‘Speed Over Safety’

Rodas said that as the influx of illegal migrant children grew heavier, the federal government began to prioritize speed over the safety of children.

She reported that HHS, in overseeing the facilities, pushed case managers to have the children processed out of the facility within 10–14 days of arrival. This quest for speed came at the cost of children’s well-being, Rodas said.

“It makes me so emotional thinking about it,” she said, reporting that she cried when she first learned of the situation.

“I knew that they knew [about the trafficking allegations] and they didn’t have people on the site who knew anything about child trafficking,” Rodas said. “And they’re asking us to move kids in 10, 14 days when they know there’s bad actors who are getting kids.

After 20 years as a public servant driven by the desire to help people, Rodas was devastated when she began to piece together the story of what was happening to migrant children.

“I mean, ... I’ve dedicated my entire life to serve the federal government. And now I’m wondering, ‘Am I on the wrong side?’ I went through the stages of grief multiple times.”

Rodas referenced a leaked conference call with Xavier Becerra where Becerra suggested this process was by design: processing children and getting them out of the facilities, Becerra said, “needs to be like an assembly line,” emphasizing quick results and turnover.

But it wasn’t only HHS that prioritized processing speed over safety: many of the security failures, Rodas indicated, would not have been possible without a series of directives from the White House.

“They issued a field guidance that removed even needing to ask who else was in the household, and no more background checks were required on household members,” Rodas explained.

“So in the past, if you, for example, were sponsoring a child, you would need to give the names of every adult over the age of 18. And a background check would need to be done on those adults living in that house. [Biden] did away with all of that. So it was speed over safety. They couldn’t possibly do ... all of those things and meet their speed goals. It would not be possible.”

Thus, Rodas said, the decision was made to emphasize quick processing over vetting sponsors.

90 Percent of Sponsors ‘Not Legally in US’

There were other difficulties as well: according to Rodas, more than 90 percent of children’s “sponsors” were in the country illegally, meaning that they had no easily accessible criminal background sheet. And neither the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, or HHS assisted case managers in vetting sponsors.

Rather, case managers relied on unverifiable documents submitted by sponsors to verify their and the children’s identities.

Rodas reported that to confirm these identities, sponsors would send in relevant documents via WhatsApp, a communication platform that is popular outside of the United States.

“They’re taking a photograph of things and sending it in, so that the case manager has no way to know if this documentation is real,” Rodas said.

In one case, this resulted in a sponsor in his 20s receiving a 16-year-old girl he claimed was his sister; but that wasn’t true, Rodas discovered.

“DHS and FBI should have absolutely had presence,” Rodas said. “They should have been the ones doing the background checks ... and background checks are ... done on so few of the sponsors. That’s what’s astounding.”

She explained that only the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies would be able to access the “high-level” information needed to assess an illegal alien’s criminal background.

“They’re not citizens of the United States. So you wouldn’t see [their criminal record] on any regular background check,” Rodas explained. “To say that they are vetting the sponsors could not possibly be true because we have no access to their criminal history in another country. Unless you’re high level, right? And that’s how we found out that some of these are very high level actors [who] should not be even in the United States. They should be in prison in their home countries, but should definitely not be getting children.”

By the end of her time at the Pomona facility, the numbers had risen from a few hundred children a day to as many as 2,000 a day. Overall, Rodas reported that Pomona processed 8,314 children in a six-month span, meaning that upwards of 8,000 children may have been sent to sponsors with no legal presence in the United States.

‘There Is Nothing Humanitarian About This’

Many Democrats have claimed since President Donald Trump left office that supporting illegal immigration was “compassionate” or “humanitarian.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, Rodas said: “There is nothing humanitarian about this.”

“We are creating a victim population. These children are being exploited. extorted, abused, neglected,” Rodas said, again emphasizing, “There is nothing humanitarian about this.”

Every month, Rodas reported, more than 250 children call the HHS hotline to report abuse, neglect, or trafficking.

“How is it humanitarian to have a 13-year-old child with chemical burns working the night shift in a slaughterhouse?” Rodas asked. “I have never in my life witnessed anything that I would consider to be as horrific as what we’re seeing right now. These children are in slave labor. They’re not just working here.”

In another case, a teenager died after a 50-foot fall while working on a roof.

In still another case, a 16-year-old reported that her sponsor, a woman claiming to be the girl’s aunt, was pimping her out inside her home.

‘We Don’t Get Sued by Traffickers’

After her initial grief over the revelations, Rodas decided that something had to be done. So, despite the risks of blowing the whistle, Rodas did it.

Later, the same sponsor who had already taken in several children, and who first made Rodas suspicious, came up again to take in another child.

Now aware of the problem, Rodas went to her supervisor, who also acted as a legal adviser for the facility.

She reported going to the supervisor and saying, “Hey, I just heard that we’re sending another child to a sponsor who’s already under investigation. I’ve always been told that we should do a sanity check. Do we really want to end up on the front page of the Washington Post? This is an area we already have under investigation.”

Her supervisor’s response astonished Rodas: “Her response to me was, ‘Tara, we only get sued if we keep kids in care too long. We don’t get sued by traffickers.’ She must have seen the look on my face. Because I was like, just stunned. And she leans in and she says, ‘Are we clear? We don’t get sued by traffickers.’”

After this stupefying response, Rodas began working with others in the facility who shared her concerns. The few case managers addressing the issue became known as “the Trafficking Team.”

“They called us ‘Richard’s Angels’ because one of the federal field specialists on the site was Richard. And so he called me CSI,” Rodas said. The name is derived from “Charlie’s Angels,” a film series about female private investigators.

“They called us ‘Richard’s Angels’ because we were the ones who were combating all this fraud and trying to rescue the kids. We got kids put in long-term care so they didn’t end up going to these evil sponsors. But we knew that there was no way that we were going to be able to fight all the schemes—there were just too many being processed.”

Punished for Whistleblowing

Rodas said that after she made a whistleblower complaint to the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, she faced some backlash from HHS.

“[HHS] found out that I reached out to the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General. And once they learned that, they took me off the case within 10 days. And then, a week after that, they walked me off the site.”

She believes she was escorted off-site in full view of her colleagues as an “example” of what happens to whistleblowers.

Rodas was welcomed back with open arms by her inspector general colleagues.

“I’m just fortunate that I still had an agency to go back to who saw that my allegations were so severe, and that it involved the safety of children that, you know, they supported me,” Rodas said.

But nevertheless, she said the experience has “given me a new appreciation for the courage of whistleblowers.”

Asked about the solution to these problems, Rodas made several recommendations.

First, she called on HHS to cease and desist from sending out migrant children until their sponsors are properly vetted.

“That is the root of the problem, it’s that they’re giving children to bad actors,” she argued. “So that would be the first thing ... to stop. Halt. Keep the children in care.”

In her opinion, she said HHS “must submit to oversight and accountability” over the Unaccompanied Children (UC) program.

“HHS has lost control of the UC program,” she said.

Finally, Rodas called on Biden to rescind his earlier orders making it easier for sponsors to get access to children without proper vetting.

In December 2022, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) in a letter to Becerra, accused HHS of “knowingly” transferring migrant children to criminals and sex traffickers on the basis of allegations by Rodas and others.

Despite originating in the office of a U.S. senator, Becerra’s agency has apparently ignored the letter.

Rodas will testify about these allegations before the House Judiciary Committee on April 26.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the HHS for comment.