A special “hotline” set up by the Biden-Harris Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) – supposedly for the protection of migrant children – failed to respond to 65,000 calls, a counter-trafficking consultant told the House Homeland Security Committee last week.
Ali Hopper testified at the hearing titled “An Inside Job: How NGOs Facilitated the Biden Border Crisis.”
The president and founder of GUARD Against Trafficking, Hopper told members of Congress that the Biden administration’s hotline was advertised as a place “where people could report concerns about the unaccompanied child’s safety.”
“But what this [Trump] administration found was from August 2023 to January of 2025, 65,000 calls went unanswered,” she asserted. “Those calls spanned from, you know, complaints about stale bread all the way to being abused – to one case where a child’s call was reporting that grown men were coming into his room at night and they were touching him. Nothing happened with that call.”
“That call went unanswered until this administration took office, went through those 65,000 calls, made follow-ups, conducted a welfare check,” Hopper continued. “And, now, that child has been rescued and that sponsor has been arrested.”
In a press statement, the committee noted “how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) helped facilitate and benefited from the historic Biden-Harris border crisis, as well as how far-left NGOs are still working to help inadmissible aliens undermine federal immigration law under the Trump administration.”
Witnesses detailed during the hearing how NGOs “received more than $6 billion from the Biden-Harris administration, including through grants from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and others,” the committee reported.
“They also testified about how the Biden-Harris administration handed over unaccompanied alien children (UACs) to NGOs, primarily at the border, who then delivered them to poorly-vetted sponsors,” the statement continued. “The Biden-Harris administration then failed to ensure proper follow-up communications to check on the well-being of the children, leading to more than 300,000 children unaccounted for in the interior. Simultaneously, many of these NGOs and their executives enjoyed substantial revenue and salary increases thanks to the grants.”
In her testimony, Hopper said her research findings revealed “significant systemic failures and corruption at the highest levels.” In addition to neglect of the hotline system, researchers found:
- Unprecedented trafficking due to lax sponsor vetting – incarcerated cartel members explained “how weak sponsor verification incentivized trafficking by enabling cartels to control children’s placement by supplying children with exact sponsor information, allowing control over their destination.”
- Alarming conditions at the border – “routine kidnapping of children for trafficking into the U.S., made easier by open borders, inadequate border security and flawed NGO screening practices. Cartels infiltrated NGOS along smuggling routes.”
- Falsified records – HHS reports “approximately 70% of sponsor applications examined were found to be fraudulent, making child traceability and safety assurances nearly impossible.”
Hopper observed in her testimony the failure of the NGOs to protect children.
“[H]ere’s the hard truth,” she asserted. “[T]he United States government became the middleman in a humanitarian pipeline exploited by cartels and obscured by federal contracts. They awarded no-bid, billion-dollar contracts to NGOs without oversight, and allowed influx facilities, funded by taxpayers, to operate as transportation hubs.”
An irate Republican Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana asserted during the hearing that the “abhorrent industry of child trafficking” was allowed to “prosper from the open border policies of the Biden administration for four years.”
“[W]e’re coming after them,” he said, “and this executive branch is building criminal files. So, I hope they’re watching, and I hope they’re frightened, and I hope they’re getting their affairs in order, hiring their liberal attorneys to defend them, starting to shuffle their money around – we’ll find it.”
Higgins agreed the Biden HHS and its NGOs served as no less than a “pipeline” for child trafficking.
“Man! We fed a pipeline of tender-age children into sex trafficking and slave labor,” the congressman said.
In June, current HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. testified that “[h]undreds of thousands of migrant children have gone missing because the Biden Administration emphasized speed over security.”
“We won’t make that same mistake,” he said. “We’re demanding DNA testing, personal identification, background checks, and income verification for every sponsor to make sure these children are kept safe.”