Whistleblower Deborah White was a perfect candidate when the government in 2021 made an emergency appeal for federal agencies to provide temporary help to process thousands of migrant children who began crossing the southern border without parents at the beginning of the Biden administration’s border crisis.
As career worker at the General Services Administration, White had experience in managing large federal projects and was a native Spanish speaker who could talk directly with children coming from Latin American countries. So she was quickly lent in May 2021 from GSA to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency responsible for finding safe homes for the children known as “unaccompanied minors” in federal parlance.
When she got to Pomona, Calif., to help process children and begin to do wellness checks, however, she became horrified by what she witnessed.
Children related to her how they were raped or forced into labor while in the custody of drug cartels that transported them from their parents’ homes to the U.S. in hopes of taking advantage of Biden’s new immigration policies.
And the federal effort to find them safe shelter once in America was rushed like an assembly line, raising the risk that children got placed in unsafe shelters or with sponsors who weren’t properly vetted, she says.
“The mantra was speed over safety,” White told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Tuesday, the same day she gave her account to three Republican senators who held a roundtable discussion.
Hellbound and Down 