Whistleblower Tara Rodas Testifies About Child Trafficking in U.S. Border Program

The U.S. DOJ has filed suit for sexual abuse, harassment, and misconduct against Southwest Key, the largest government-funded provider of shelter for unaccompanied children that cross the southern border. The documented cases of sexual abuse range from 2015 to 2023 and include severe allegations, including rape, solicitation of sex, and death threats. Southwest Key has 29 shelters in California, Texas, and Arizona. The shelters can house a total of 6,350 children.

A New York Times expose’ about Southwest Key and founder Juan Sanchez in 2018 revealed that the non-profit has a history of sexual abuse, failure to run background checks on employees, and misuse of federal grant money that was $626 million in 2018. A Texas Monthly report from 2017 revealed a former border agent who was arrested for charges of child pornography was employed as a case manager for Southwest Key’s Casa Padre shelter.

The DOJ suit alleges that Southwest Key knowingly violated their own policies as well as the policies of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). Employees were required to have a “spotter system,” which means an employee cannot enter an area closed off to cameras without another employee present. The bedrooms for the children do not have cameras, but Southwest Key allegedly knew that employees were violating this rule and didn’t do anything to resolve the violations.

Other alleged violations include the exchanging of contact information, gift-giving, inappropriate comments, physical contact, and favoritism. A child with visible hickeys reported a sexual assault to an employee and was told to cover it up. The child told another employee, who notified a supervisor. The supervisor said not to write a report. The employee attempted to report directly to ORR, but the supervisors said no hotline was available. According to the complaint, that is against ORR policies.

Children who end up in shelters operated by Southwest Key may not be able to speak English or Spanish, which means the shelter should have interpreters or other ways for children to file complaints about employees. Southwest Key did not provide this for the children in their care, which left them more vulnerable to exploitation.

2 min 36 sec: "I saw vulnerable indigenous children from Guatemala who speak Mayan dialects and can not speak Spanish. They can't ask for help…they become captives of their sponsors."

We Must Stop Government-Sponsored Child Trafficking!@Amerifuturehttps://t.co/NPX7pn37X0

— Tara Rodas (@taraleerodas) May 13, 2024

Unaccompanied minors at the border has been an increasing problem for the United States, and there have been several whistleblowers who accuse the government of enabling child trafficking via the unaccompanied children program. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the primary agency that oversees the Administration for Children and Families. The ORR falls under that agency and operates the Unaccompanied Children program. Tara Rodas is one of those whistleblowers who has spoken at hearings for the House and Senate.

Rodas is a government employee who worked at the Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake Site. She responded to calls from the Biden/Harris administration to help with the border crisis and unaccompanied children. “The advertisement said that this was to care for these children with their families,” Rodas told The HighWire. “I really believed that this was a family reunification program. I had zero idea, no clue that one child had ever been trafficked through this program. This was a very hard, harsh reality when we realized that these children were being trafficked.”

Rodas said, “The U.S. government is the middleman for the trafficker. It is the delivery system.” She explained that traffickers in the United States will convince families in Guatemala to send their kids for a more lucrative work opportunity and gave a specific example.

“[The trafficker] is a Guatemalan national living in Texas,” Rodas said. “He was telling them, ‘You’re special. I’m going to bring you here to the U.S. I’m going to pay for your journey. You’re going to leave your family behind. I’m going to pay for your journey with the smugglers. That’s going to cover your food, water, and transportation to get you to the U.S. border. Once you get here, instead of making $2.50 a day, I’m going to pay you $6 an hour.’ These kids and their families believe that these children are going to be Elon Musk rich. These parents are sending their children believing that they are going to make all of this money. That their son is coming to the U.S. and is going to be sending money back. That’s what these parents believe. So the children are quite proud. They have no idea they’re being trafficked. They know they’re going to work, but they don’t understand the situation they’re about to be in.”

Rodas said the Unaccompanied Children program is incentivizing traffickers to encourage children to come to the border and has been doing so since the program was started in 2013. “They are on track to spend $7.3 billion just on unaccompanied children,” Rodas said. “That is just in this one small program. HHS is over all of this program, and they’re funneling all the money to these NGOs and contractors, organizations like Southwest Keys. The federal government is paying Southwest Keys.”

Taxpayers fund the flights that bring kids from the border to the shelter and flights from the shelter to the sponsor. Rodas said that the program has chosen speed over safety when it comes to finding sponsors. She said it is not possible for HHS employees to vet sponsors because they are not law enforcement. Background checks are not required and the identification provided by the sponsor is not verified as HHS agents speak with sponsors over the phone.

“Most sponsors have no legal presence,” Rodas said. “Most of these kids are going to illegal aliens. There is no rule requiring that a sponsor is a legal permanent resident or a citizen of the United States. We’re handing children over to illegal aliens. We have their consular IDs. A majority of the children come from Guatemala.” Rodas said the Biden administration began to remove some of the protections in place to ensure kids don’t go to an abusive sponsor.

“Under the Trump policies, if a child did not, absolutely did not want to go with the sponsor, they showed up to deliver the child, and if the sponsor was drunk, high, acting crazy, they were allowed to bring the child back to the shelter,” Rodas said. “Under the current administration, under no circumstances are you allowed to bring the child back once you put them out of HHS custody. Once we put the child in transportation, they were out of our custody. They were then in the custody of the contractor, so we could wash our hands at that point. There was no way we were going to allow them to bring those children back.”

“They started rolling back all of the security features,” Rodas added. “What happened was they began repealing the laws that they put in place in 2016, ’17, ’18. All of these laws that they put in place to protect the kids, that you must do background checks on everyone in the house if they’re over 18. You must fingerprint. You must do this; you must do that. All of those ‘musts’ were taken out of the system. They were rolling back the protections in order to move the kids quickly. It became speed over safety. In the past, if somebody was sponsoring a child. I need you to tell me what other adults are in the household. I need all of you to have background checks run. Now, I’m like ok, I might not even require you to have a background check done, beyond a public records check.”

Rodas said everyone is concerned about families getting separated at the border, but they don’t realize that the federal government is facilitating the separation of families. She stressed that the separation is happening in the origin countries like Guatemala, and the multi-billion-dollar taxpayer-funded Unaccompanied Children program is splitting up families and trafficking children in the process.

“They thought they were coming here for a good life, and they were put in forced labor 12-14 hours a day,” Rodas said. “A gun to their head literally, their parents being threatened with their very lives. Their parents give up the deed to the house to pay for the journey, so the kid is in debt bondage and can never escape. They have to do what the sponsor tells them to do. We’re creating a victim population. Everyone on Capitol Hill is saying, ‘oh my gosh, family separation’. This program is incentivizing family separation.”

The Wall Street Journal wrote an article last month about the lack of oversight in protecting children from dangerous sponsors. The story has been covered, but there are still half a million missing kids, and the federal government will not provide the information they do have about the sponsors of these kids. Meanwhile, the program is still up and running while long-term children are sent to abusive homes being operated by Southwest Key. These abuses have been known for nearly a decade, but American taxpayer dollars are continuing to fund these programs.

While the DOJ has filed suit against Southwest Keys for allowing sexual abuse to take place at their facilities, there is no indication that the federal government intends to stop using Southwest Key facilities for minors who travel across the border unaccompanied. Rodas is reasonably frustrated with the lack of action regarding the ongoing child abuse and trafficking that is enabled by the Unaccompanied Children program.

Many of these shelters and Southwest Keys in particular, they’ve had people come forward,” Rodas said. “Since 2015, they’ve been accused of abusing children. What’s happening is horrific, obviously. We just have to ask, ‘Why is the United States federal government separating children from their families and giving them to strangers here in the United States?’ Why is this happening? I don’t know what it’s going to take to move the needle on this. It has been three years that I have been reporting on trafficking. I don’t know what it’s going to take to wake people up to what’s happening.”