A federal whistleblower said unaccompanied minors who enter the U.S. are being placed in a sponsorship program riddled with criminals, including human traffickers.
Tara Lee Rodas, with an agency called the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity & Efficiency (CIGIE), told Project Veritas that she volunteered to assist the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with the processing of unaccompanied migrant children and was deployed to the Emergency Intake Site in Pomona, California.
Rodas told Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe: “Our sponsors typically are not citizens. They’re not permanent residents. They don’t have a legal presence.”
The sponsor, Rodas said, “can hold up an ‘Order of Deportation’ to a (migrant) child and say, ‘This is your Order of Deportation. If you do not do what I say, when I say, I’m going to call ICE on you myself.’ ”
Rodas added: “We are paying to put children in the hands of criminals.”
When she informed federal officials about the potential wrongdoing, Rodas said the response has been dismissive. She believes she has suffered retaliation at work for raising these issues.
“I said (to the command center executives), ‘We’re getting ready to send another child (to Austin, Texas),’ and they said, ‘Tara, I think you need to understand that we only get sued if we keep kids in care too long. We don’t get sued by traffickers. Are you clear? We don’t get sued by traffickers.’ So, that was the answer of the United States federal government. HHS did not want this information to get out,” Rodas said.
“They knew I had made protected disclosures and they retaliated against me as a whistleblower and had me kicked off the site so I could no longer research the cases,” Rodas added.
Following up on the information Rodas provided, a Project Veritas journalist spoke to a migrant female minor who revealed that she had been put through sexual abuse by her sponsor.
“An aunt (sponsored me), but she kicked me out of her house. She was pimping me and I didn’t like that. She would pimp me to men,” the child said.
“I just escaped one night. I told her [aunt], ‘I’m going to the laundromat.’ She [aunt] went to the laundromat and didn’t find me there. Later on, she called Immigration.”
Project Veritas said it would soon be releasing more information on this issue.
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