>>112996The whistleblower, Tara Lee Rodas, volunteered to assist the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] with the processing of unaccompanied migrant children and was deployed to the Emergency Intake Site in Pomona, California.
Rodas sat down with Project Veritas founder, James O’Keefe, and described how precarious she believes the current child sponsorship program is for these minors.
“The tax dollars of people who are listening are paying to put children in the hands of criminals,” Rodas told O’Keefe.
“Our sponsors typically are not citizens. They’re not permanent residents. They don’t have a legal presence,” she said.
“The sponsor can hold up an ‘Order of Deportation’ to a [migrant] child and say, ‘This is your Order of Deportation. If you do not do what I say, when I say, I’m going to call ICE on you myself.’ We are paying to put children in the hands of criminals.”
The whistleblower affirmed that she has questioned federal government bureaucrats about the potential wrongdoing happening within their institutions, and the response has usually been dismissive of her concerns. She believes she has suffered retaliation at work for raising these issues.
“I said [to the command center executives], ‘We’re getting ready to send another child [to Austin, Texas],’ and they said, ‘Tara, I think you need to understand that we only get sued if we keep kids in care too long. We don’t get sued by traffickers. Are you clear? We don’t get sued by traffickers.’ So, that was the answer of the United States federal government. HHS did not want this information to get out,” Rodas said.
“They knew I had made protected disclosures and they retaliated against me as a whistleblower and had me kicked off the site so I could no longer research the cases,” she said.
As a result of Rodas’ stepping forward, Project Veritas journalists visited several physical addresses provided by the whistleblower in order to interview individuals and investigate whether trafficking was taking place.
A Veritas journalist spoke to a migrant female minor on one of these occasions, who revealed that she had been put through sexual abuse by her sponsor.
“An aunt [sponsored me], but she kicked me out of her house. She was pimping me and I didn’t like that. She would pimp me to men,” the child said.