Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is workshopping a new theory: The HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement sanctioned child trafficking during the Biden administration, and he has a mandate to stop it and track down the missing migrant children.
“During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking and for sex and for slavery,” Kennedy said during a cabinet meeting this month. “We have ended that and we’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these children — 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”
But former HHS employees and conspiracy theory experts told NOTUS they believe Kennedy’s theory is being used as an excuse for HHS and the Department of Homeland Security to arrest and deport the often undocumented people who volunteered to take care of children who immigrated to the U.S. without their parents — with dire consequences for the unaccompanied minors themselves.
“They’re not helping kids. They’re going after sponsors to try to find more people to put on their deportation list,” said a former HHS official with direct knowledge of the changes taking place at ORR, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the department. “They twist it and say, ‘We’re doing this to protect kids from being trafficked,’ which isn’t the case, because then they remove all the legal services from the kids to actually have that protection, which they’ve had since the beginning of the program.”
HHS and DHS did not respond to requests for comment.
ORR was created by the Refugee Act of 1980 and has historically provided support to refugees in the U.S. via short-term financial assistance, help finding medical care, community engagement activities and career development programs.
But right now, a current ORR employee said, the program they work for has only one priority: to “finish shutting down.”
Beyond the fundamental shift in the office’s goals, ORR has also been targeted by the Trump administration’s budget cuts.It has lost “hundreds” of personnel to cuts carried out by DOGE and Kennedy, said the current employee, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely about their employer.
“A lot has changed. A lot has changed in a rapid pace,” the employee said.
For Kennedy, change is the point. Kennedy told members of Congress at a hearing before the House Committee on Appropriations earlier this month that under ORR’s care during the last administration, “What happened to many of those children is just horrific,” describing a case where 400 migrant children were sent to work in a meat-packing plant in Kansas.
“My predecessor was deliberately employing a policy of speed over safety, so they waived all the identification requirements for sponsors,” Kennedy said. “The Biden administration knew about it, they saw the same pictures we did, and they did nothing.”
Kennedy’s claims of migrant child trafficking under ORR appear to be based on an August 2024 report from the DHS’s Office of the Inspector General that found that the federal bureaucracy didn’t have the resources to keep track of all unaccompanied migrant children in the country. The 300,000 allegedly missing children Kennedy has referenced appears to stem from a line in the report referring to 291,000 children that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had never attempted to remove from the country. The report didn’t allege that any of the children ORR had lost contact with were being trafficked, though migrant children are at particular risk for being exploited and abused.
But Kennedy’s claims have conflated the report’s findings with evidence of widespread corruption and child endangerment within ORR — accusations that the former HHS official says have no basis in reality.
The former official told NOTUS that Kennedy is flat-out wrong about the number of migrant children who are being trafficked — but regardless of that, they said the location data ORR maintains on the whereabouts of unaccompanied minors in the U.S. is now being co-opted by ICE. The former official said ICE is using Kennedy’s claims as an excuse to visit the homes where children are living with their sponsors, many of whom are family members, often also immigrants.
Under the Trump administration, ORR has tightened its rules for sponsors, including increased income requirements, expanded DNA checks and disallowing foreign IDs to be used as identification if the sponsor doesn’t have a legal authorization to be in the U.S.
Most importantly, said the former HHS official, it’s common knowledge that most sponsors are undocumented immigrants themselves — so ICE visits can lead to sponsors being arrested. Without sponsors, those children are then placed back in ICE detention centers.
“What is child protection if we’re just letting kids sit in institutions for years?” the former HHS official said.
It’s unclear exactly how many arrests have taken place so far. ICE agents have reportedly visited unaccompanied minors in Texas, California and Washington state. A ProPublica investigation reported that Angie Salazar, the new head of ORR and a former ICE official, told ORR employees that ICE officials had visited 1,500 residences of unaccompanied minors. Salazar reportedly said that the agents had uncovered a “handful” of cases of sex and labor trafficking, but didn’t go into further detail. She also reportedly told ORR staff that she would expect an increase in the number of children removed from their sponsors and placed back into federal custody.
In order to fix what he sees as a widespread issue, Kennedy said he’s launched a criminal task force that will work with DHS to find migrant children that he says ORR lost track of and who he claims are now being trafficked. He said that his task force will open up 500 criminal investigations and that they’ve already brought 80 to court.
In an April press release, DHS stated that its Homeland Security Investigations and ICE had launched a “collaborative operational initiative” to locate “unaccompanied alien children,” who it calls UACs, who had been released from ORR custody.
“The UAC initiative identifies and locates UACs to ensure immigration obligations are met, and investigate any potential indicators of forced labor, sex trafficking, or other exploitation,” the release says.
Kennedy’s claims pair the real problems facing migrant children in the U.S. with a conspiratorial angle that’s been jumping from issue to issue for decades. Accusations of child trafficking have long been an easy way for those willing to use them to target their enemies, thanks to the issue’s inherent unforgivability, said Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science at the University of Miami who’s written several books about conspiracy theories.
Often, new iterations of long-running conspiracy theories arise as a direct response to changes that are taking place in society at any given time, said Rachel Robison-Greene, an assistant professor of philosophy at Utah State University who studies conspiracy theories.
Conspiracies connecting politics with child trafficking ballooned in the 2010s with Pizzagate, which claimed that a child sex trafficking ring was being run out of a pizza restaurant in Washington. This presented an opportunity for another newly minted movement to develop Pizzagate into a worldwide phenomenon: QAnon.
QAnon’s subsuming of Pizzagate didn’t surprise Richard Greene, a professor of philosophy at Weber State University who co-wrote a book with Robison-Greene on conspiracy theories.
“The different conspiracy theory groups will appropriate other theories to the extent that they support their purpose,” Greene said. “QAnon forms, and then immediately subsumes Pizzagate just months after that happens.”
Robison-Greene said it’s not surprising that Kennedy would be pushing a theory that’s seemingly unrelated to the MAHA movement’s health-oriented conspiracy theories on vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry.
“These things are not really isolated,” Robison-Greene said. “The best predictor of whether a person will believe any given conspiracy theory is if they believe another one.”
Of course, conspiracy theories themselves don’t have agency, as Uscinski is quick to say.
“This is really a story about people,” Uscinski said. “If you think the government and big pharma are trying to poison children with MMR vaccines and are engaged in a massive scheme to cover it up, then how far is it for you to also believe that they’re probably engaged in some sex trafficking too? Really not that far.”
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.