President Donald Trump’s immigration chief has faulted the previous administration and its open-borders policies for not only “misplacing” hundreds of thousands of immigrant children but actually paying human traffickers to take those children.

While testifying before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem charged her predecessor, Alejandro Mayorkas, then-Health and Human Servies (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra, and their boss, then-President Joe Biden, with knowingly placing unaccompanied alien children (UACs) in the custody of human traffickers, who were then paid by the administration. “The one thing that has been challenging is that under the Biden administration, the government paid sponsors in” HHS, which was tasked with relocating and taking care of UACs, “in order to host these children — and those sponsors, many times, we found instances where they trafficked these children themselves,” Noem testified. Under the Biden administration, she said, “we not only had children in this country that were part of a program, the government was paying individuals that were knowingly trafficking them and abusing them.”

“That has stopped,” Noem asserted. “We have gone through and found these children and put them back with their families when we have been able to do so,” she reported. Border Czar Tom Homan, a veteran of both the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), shared in late 2024 that one of Trump’s goals upon taking office was to locate the nearly 500,000 UACs which the Biden administration failed to keep track of. “We gotta save these kids, a lot of them are living a life of hell every day,” Homan said at the time. “We’re gonna find some of them living with pedophiles, living in sex-slavery, some are gonna be dead, but we gotta find these children,” he insisted. “I’ve talked to little girls as young as nine who were raped multiple times by members of the cartel. Not once, numerous times. Grown men crawled upon this little girl and took everything innocent and pure from her,” he said, citing his decades of experience in USBP and ICE. “Her life would never be the same. You look in her eyes, there wasn’t life in her eyes.”

“When you lose the border, trafficking and sex trafficking’s gonna skyrocket, child deaths will skyrocket, migrant deaths will skyrocket, American deaths will skyrocket,” Homan asserted, addressing the humanitarian crisis the Biden administration’s policies facilitated. “I love this country. I want to save some lives. Secure borders save lives.”

Last year, Trump’s HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also confirmed that the Biden administration was complicit in the trafficking of immigrant children. “Under the Biden administration, the Federal Government became the biggest facilitator of child abuse in our country. My predecessor prioritized speed over safety,” Kennedy stated. “In stark contrast, this administration is putting a halt to the child trafficking problem. We are fingerprinting every sponsor, DNA testing, income testing and valid ID testing. Nobody gets a kid until they prove they are a family member.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Jessica Vaughan, director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, pointed out that Noem and Kennedy were referring to “the Biden-era system of waving in hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children who crossed the border illegally” before being passed off to well-paid contract shelters, which would in turn place the children with “sponsors.” Vaughan explained, “Most of the contractors who were receiving hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds to care for and protect the kids were instead just funneling them to any sponsor that turned up, few questions asked, and no background checks, identity verification, or home studies required.”

“It was revealed through whistleblowers that these contractors knowingly released kids to gang members and abusive situations, including many situations of labor trafficking, and even to commercial sex trafficking. Rather than stop the release of the child to an unsafe situation, the contractors instead fired the whistleblowers,” Vaughan continued. Contractors included Catholic Charities, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and Lutheran World Services, among others. Children were sold into indentured servitude in factories or farms, used or sold by street gangs for sex, or forced into long-term sexual relationships with older men. The contractors, Vaughan said, “were informed of the problems, but still failed to take steps to protect the children from abuse. They just kept cashing checks from the federal government.”

“Our government has the constitutional and moral obligation to secure our borders, not only to keep citizens safe, but to avoid enriching criminal smugglers and facilitating human traffickers,” Vaughan stated. “When we tolerate illegal employment, then human traffickers can more easily entice people in other countries to put themselves into indenture, thinking it is a way to a better life. It’s important to remember that the criminal smuggling groups control the land border crossing areas to our south, so they end up controlling the people who want to cross,” she continued. “An open border lures people into danger and into exploitation, or worse, death, because the smugglers and traffickers care nothing about their safety, they only care about getting paid.”