by Wendi Strauch Mahoney, American Thinker:
Last Tuesday, James O’Keefe highlighted whistleblower and contract specialist for the General Services Administration (GSA) Clarissa Rippee. Rippee agreed to expose an alleged taxpayer-funded $347-million contract that transports alien unaccompanied children (UACs) from the border. She came forward because she felt that UACs, including infants, were being treated like “commodities.” O’Keefe alleges that it’s a “big-money business.”
Ripee was courageous to step forward. In this case, it added a human dimension to previously exposed information. The fact is that NGOs have long been using tax dollars to do the bidding of DHS and USCIS at the border.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) often leads in exposing issues like this one. In March 2024, the CIS’s Andrew Arthur used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain a 113-page, $404-million contract between the federal government “and a private entity to transport unaccompanied alien children (UACs) from shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).”
I have written extensively on the Biden-Harris open borders crisis. The flood of illegal aliens, including countless unaccompanied minors often victimized by the carelessness of this administration. The agreements between NGOs and our government to transport them are but one example of the way these innocents may be placed in harm’s way.
As CIS explains, the federal government farms out the transportation of young children from the border using NGOs and private contractors. The report indicates some effort to properly vet the escorts who transport the children. However, it seems that there is much less rigorous vetting of the sponsors who receive them.
According to Arthur, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA) changed the way minors were handled at the border by “abolish[ing] the former INS and dispers[ing] its enforcement and adjudication responsibilities across various agencies.” Arthur also states that, with “no debate,” Democrats gave ORR, with “no experience in sheltering children,” the responsibility for housing minors.
Later in 2008, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), added to DHS mandates the transportation of UACs “from non-contiguous countries to ORR within 72 hours, nearly all for placement with sponsors in the United States,” according to Arthur. As a result, the “number and percentage of UACs apprehended at the border from non-contiguous countries has skyrocketed ever since.”
Reporting in June 2023 from the Congressional Research Service shows massive increases in UACs at the southwest border since FY2009. UAC apprehensions skyrocketed when Biden took office in 2021. UACs “consistently exceeded 8,500 per month, higher than any period since CBP began publishing UC [UAC] statistics,” according to the report.
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