In light of Obama’s former ICE chief coming out and saying that the cages for migrant kids were Obama’s, not Trump’s, brainchild, let us travel back to 2016, when NY Mag reported that the Obama administration handed child migrants over to human traffickers!
Here’s an excerpt from that NY Mag article:
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,” according to a Senate report released on Thursday.
In the fall of 2013, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors traveled to the U.S. southern border, in flight from poverty and gang violence in Central America. 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. Local law enforcement uncovered the operation last year, prompting the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to open an inquiry into the federal government’s handling of migrants.
“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and the chairman of the subcommittee, told the New York Times. “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 story is so sick that you wish it was a lie.
However, sure enough, Snopes has fact-checked and reports it as being true.
Here's what Snopes had to say about the evidence behind NY Mag's claim:
In July 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted a ring of traffickers led by Aroldo Castillo-Serrano and accused them of smuggling children into the United States. They were also accused of lying to Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) by posing as relatives in order to gain custody of children in its care and use them for forced labor in Marion, a city north of Columbus. The federal indictment, filed in U.S. district court in Ohio accuses Castillo-Serrano and his conspirators of forcing the children to live in squalid trailers and work six or seven 12-hour days a week, using threats and physical violence as coercion.
According to the Justice Department, Castillo-Serrano pleaded guilty in August 2015 to counts related to trafficking. He was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution to the victims.
The case spurred a Senate subcommittee investigation led by Rob Portman (R-Ohio) which concluded the processes used by ORR to screen sponsors “are inadequate to protect the children in the agency’s care.” At the time, HHS lacked a system to screen potential sponsors for signs of trafficking, like accumulating multiple unrelated children. It did not physically assess homes children were being placed in and did not do adequate background checks on adults residing in those homes. The report found that in 2014, “HHS permitted a sponsor to block a child-welfare case worker from visiting with one of the victims, even after the case worker discovered the child was not living at the address on file with HHS.”
As a result of the investigation, HHS and the Department of Homeland Security entered into an agreement to hammer out a joint plan that would address the issues raised in the report. As of 26 April 2018, that still had not happened according to Portman, who released a statement blasting the agencies for their failure to take action. He wrote:
The agreement said the agencies would enter into a detailed “Joint Concept of Operations” that would spell out what the agencies would do to fix the problems. They gave themselves a deadline of February 2017. That was over a year ago.
It’s now April 2018. We still don’t have that Joint Concept of Operations — the JCO — and despite repeated questions from Sen. Carper and me, as well as our staffs, over the past year, we don’t have any answers about why that is.
In fact, in a recent meeting, a DHS official asked our investigators why we even cared about the JCO.
It's both crazy and sad that Dems are so fixated on their fantasy that Trump is a villain to recognize the corruption that comes from their own party members.
As this Twitter user pointed out to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has mouthed off about how upset she is that the border detention facilities are akin to "concentration camps":
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