“It’s appalling, and the press hasn’t spoken enough about it,” – Eric Hovde.
A top border expert says that the U.S. government is facilitating “taxpayer-funded trafficking” by sending unaccompanied migrant children to unvetted homes where they are sexually abused, and a growing number are ending up in Wisconsin.
Dr. Jarrod Sadulski, who has two decades of experience in federal law enforcement, told an audience in Pewaukee that the Biden/Harris administration is “sending children to unvetted sponsors. They are delivering children to people who are trafficking them. This is happening. And this is happening in Wisconsin. The cartels move these children.” The cartels also give the children new identities and tell them who to name as their sponsors, he said.
More than 300,000 unaccompanied minors are unaccounted for, he said. The government sent 774 such kids to Wisconsin homes this year through September 30, a number that rose from 98 in 2018, according to Sadulski, who added that the “screams of women and children” are heard at the border “every night.”
He spoke at a panel discussion called “Crisis to Security: Our Southern Border’s Humanitarian & Safety Concerns,” sponsored by AFP Wisconsin.
Speakers were Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who has worked through his charitable foundation to provide housing for abused kids and women in Africa and South America for years; Chris Clem, who is a retired Border Patrol Chief with 28 years of service mostly along the Southwest border; and Sadulski, who, according to AFP, “conducts in-country research in Central America, Mexico, and the Southwest Border to gain insight into trends in human trafficking.”
Clem said that the government focuses on “how quickly can you process.” He said the border bill that Kamala Harris touts was a “terrible bill” that would have allowed many inadmissible migrants into the country to work every day without properly securing the border.
Sadulski works in prisons in South America to gain the trust of traffickers and cartel members, who then outline for him how sex trafficking works. He’s learned that the women and girls are brought to houses on the border, where they are told how much money they will need to work off in the U.S.
Then, he said, they are transported to a home within the United States, including states like Wisconsin. “Some don’t survive it,” he said, adding that men are placed in dangerous fentanyl and other drug packaging roles.
According to Sadulski, the government facilitates cartel-driven trafficking by sending unaccompanied children to people they name in the U.S. without properly vetting those people, and he says some of those people are names supplied to kids and women by cartels. “Speed over accuracy,” is prioritized by the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration, he said, naming the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement.
That office says only 8,619 home studies were conducted in 2022, the last year provided. There were 118,938 referrals in 2023, according to the office’s statistics, and more than 128,000 in 2022. The data is in a section on unaccompanied minors.
“You don’t go through the border without the blessing of the cartel,” Sadulski said. He described one case where a mother was clutching a child and refused to let go; Sadulski learned the cartel “stole her other two children.”
Clem also lambasted the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris administration for its weak border policies. “Our system is so messed up,” he said, adding that 57 unaccompanied children tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border just the other day.
People from 177 different countries have “come in illegally” in the last few years, he said. “Transnational criminal organizations have their tentacles everywhere.” Clem said that “China practically owns South America and is making its way north.”
The solution is twofold, he said: Secure the border and harden the ports.
Hovde described how he started a foundation in roughly 1996 to conduct research into MS, which he has and then switched the focus a couple of years later to rescuing abandoned and trafficked children.
It’s “horrific,” he said of what he has learned. Hovde’s foundation opened homes in Africa and South America to help the children and women.
He said that most people have no idea “how big sex trafficking is” or the fact that Milwaukee is “one of the epicenters in this country for sex trafficking.” Hovde’s foundation helped develop a tool used by law enforcement to combat sex trafficking by flagging indications online that a person is underage.
Hovde said the Biden-Harris administration has lost about 300,000 kids “they can’t account for.”
A “huge percentage end up in the sex trade,” he said.
“It’s hell on earth.” Hovde said kids are drugged, beaten, and then stripped of everything by traffickers. He called it indentured servitude and “modern-day slavery.”
“It’s appalling, and the press hasn’t spoken enough about it,” said Hovde, who added that he was driven to help by his faith.