Tara Rodas worked in the USA in 2021 in a management position at a reception center for unaccompanied children.
She responded to a call from the Biden administration to assist with the crisis of underage refugees who were
crossing the southern border of the US en masse at the time.
She wanted to help reunite the children with their families.
However, she soon realized that something was wrong with the children.
They suffered from panic attacks, screamed for their parents and said that they had been lured to the United States by smugglers.
Rodas investigated and came across a huge child trafficking network.
This is how she became a whistleblower who is now fighting to expose these networks and bring them to justice.
In a moving interview with Chris Farrell, she talks about her discoveries.
She uncovers how these children are passed on to criminals who then force them into forced labor or prostitution.
She tells of doctors who tearfully describe how very young children are scarred by massive sexual abuse and already
suffer from sexually transmitted diseases at primary school age.
She also describes how the state supports this child trafficking with billions of euros, that 325,000 of these
children are now considered missing and that the Ministry of Health is blocking the urgently needed clarification.
See excerpts from the video with Tara Rodas below.
The interview was conducted in October 2024, i.e. before the last US election.
At the end of the program, we therefore look at the developments in this matter under the current US administration.
[Interviewer: I'm Chris Farrell, and this is "On Watch".
Welcome to "On Watch," Judicial Watch's podcast where we look behind the headlines to bring you stories that the
mainstream media really doesn't want you to know about.
We try to reconstruct the forgotten and explain the incomprehensible.
Today we have all three of these elements for you.
Once again, we salute a very courageous woman, a whistleblower, who has discovered and exposed an incredible human trafficking,
sex trafficking and child abuse crisis in our country.
We welcome Tara Rodas. Welcome, Tara!
Chris, thank you so much for having me on your show today.
I am very grateful to you and Judicial Watch for not ceasing to shed light on what we know is
state-sponsored and taxpayer-funded child trafficking.
Exactly. And loyal viewers and listeners of our podcast will certainly remember.
And I know you remember, because our first interview in July 2023, just over a year
ago, about 14 months ago, had a huge audience.
We hosted Tara to talk about her experiences at a reception and processing center for unaccompanied children.
The story is unbelievable. I think we talked for over an hour.
My colleagues here will link the former episode to the current one so you can watch both if you haven't seen them yet.
But just as a starting point, as a common reference point, Tara, tell us how you found out about this egregious, brutal,
state-sponsored child trafficking, how you became aware of it.
Right, Chris, your viewers may remember, at the beginning of 2021, the Biden-Harris
administration made a call to all federal employees.
They said if you're a federal employee, you should leave your local agency to help with the crisis on the southern border.
And it was specifically the crisis of these unaccompanied children.
Children who came to our borders without a family, without a parent.
And then the aim was to bring these children together with sponsors from the USA.
And I thought it was about a family reunification program.
I thought I would be coloring and doing puzzles with kids while they waited to be reunited with their parents here in the US.
But that wasn't the point. Their best intentions had absolutely nothing to do with what was actually going on.
Right. And what I and many other federal officials who were engaged in this mission didn't know....
No one knew that children had been abducted through this program and exploited for more than a decade.
That is absolutely shocking.
So I didn't know anything about it when I said, "Hey, here I am, send me. I want to help these kids."
My husband comes from El Salvador. I speak Spanish.
And I thought it was going to be the humanitarian mission of my life. It's going to be fantastic.
Right.
Only to be told that the children did not know where they were to be taken.
And that was shocking.
And when we talk about children, you often think: Oh, that's a 14-year-old, well, actually still a child,
but a 16- or 17-year-old is of course a much more mature person than a 10-year-old.
But you're not just talking about young people like these, you're talking about young children.
Right.
I mean, literally babies that were sent across the border to the United States.
Yes. Infants and toddlers. That's unimaginable.
But Carlos Arellano, the whistleblower from MVM (US security company) transported a three-month-old baby.
So, people need to understand that.
MVM is a security company that was hired to transport these children - not all of them, of course, but they played a role.
They had a contract with the US government to transport people.
Yes. And we're talking millions and millions of dollars for the transportation of these children.
That is absolutely incredible. And they are only three months old.
And, Chris, I would argue that some of the kids I saw with my own eyes were teenagers, including teenage boys.
But they come from indigenous population groups in Guatemala, speak Mayan dialects and no Spanish.
Correct
You are absolutely defenceless.
Some of these children have never attended school.
They can't read. They can't write.
And then they are here and have to do forced labor.
The New York Times reported on this.
It is shocking that no one has done anything to save these children to this day.
Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting part of the story, that you obviously had your own personal
experience at the processing center for these kids.
The bigger story was even reported on.
I think it was a three-part New York Times series that reported on child labor in meatpacking plants and other places.
Yes.
And you'd think that would register somewhere on the left around Biden and Harris under the rubric of, "Oh my God, even our own
propaganda tool, the New York Times, says we caused a crisis."
But somehow it was reported on. I think you have to give them credit for reporting on it.
It was horrible. But there seemed to be no effect or reaction, nothing.
No, there was no impact at all. No action was taken to save these children.
And I think that's one of the scariest things.
When we started reporting on cases of human trafficking in 2021, in June 2021, we thought that perhaps 50 children were affected.
But by the time we were finished, we had processed more than 8,300 cases in less than six months through
the Pomona Fairplex reception center where I worked.
We thought: 'Oh my God, this affects thousands of children: Because we saw cases from very different institutions.
But then, in 2023, Hannah Dreier revealed in the New York Times that 85,000 children had disappeared, gone missing.
And the last time we talked about it, that was roughly the figure we used to quantify the crisis.
But in reality, it's much worse than that. There are four times as many.
I consider the figure that is now being used to be reliable and well documented, although it is still an estimate.
The figure now stands at 325,000 children who have disappeared.
They are missing. No one knows how they are or where they are.
They simply disappeared. They were abducted and have disappeared.
Yes. And the scary thing is that no one did anything to save these children.
And people need to understand that it is a political issue.
We could launch the largest child rescue operation ever attempted in human history if the HHS would release the data.
Chris, I think that's something that most people just don't realize.
People think: "Oh my God! The kids are gone! What can I do?"
And they believe that they can do nothing or that nothing can be done.
In fact, the federal government not only has the children's data, but also the data of the foster parents with whom the
children were placed, as well as detailed information about these foster parents, such as their last known address.
But they will not take action against them and they will not hand over the data, not even with a subpoena will the Department
of Health pass this information on to law enforcement.
And because this government is withholding this data and hiding it from law enforcement, no
one knows where more than 320,000 children are.
And that is unacceptable.
In my opinion, without advocating for any particular outcome or position, this is incredibly
important information for educating the public.
National elections are coming up in the next few days and people will be making decisions
and filling out a ballot or pulling a lever.
You need to make an informed decision.
And so our border commissioner Kamala Harris, in my opinion, presided over the largest human trafficking and
sex trafficking operation in the history of the world.
And more specifically, this is about child trafficking, which is what we are both talking about.
They have first-hand knowledge and experience in this area.
You have observed it.
I know that you are speaking here today as a private individual, but fortunately you come
from the professional world of inspectors general.
Therefore, I will use a colloquial or slang expression.
They are a little 'smarter' than the average person.
You know what you are looking at when you are confronted with such fraud, scams and manipulation practices.
They have a flair for recognizing this.
And so you see what's going on in this facility; in Pomona, and you say, "Hey, wait a minute. What are you guys doing?"
I mean, tell our viewers and listeners a little bit about it; about your knee-jerk reaction:
"What the hell is going on here? What are you doing?"
Right. Well, it was very easy to see that kids who were having panic attacks had to be put on suicide
watch, screaming for their parents and telling us stories about how they had been lured here.
It didn't take long for us to realize that we had a serious problem.
These are children. I mean, that's valuable cargo.
We must ensure that these children are placed in safe homes.
That was the moment when I realized that this was a crisis with these children.
I realized that something couldn't be right.
And I think it's important for people to understand that HHS is not a law enforcement agency.
It simply does not have the knowledge, skills, competencies or expertise to tackle human trafficking rings.
Right.
They didn't. And unfortunately, they are currently responsible for the release because they failed to
.... These are also political decisions that have been made.
Unfortunately, it was a major miscalculation on the part of the political decision-makers to reduce the
controls and security checks for these supposed sponsors.
And we know that some of these sponsors are members of transnational criminal organizations.
HHS does not have the resources necessary to crack down on gangs and high-level criminals.
Unfortunately, the failed policy of open borders has led to high-level criminals, murderers and members of
transnational criminal organizations crossing our borders.
They are now also the sponsors and caregivers of vulnerable children.
And it is ... it is unimaginable!
But HHS is not a law enforcement agency.
And that's why they simply don't know.
You have raised an important point, and I would like to provide some background information.
Some of our viewers and listeners may not be thinking about border protection right now.
You're thinking of ICE .
You are thinking of law enforcement agencies that deal with illegal immigration.
Crucial to this whole discussion, however, is that unaccompanied children are not a matter for the Border Patrol or ICE.
This falls under the 'Ministry of Health and Welfare'; the Office of Refugee Resettlement - the ORR .
And this is the actual government agency responsible for the care, provision and accommodation of the children.
They are therefore healthcare administrators who manage this process.
As you mentioned, they are not law enforcement officers.
They don't know how to check people or carry out checks.
Basically, they only manage bodies.
And they are dealing with a very sophisticated criminal organization.
Yes.
And they're after a commodity, and that commodity is these little children.
And they know how to exploit these children, manipulate them, turn them into money and rake them in for God knows what purposes.
Exactly. And that's what I think the average viewer and most people just don't understand: that there are
evil people in the world who see children as commodities.
Right.
And they use them for human trafficking for labor exploitation or sex trafficking and even worse.
Because drugs are sold once; as a one-time consumption for the person selling the drugs.
Yes, they get money for it, but they only sell it once.
If you have a child, you can use it every day.
Multiple times. Several times a day, and that is a continuous source of income!
And that is what people need to understand.
That there are people who think this way and that we need to take action at a political level to protect children!
A war is currently being waged against children.
And people need to wake up and realize that we can solve this problem, but not with the current situation as it is.
This program needs to be fundamentally redesigned.
And law enforcement needs to be brought back into the equation.
This requires a strong executive.
But she can start saving children today.
It could start prosecuting these criminal elements, the human traffickers, today.
It could start today to eliminate the infrastructure of human trafficking.
This could still happen today if the right people were in office.
Absolutely!
And in some cases, it was pretty obvious that the bad guys who were abducting these kids were using the same address for
multiple sponsors and multiple kids that they were picking up.
I mean, they didn't even bother to pretend to have false addresses.
Some of these people were very sloppy and lazy, so you'd have a residence or an apartment with several "sponsors" and maybe
half a dozen or a dozen children registered at one address.
So you don't need a super analytical process to figure out that the system has been exploited by these bad guys.
Yes. Anyone who knows a little bit about data analysis could see that it doesn't make sense for a sponsor to give
two different addresses or for three sponsors to live in one apartment and sponsor multiple children.
This is not witchcraft.
Right.
And the fact that this program has existed in its current form for so long is once again proof that those
responsible are obviously unable to identify human trafficking networks and protect children from traffickers.
So a radical change must take place to save these children!
Was it routine for these children to be photographed and fingerprinted?
Fingerprints? No. We took photos of the children.
This is another important piece of information to know. The HHS has a photo of the child.
The HHS has information. They just don't pass it on.
Yes. So these are serious indications.
These are usable traces.
Yes.
I mean, if that had happened three years ago, God knows where they are.
But there is basic investigative work, the police could find addresses and people and look for the children.
You have a photo. And now it's no longer a 12-year-old girl, maybe she's 14 now, but you still have a photo of her and
a general description and maybe even an identity statement.
So there is quite a bit of police investigation that could be done in the preliminary phase
to find out who could be rescued immediately.
Absolutely!
And also who the criminals are that you have to pursue, right?
Exactly .
Tara Rodas: Because if obviously a hundred children are delivered to one address, then of course there is a pool of
information that has to be passed on directly to the law enforcement authorities so that they can investigate.
But they won't release the data, Chris.
That is unbelievable.
Senator Grassley has filed a criminal complaint.
Senator Grassley has been campaigning for these unaccompanied children for years.
He held hearings in the Senate in July.
He actually filed criminal complaints with the FBI and the DHS , but the HHS would not release the data, not even with subpoenas.
They did not respond.
In most cases, this only resulted in the Ministry's investigations being able to locate less than 4% of their targets.
So less than 4% of the children they were looking for and less than 4% of the traffickers because HHS is
not cooperative and won't provide them with the data.
That's unimaginable.
What does the HHS say? How do they justify this?
Are they invoking data protection regulations or what, this ridiculous non-cooperation?
What...? Yes. I mean... They usually give some flimsy excuse, as ridiculous as it may be.
But at least they act as if they abide by the law or protect young people and privacy.
Is that their excuse?
Yes, they say it's the sponsor's privacy, and that's more important to them than anything else.
And that again is absolutely wrong thinking.
Yes. Yes.
Sponsors never have to report to the ORR.
So we hand over a child to a person who will never have to take a call from the federal government again.
That makes no sense at all.
A kid shows up at the border, and he has a phone number and the name of a person here in the United States with him.
How did it get the data?
Well, the children tell us that they got it on the way.
Yes, and they then pass it on to our excellent border police, who act as the US point of contact.
Right.
This U.S. point of contact must then transfer the child to HHS within 72 hours.
Our target was to hand the child over to the US contact point within 10 to 14 days.
These were our so-called "sponsors".
I don't think people realize that children are turned over to people here in the United States within two weeks
who never have to take another call from the government.
We hand over custody. That's it.
Bye bye! Good luck with that. It's incredible!
We would never treat American children like this.
And I don't know why we treat migrant children like this.
: Yes. I'm going to say something that might sound flippant, but I don't mean it that
way, I want to express something very specific.
There are places in this country where you can't adopt a dog without a thorough background check and follow up.
And I mean that literally, I know that first-hand.
You go to a dog adoption event, have to fill out forms, show ID, they check you out and question you.
You get the dog and then there is a home visit.
It literally happens like this.
We have a greater awareness and concern and a mechanism to double check a dog's health and well-being.
And I am a dog lover.
So I understand that and I'm not complaining about it.
For me personally, this unequal treatment is so... it's so inconsiderate and crazy on the part of HHS.
I mean, there is no excuse, no explanation for it.
: Yeah, there's no explanation except that it's a multi-billion dollar a year business.
Let's stick with that.
I would like us to talk about the money.
This is a money business.
You see, either way, again in very simplistic terms, they are selling children, right?
It is a commodity, money changes hands, and there are ... they are the commodity, the contraband that is being transported.
Who earns from it? Who?
Many contractors and NGOs make millions and millions of dollars a year.
: So, I mean... let's go through the mechanisms a little bit here, just to give people an idea of how this works:
If they cross the border, they are apprehended.
But who picks them up?
Sometimes it's the border police, but sometimes the border police just collect the people and send a bus or a minibus.
And guess what! This bus or minivan belongs to a bus or transportation company.
They don't do this out of the goodness of their hearts.
They were given the government order to run buses between point A and B or between reception center A and processing center C.
But it is a bus service.
And they drive... I don't know, 10 to 20 buses a day.
More than that.
Yes, I just mean 10 to 20 over a certain stretch of road, right?
These are huge transportation orders: Buses, minibuses, etc. and then there are the flight costs.
And then there are these NGOs, which is just a general term for non-governmental organizations, but honestly,
and I'm sorry to admit this: very often these are church organizations that have found a way...
I mean, they probably had good intentions to begin with, they wanted to help people, God bless them, that's great.
But then it became a lucrative business for them.
And there are both secular and church-based NGOs.
Some of them started out as philanthropists who wanted to help people and some of them are honestly just in it for the money.
But here, too, they are paid, almost per head, for handling and processing fees for these
people - and that's exactly how you earn money.
The expenses there are enormous, we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yes! Hundreds of millions, monthly.
What I think some people just can't grasp is that the contract I had for the website I
worked at was over a hundred million a month.
No one thinks, "Wow. I'm just going to disclose that my agency or contractor is getting all this money and trafficking children."
Correct....
Excuse me!
Never mind!
So this is a huge business.
Then there's.... I mean, these are the outstanding government contract expenses and costs.
And the leftists would scream: "What are you going to do, just let them die in the desert?"
I think that's kind of a bogus argument - nobody would be in favor of that.
But there is also another side, namely illegal criminal money transactions in secret.
And that's really where the government loses control.
Right? Once she hands these kids over to who knows who, it's about sex trafficking, it's about child labor, it's about any
number of deranged, bizarre, criminal and perverted things that could be done to abuse, manipulate and exploit young people....
And the whole dark side of the business, the secret criminal activity. God knows how much money is involved. Nobody knows.
Yes, yes. And Chris, we separate the children from their families and their home country.
Right.
That's the thing that people just don't understand.
Originally, the program - I mean, the commander's intention - that's what we're talking about.
What is the ultimate purpose of this program?
I thought it was family reunification, and the people who originally thought of this
program said, "Well, this is family reunification.
However, this is not currently the case.
Hannah Dreier of the New York Times used her data - after analyzing the data - to reveal that in some zip
codes, less than 10% of children are visiting their parents.
This is not a "family reunion".
This is a large-scale criminal operation!
Children are put into sweatshops.
Children are given into sex slavery. They said so themselves.
Children three years later, because Anthony Rubin of Muckraker actually tracked down children who three
years later said, "Look, I'm still in debt bondage.
I still owe money to the person ... who paid for my smuggling here....
Three years later, these children still owe money.
It's unbelievable what's happening here!
Yeah. And Chris, I think that's what people just don't understand or maybe can never imagine what a sick person does to a child.
Right.
And that, I think, is one of the most horrible things I've ever seen.
That I had to look into this darkness and think: Oh my God, there are people who do this.
But there are also doctors and nurses with whom I have spoken personally.
I mean, they're... you know, in tears they said, "Tara, there was a seven-year-old little girl who had all these STDs."
Right.
I mean, people don't understand what bad people do to children.
And we handed them over to criminals.
Right.
I would encourage people to look at the documents that Senator Grassley released on July 11 .
You can look at his press release and learn that this administration has placed
children in the care of MS-13 people . Okay?
They are evil criminals. Why should we give them children?
They are known members of transnational criminal organizations.
That is, that is beyond imagination.
And honestly, Chris, if I hadn't seen this with my own eyes, I wouldn't be able to believe that the federal
government has become a white glove delivery service.
I mean, she's literally the middleman for a child trafficking organization.
Yes, they carry it out.
I mean, it's not even that they are somehow involved in it. They're carrying it out.
They implement the plan to abduct and abuse these children. It is their game.
Yes.
It's her operation.
Yes. And separating them from their families at home by luring them, that's human trafficking.
It is violent fraud or coercion.
Right.
So, the children and the parents, because the children told us that.
Right.
You know, everyone can have their arguments.
We looked, and I looked into the eyes of frightened children.
I know this because the children have told me and others.
And there are reports with the children's statements. That cannot be denied.
The children said: "You know, back home in Guatemala I only earned 2 dollars and 50 cents a day.
But the human trafficker here in Texas told me if I leave home, I can come here to the U.S. and make 6 dollars an hour."
The child and the parents believe that the child will become as rich as Elon Musk.
Right.
From 2 dollars and 50 cents a day to 6 dollars an hour.
And it is simply inconceivable that we are attracting vulnerable groups.
And there are indigenous children from Guatemala who don't even speak Spanish.
Exactly.
So we really need to think about what's going on here.
New guidelines need to be introduced.
People with experience in law enforcement must be able to protect the children.
And the Ministry of Health must release the data so that the children can be found and the criminals prosecuted.
We cannot continue to allow this to happen here in the United States to vulnerable children, young children.
That is truly unimaginable.
Yes! We need to prosecute the animals that run the networks that do this.
In my opinion, we should prosecute the government officials who made these decisions and caused this to happen.
They are in a category of their own. But they too must be held accountable.
Of course, the criminal masterminds who do this must be prosecuted.
And then we have to save these poor children.
The interview with Tara Rodas was conducted in October 2024, before the re-election of Donald Trump as US President.
After the election, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services under Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., publicly stated in a
cabinet meeting that the Department of Health and Human Services under Biden had made itself
"complicit in child trafficking for sex and slavery".
So has the tide turned for the better under Trump?
Investigative journalist Ryan Matta is skeptical here.
He has been trying for years to find out where the missing children are and has already
made several documentaries on the subject.
In an interview in May 2025, he expressed his frustration that the Trump administration had not yet brought back
the 300,000 children in question after 100 days in office.
He points out that the government has the cell phone numbers and addresses of the sponsors to whom the children
were referred and that they could easily be tracked down.
He also criticized the government's handling of the Southwest Key programs.
Southwest Key Programs is a large U.S.-based organization that operates in several states.
It offers a wide range of services, including refugee accommodation for unaccompanied immigrant minors.
Ryan Matta is convinced that the 30-40 facilities in this program represent the largest of the child trafficking rings.
They did it so violently that even Biden's Minister of Justice, Merrick Garland, filed a lawsuit against these
facilities because children were allegedly raped there.
However, Trump's Attorney General Pam Bondi decided relatively quickly after taking office that the lawsuit should be dropped.
This is quite astonishing when you set out to drain the swamp.
In view of Health Minister Kennedy's statement that his ministry was an accomplice to this child sex
trafficking under the previous government, one wonders where the legal investigation is going.
If Tara Rodas says that Kamala Harris presided over the largest human and sex trafficking operation, then she
and those responsible in the Ministry of Health should be investigated as soon as possible.
However, this is not yet in sight.
Trump had already announced during the election campaign before his first presidency that he would put Hillary Clinton in prison.
However, no investigations were even initiated after the election.
In the Epstein scandal, too, the Trump administration has so far failed to deliver the promised investigation and disclosure.
This is not surprising when you consider that many victims and witnesses report that Epstein was not an individual
perpetrator, but that large sections of the political and social establishment were involved in the scandal.
The question therefore also arises as to whether, in the case of child trafficking at the US border, only the smaller criminals
are being dealt with in a media-effective manner, while the big fish, the networks, the NGOs and those involved in
government and ministries are once again left unchallenged?
As long as these people are not put behind bars, it must be assumed that the successes presented are
merely pulling the wool over the eyes of the population.