[Make sure to read Joseph Klein’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

On December 29^th, President Joe Biden proclaimed January 2024 as National Human Trafficking Prevention Month. “There is no greater sin than the abuse of power, and human trafficking is among the worst abuses that exist,” the president declared.

The cruel irony is that President Biden regularly abuses his presidential powers, especially by blatantly refusing to enforce America’s immigration laws. President Biden’s open border policies have opened the door for the Mexican cartels’ human smugglers to lure migrants to make the dangerous trek to the U.S.-Mexico border with promises of easy entry into the United States. The smugglers have taken over effective control of the border thanks to Biden. They make obscene profits from human trafficking on the backs of desperate immigrants whom the smugglers enable to cross the border into the U.S. illegally.

Since President Biden took office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has logged nearly eight million encounters with illegal immigrants, with an all-time monthly record of 302,000 such encounters at the southern border in December 2023 alone.

Most of the illegal immigrants claiming asylum are processed and released into the interior of the country where they can reside for years until their asylum claims are adjudicated.

The Biden administration believes that turning away unaccompanied migrant children is particularly inhumane. But the administration has lost track of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who have been allowed to remain in the country. Some of these children have been forced into indentured servitude to pay back the smugglers who got them into the country in the first place.

President Biden has turned a blind eye to the human trafficking of migrant children that he made possible.

The Unaccompanied Children Program is managed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is ORR’s job to temporarily care for the unaccompanied children until they can find suitable sponsors to take in the children. They have failed miserably on President Biden’s watch.

In early 2023, the New York Times reported its findings from an investigation of working conditions for unaccompanied migrant children. These children, “who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country,” the New York Times reported. “This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century…. it has exploded since 2021, while the systems meant to protect children have broken down.”

This inhumane situation is the result of the Biden administration’s reckless immigration policies, including bringing back catch-and-release and ending the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy. In response to more and more unaccompanied children arriving in the United States illegally – 130,000 in 2022 alone – “the Biden White House has ramped up demands on staffers to move the children quickly out of shelters and release them to adults,” the New York Times reported. “Caseworkers say they rush through vetting sponsors.”

Not surprisingly, the children, whose well-being and safety the Biden administration claims it wants to protect, end up in dangerous hands.

A whistleblower at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provided sobering testimony to a congressional hearing last year, recounting how some unaccompanied children are working overnight shifts at slaughterhouses, factories, and restaurants while others are being sold for sex:

“I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes. Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with being recruited in their home country, smuggled to the U.S. border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to a sponsor – some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations. Some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income – this is why we are witnessing an explosion of labor trafficking.”

“Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the U.S. Government has become the middleman in a large scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children.”

In addition to creating a national security crisis by allowing waves of suspected terrorists and violent criminals to enter the country illegally, which gravely endangers Americans’ lives, the Biden administration has created a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions.

President Biden’s shameless proclamation of January as National Human Trafficking Prevention Month shows an astounding lack of self-awareness. The president should use this January instead to make a New Years resolution to end his open border policies that have enabled the Mexican cartel smugglers and phony “sponsors” in the U.S. to exploit unaccompanied migrant children. He should agree to the Republicans’ reasonable demands for meaningful changes to immigration policies, starting with closing the huge loopholes in America’s current asylum laws and restoring the Remain in Mexico program.