Report: Obama's HHS Placed Children With Human Traffickers, Media Dead Silent
A terrible double standard has been uncovered within the media, and it centers on one of the left’s favorite talking points this month: Underage illegal immigration.
For weeks, the topic has dominated headlines and sparked what seems like coordinated outrage among liberals.
Apparently oblivious to the fact that the Obama administration detained minors at the border for years, the left has pointed fingers instead at President Donald Trump for enforcing regulations that were enacted before he was even president.
Pundits including MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough even compared U.S. law enforcement officials to Nazis, all because they separate children who are brought along during the commission of federal crimes from adults who are being placed into criminal custody.
This is akin to being outraged because police don’t throw the children of suspects in jail with their parents during arrests, but instead take them into protective environments.
The left-leaning media stayed strangely silent when the detention of migrant children went on for years before Trump took office… and now it looks like they also kept quiet when Barack Obama’s administration literally placed immigrant children in the hands of human traffickers just a few years ago.
“The United States government placed an unknown number of Central American migrant children into the custody of human traffickers after neglecting to run the most basic checks on these so-called ‘caregivers,'” New York magazine reported in 2016, based on a Senate report.
Blame Trump! The problem, for the left, however, is that this horrific mistreatment of immigrant children happened in 2013 — right in the middle of the Obama presidency, and two years before Trump even announced he was a candidate.
“In the fall of 2013, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors traveled to the U.S. southern border,” continued New York magazine.
“At least six of those children were eventually resettled on an egg farm in Marion, Ohio, where their sponsors forced them to work 12 hours a day under threats of death,” the report continued.
That’s right: Around the same time that now-infamous pictures of the Obama administration putting migrant children in caged detention areas were being snapped, the same administration was directly responsible for essentially handing foreign kids into child slavery.
“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, told The New York Times at the time.
“But what makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers,” the senator continued.
The Obama administration was appallingly lax at conducting even basic checks about the adults who showed up to “claim” migrant children.
“As detention centers became incapable of housing the massive influx of migrants, the [Obama-run] Department of Health and Human Services started placing children into the care of sponsors who would oversee the minors until their bids for refugee status could be reviewed,” explained New York magazine, again confirming that the detention of child migrants took place long before Trump.
The current administration at least provides comfortable and safe housing for the children who are separated from their parents. Obama’s team did something very different.
“But in many cases, officials failed to confirm whether the adults volunteering for this task were actually relatives or good Samaritans — and not unscrupulous egg farmers or child molesters,” the magazine reported about the Obama-era scandal.
“The department performed check-in visits at caretakers’ homes in only 5 percent of cases between 2013 and 2015,” it continued. “The Senate’s investigation built on an Associated Press report that found more than two dozen unaccompanied children were placed in homes where they were sexually abused, starved, or forced into slave labor.”
Shockingly, nobody knows for certain how many immigrant children ended up in horrific slavery-like circumstances under Obama’s watch. Over 90,000 immigrant children were placed into so-called “sponsor care” during the time-frame of 2013 to 2015.
“Exactly how many of those fell prey to traffickers is unknown, because the agency does not keep track,” New York magazine concluded.
Even after the scandal was uncovered and locations such as the slave-like egg farm in Marion, Ohio, were raided by police, the media remained oddly quiet.
A Google search of this incident reveals only a handful of media outlets covering the story between 2013 and 2014, despite the clearly huge implications of this Obama scandal.
It seems that when immigration enforcement policies made President Obama look bad, they were swept under the rug. Now that the same border problems that have existed for decades can be used against Donald Trump, however, liberal journalists have miraculously found the backbone to cover the story.
The reality is that border and immigration issues are tough, and children are unfortunately caught in the middle.
Just as it’s heartbreaking but necessary for police to make an arrest when children are witnesses, or for Child Protective Services to step in when a family situation turns ugly, the presence of minors doesn’t mean that we stop enforcing national laws. This would only encourage law-breakers to use children as “legal shields” as they commit more crimes.
Reality isn’t always pretty. There are no easy or magic answers on how to enforce U.S. border laws while being humane and compassionate to innocent kids dragged into the chaos by adults. It’s a difficult situation from any angle.
Trump’s administration is doing its best to deal with a problem it inherited from past presidents — but the fact that the mainstream media barely said a word about much worse treatment of migrants should be a giant red flag about the real agenda being pushed by liberal journalists now.
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