Alright, folks, buckle up, because what we’re dealing with here isn’t just a scandal—it’s a full-blown humanitarian and national security crisis. Senator Chuck Grassley, the dogged Iowa Republican and one of the Senate’s toughest investigators, is finally getting answers from the contractors who took more than $9 billion in taxpayer money to house illegal immigrant children, only for tens of thousands of them to disappear.
Yes, you read that right. Thousands of vulnerable children—many of whom don’t speak English, have no legal status, and owe debts to the cartels who smuggled them in—were placed with “sponsors” the government didn’t even vet properly. And now? They’re gone. Missing. Unaccounted for. Many have likely been trafficked for labor or worse, and for years, these contractors refused to answer questions about it.
Well, now that Republicans control the White House and Congress, the days of ignoring oversight are over. Grassley has sent document demands to 23 contractors—the same ones that ignored him a year ago under Biden. These companies, which were supposed to protect these kids, are now being forced to answer questions like:
- Did you check if sponsors had criminal ties, including human trafficking?
- How often did you conduct background checks or home visits?
- How many cases of abuse or trafficking did you report?
And get this—some of these companies have been caught red-handed in absolutely horrific negligence. Southwest Key Programs, for example, is being sued by the Department of Justice for rampant sexual abuse of children by employees. One eight-year-old girl reported that a staff member came into her room at night to assault her, then threatened to kill her family if she told anyone.
But the scandal doesn’t stop there.
Let’s talk about how this whole catastrophe started. The “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) program, managed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), allowed any minor who arrived without parents to be fast-tracked into the U.S. and placed with a “sponsor.” That policy? It created an open border for children, and guess who immediately took advantage? The cartels.
Think about it: these kids weren’t really "unaccompanied." They were accompanied by smugglers the entire way, then handed over to Border Patrol with a birth certificate to prove they were minors. And thanks to the Biden administration’s weak policies, Border Patrol had no choice but to process them and ship them off—no questions asked.
And where did they go? To sponsors the government barely knew anything about. No in-person verification. No checking if they were human traffickers or gang members. Nothing.
- 85,000 children—that’s how many the government admitted in 2023 were completely unaccounted for after being placed with sponsors.
- 300,000—that’s how many minors the Department of Homeland Security said in August 2023 were totally missing from federal records.
- 70% of these kids come from Guatemala, a bizarrely high percentage that suggests cartels in that country are running a sophisticated child smuggling operation.
And what did Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas say when asked about this? That human trafficking is “outside the responsibility” of DHS. Unbelievable.
Now, under Trump’s administration, the federal government is finally getting serious about fixing this disaster. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed “radical transparency” on these missing kids, and White House border czar Tom Homan is leading a nationwide rescue mission to find them.
Meanwhile, some states are fighting back. Maine’s Republican state Rep. Laurel Libby exposed the case of a biological male winning a girls’ state pole vault competition—a moment that sparked major protests. And when she was censured by Democrats for calling attention to the issue, she filed a lawsuit against the state’s House Speaker.
Americans are waking up, and they’re furious. Protesters have taken to the streets, marching against Democratic Governor Janet Mills for allowing these policies to continue. And the Biden-era contractors, who thought they could get rich while looking the other way, are finally being held accountable.