Florida grand jury has found the Biden Administration’s immigration policies of open borders a disaster that has led to unaccompanied children (UAC) being abused and becoming victims of human trafficking and declared the policy is a danger to the welfare of the state.
The grand jury submitted its report to Judge Ellen S. Masters in Florida and recommended the court take action.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody released the Third Presentment of the Twenty-First Statewide Grand Jury Regarding Unaccompanied Alien Children.
The Florida preliminary grand jury report has concluded that more than 20,000 unaccompanied minors have gone missing and more than 250,000 unaccompanied minor children have crossed into U.S. since Biden was inaugurated president in January 2021 with “nearly a five-fold increase” of unaccompanied minors in 2022 alone. Approximately 72% of the minors are ages 15-17 and 16% were under the age of 13.
“This process exposes children to horrifying health conditions, constant criminal threat, labor and sex trafficking, robbery, rape, and other experiences…, notes the grand jury. “We will never be able to forget or un-see some of the heart-wrenching testimony, disturbing videos, wrenching testimony, for example regarding brutal and horrific murders committed against civilian tourists, law enforcement officers, and even sponsors of immigrants, by those who had no legal right to be in the country in the first place, and about the significant cost to our State due to the unlawful presence of such individuals and the resources which must be diverted to deal with them and infuriating abuse we have observed in the course of our five-month investigation.”
And, the grand jury notes that President Biden cannot claim he is unaware of the situation.
“In 2014, then-Vice President Biden warned that between 75 and 80 percent of unaccompanied alien children are brought into the United States by smugglers, many of whom “routinely engage in physical and sexual abuse, and extortion,” reminds the jurors.
“We understand that one of the typical defenses of this process is that only a small number of children fall prey to any of these misfortunes. To that we say two things: (1) this is a false trope, presented either by those who are utterly ignorant of reality or those who would see the current conditions continue- the number and percentage of UAC experiencing problematic scenarios is n[o]t small by any stretch; and (2) even one such easily preventable case is unacceptable,” further states the report.
The surprise is that it has taken this long for any U.S. authority to finally realize the magnitude of what “open borders” is and what the massive migration into the U.S. under Joe Biden is causing – a massive wave of risk to children and his administration has intentionally refused to come clean on the facts.
Horrible atrocities have been inflicted on immigrant children in Florida and elsewhere who are under the authority of the Biden administration and nonprofit organizations receiving taxpayer money.
Not only have these children been traumatized and lost into the abdominal US federal government system, but there have been no background checks on the minors’ sponsors.
In June 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis filed a petition with the Florida Supreme Court to impanel a statewide grand jury to identify and investigate persons and international human-smuggling networks that move illegal immigrants, particularly children, across the Southwest Border into Florida and other states. The court approved the petition.
“I want to thank Gov. DeSantis for standing up for children and calling for an investigation into the Biden administration’s abject failure to protect unaccompanied minors in dangerous situations. As a mother, I am outraged at how the Biden administration and others in authority have encouraged this nightmare through policy and are neglecting hundreds of thousands of children, subjecting them to abuse and sexual assault even after they cross the border. The federal government is knowingly aiding and abetting trafficking organizations and allowing horrific harm to happen to these children. I am calling upon Congress to investigate and consider federal law to stop these misguided programs,” stated Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody stated.
Jurors spent months investigating the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and the organizations it contracts with to find sponsors for unaccompanied minors.
According to the grand jury report, “ORR is facilitating the forced migration, sale, and abuse of foreign children…This process exposes children to horrifying health conditions, constant criminal threat, labor and sex trafficking, robbery, rape and other experiences not done justice by mere words.”
When the foreign unaccompanied chilldren arrive in the US, they are immediately shipped to a federal facility. Then there is “incessant pressure on case managers to process UAC speedily with minimal, if any, scrutiny of sponsors or questionable documents, addresses, or stories told to them,” the grand jury found.
Most NGOs do not even have trauma-trained experts on staff.
The short list of findings include, but are not limited to:
- · During a 10-month period in 2021, ORR lost contact with nearly 20,000 UAC;
- · A report showed HHS and the U.S. Department of Justice received thousands of allegations of sexual abuse;
- · Testimony of UAC revealed that a minor was ‘pimped out’ by their ‘aunt’ (whom they did not know prior to arriving in the U.S.), some UAC ran away from sponsors for being sold for sex, and ORR placed a teenage girl in the house of unknown men with no private bedroom;
- · ORR discouraged close checking of addresses of sponsors and some sponsors utilized addresses in Jacksonville including a strip club, empty lots surrounded by stacked shipping containers or open fields;
- · During the Biden administration, case managers are only performing home studies in approximately 4.5% placements and discretionary home studies in less than one percent of cases.
- · One case manager reported having to release a teenage girl to a male sponsor with multiple other unknown males living in the same residence—all unidentified. The presentment stated this is not an isolated incident.
- · Criminal history, lack of citizen status and even total refusal to submit to a background check does not disqualify sponsors from receiving a UAC. One sponsor was given custody despite having been to Florida prison before for battery on a child;
- · A disturbing pattern emerged with sponsors applying to receive multiple UAC. One address in Texas showed 44 children sent to a single residence. One contractor testified that it placed 598 UAC with only 132 sponsors or each sponsor receiving 4.5 UAC;
- · In Florida, neither U.S. Department of Homeland Security or HHS actively coordinates or consults with the state on the UAC resettled in Florida. The state doesn’t receive meaningful notice when UAC are transported here. Florida receives no information on backgrounds, criminal history or immigration status of the UAC brought here, nor does the state have any assurance the UAC are in-fact minors; and
- · During a six-month period in 2021, more than 70 airplanes landed at Jacksonville International Airport, arriving in the middle of the night at the commercial terminal with UAC. One of these UAC was actually 24 years old and ended up brutally killing his sponsor. ORR now conceals small groups of UAC on regular commercial flights.
The scathing report found that ORR has intentionally denied access to information and internally silenced those who are speaking up about the situation.
“This obfuscation extends beyond just ORR in the immigration context…We also learned that ORR actively discouraged its employees, including case managers and those tasked with conducting sponsor verifications, UAC interviews and post release followup, and fingerprint and background checks, from questioning the process even internally; some were transferred, some terminated, some threatened, and some smeared simply for not processing the UAC as quickly as possible. One was fired for reporting a case of suspected human trafficking (of over 100 UAC shipped off to a single house in Texas) to a government hotline because her ORR superiors refused to investigate the matter. One facility went so far as to set up a “reporting station” for employees to bring their concerns to; it was purported to be staffed with FBI agents, but was later learned to have simply other ORR employees—the agency was reporting itself, to itself. In one memorable instance, a federal employee was told by an ORR attorney to stop asking questions about potentially unsafe sponsors because doing so caused delay, and “[W]e only get sued for keeping them too long. We don’t get sued by traffickers. Are we clear?” reads the report.
“Two Senators and thirteen U.S. Representatives from Florida wrote letters to DHS demanding to know what was going on when airplanes full of children were landing in Jacksonville in the middle of the night; they got no cooperation,” wrote the grand jurors.
The grand jury reviewed financial records.
“The testimony we have received corroborates this clear pattern; people here send funds to facilitate the migration of others to the border, and in so doing some of them are (wittingly or otherwise) funding trafficking operations, gangs, cartels, and other unsavory characters. Some of the people sending these funds are not citizens, but themselves are recent arrivals or even UAC who have aged out of ORR custody,” reads the report.
It is clear to the jury that this model has turned into a cash cow.
“In fiscal year 2021, $2.14 billion was transferred to the unaccompanied minor program within HHS,” according to the agency’s website.
“ORR has a rather spotty record when it comes to vetting sponsors, and has intentionally gutted many of the protections for minors that were in place regarding the identities and backgrounds of the adults to whom they were given. We believe this is why the agency does all it can to keep the public from knowing what is going on,” concluded the report.
The report cited labor trafficking examples across the country.
As a result of their findings, the grand jury has asked the presiding judge to enforce the law in Florida.
“Willful Blindness.” In some cases, the issue to be determined is whether the defendant had knowledge of a certain fact. Florida law recognizes a concept known as willful blindness, which is sometimes referred to as “deliberate avoidance of positive knowledge.” Willful blindness occurs when a person has his or her suspicion aroused about a particular fact, realized its probability, but deliberately refrained from obtaining confirmation because he or she wanted to remain in ignorance. A person who engages in willful blindness is deemed to have knowledge of that fact,” concluded the jury.
The statewide grand jury remains in session.