CV NEWS FEED // Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused the Biden-era HHS this week of becoming “a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and slavery,” citing the agency’s failure to protect hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children.
“We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking. During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that,” Kennedy said during a Wednesday cabinet meeting. “We’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”
“We have ended funding for gender mutilation surgeries and other kinds of gender dysphoria practices. And thanks to Elon, we have saved $67 billion at our agency without compromising any of our critical programs.”
Kennedy’s remarks come amid renewed scrutiny of HHS’s failures under former President Joe Biden after reports revealed that over 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children were released, many to unvetted or unsafe sponsors.
A 2023 New York Times report found that HHS lost immediate contact with over 85,000 minors—about one-third of those placed with sponsors between 2021 and 2022. Internal whistleblowers said staff were pressured to move children quickly, often skipping vital safety checks.
Last November, House Republicans grilled then-HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, pointing to a series of shocking placement failures. As CatholicVote previously reported, children were housed with gang members, sex offenders, or unrelated adults who falsely claimed familial ties.
Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-WI, cited a 2023 Florida grand jury report, which confirmed that migrant children “were pimped out” by unrelated adults posing as family members.
In one case, a teenage girl was found living with multiple unknown men, without a private room. In another, sponsors used a Jacksonville strip club as a child’s listed residence.
Human trafficking expert Alicia Hopper described systemic loopholes that allowed abused children to be returned to their traffickers.
“A young girl who arrived at the border in the custody of individuals claiming to be her family was bruised, disoriented and in pain,” she testified last November. “Medical examinations revealed that she had been raped, yet she was sent back to her abusers because no verification was done to confirm her guardianship.”
Kennedy also pointed to a sharp policy reversal under President Donald Trump on taxpayer-funded transgender procedures.
Following Trump’s January executive order cutting federal funding to hospitals performing trans-related surgeries on minors, HHS released an alarming report concluding that so-called “gender-affirming care” is supported by “very weak” evidence.
The report cited irreversible harms like infertility and psychological damage, many of which were reportedly overlooked under the Biden-era HHS.
CatholicVote previously reported that under the Biden administration, HHS officials pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to remove age minimums from its guidelines as part of the administration’s pro-transgender agenda.
Kennedy praised Trump’s leadership Wednesday, calling the last 100 days “exciting” and “rewarding.”
“Mr. President, I want to thank you for your vision, for your leadership, for giving me the 100 busiest days of my life. And most exciting and most rewarding,” he said. “And over the next 100 days, we’re going to do much, much more.”