SOME PEOPLE WAIT TO KIDNAP YOUR CHILD

In 2020, Aaron Stevenson, then a federal employee of the Department for Homeland Security, started to realize the lies dictating our lives, in February 2021, he blew the whistle on government-sponsored child trafficking, and in June 2022, he was baptized into Christ in the Orthodox Church. “This is what’s basically saved me,” Stevenson said about his path over the past three years. And although he was fired from his very comfortable job with the DHS for coming forward, he says he would absolutely do it again. Aaron Stevenson recently joined his fellow whistleblower Tara Rodas on the Kyle Seraphin Show to talk about the horrifying government program that has resulted in thousands of children becoming victims of sex and labor trafficking. Stevenson recounts how after serving in the marines, he became a federal employee, working for the DHS from 2012 until he was fired in 2023, helping with various programs and various forms of analysis. One program was the International Crime Watchlist, which he worked on from its inception, identifying and tracking transnational organized criminals (cartels, mafias, etc.). Stevenson recalls how in February 2021, he came across a case where a watchlisted person was trying to sponsor a child who had arrived at the U.S. border illegally and unaccompanied. From there, he noticed a pattern beginning to emerge, with criminals (including many sex traffickers) from countries all across the globe also applying to sponsor children. When Stevenson tried to track down whose job it was to address this shocking fact, he couldn’t find anyone, so he took it to the media, first anonymously and later openly. Tara Rodas, a federal employee for decades, explained how she became aware of the child trafficking through first-hand experience. In 2021, the Biden administration knew it had a border crisis on its hands and called on all federal employees to leave their home agencies and go on detail to Health and Human Services (HHS) to help with the mission of taking unaccompanied children into the care of the HSS to be placed with sponsors in the U.S. Fluent in Spanish, Rodas went to an HHS site near the border to spend time with the children, but she learned that the HSS had been handing children over to unvetted sponsors—traffickers, members of transnational criminal organizations—for more than a decade. After seeing Aaron Stevenson’s initial testimony, Rodas also began to report on the cases she was personally seeing at the HHS site, which eventually got her kicked off the site. The official purpose of the sponsor program, Rodas explains, is for children to have a place to live and someone to help them through the court process of claiming asylum. However, since many of the sponsors themselves are criminals, of course they have no intention of helping the children become legal. According to Stevenson, in fact, 90% or more of the sponsors are illegal aliens. What happens, Stevenson and Rodas explain, is that the children are being forced into labor and/or sex trafficking. Some have died and some have been badly injured working in unsafe conditions. The HHS itself admits that it has lost contact with 85,000 of the children placed in this program. Essentially, Rodas explains, the criminal sponsors offer to pay for a child’s trip to the U.S. and give them a well-paying job. But after being smuggled into the country, they find themselves in debt bondage/slave labor, working in horrendous conditions. Often, the children agree to come because the criminal organizations sponsoring them threaten their families back home. Moreover, the children undergo “unspeakable horrors” on the way to the U.S.—some, being so young, are even raped to death, Rodas says. Asked whether his faith inspired him to blow the whistle on the program, Stevenson explains that, in fact, uncovering the truth of the government program helped lead him to faith: I was an atheist from 2010 till about 2020. I was full-on don’t believe it, I would argue with people, yadda yadda yadda. I started seeing all the lies in 2020, and I started thinking about things differently, going forward. Come February 2021, I’m still not going to church, I don’t understand things yet. Doing all these things has brought me back. You can see it [points to icons], I’m baptized now, Divine Liturgy every Sunday, I pray every day. This is what’s basically saved me. There’s no way I could be doing this without the grace and protection of Christ. It’s all thanks to God. And that’s been my take on it. Without that, there’s no way I’d be where I’m at today, either doing this or being able to mentally or spiritually take it. I’d be depressed, I’d be an alcoholic, who knows? But this right here [points to icons] is the way. Stevenson told OrthoChristian that he began to question why he was an atheist in 2020 and realized he had no solid reasons. “So I accepted I was wrong and began to search,” he said. Realizing that God is real, he began to look for an explanation of this truth. “That’s when I learned about Orthodoxy and it’s like it just clicked,” he said. Speaking with Kyle Seraphin, Stevenson further explained that, rather than cracking down on criminal sponsors of unaccompanied minors, the Biden administration is attempting to deregulate the process even further, doing away with sponsor background checks and home visits, and much more. In fact, as the Washington Examiner reported on Monday, December 4, a group of 39 Republican Senators “have called on the Biden administration to cancel a Department of Health and Human Services proposal that would allow the government to stop vetting certain adults who apply to take custody of an unaccompanied migrant child.” “In effect, ORR [the Office of Refuge Resettlement] accepts a sponsor’s representations almost entirely on face value. ORR then delivers the child at taxpayer expense and free-of-cost to the un-vetted sponsor, opening up the possibility that a vulnerable child could fall into the hands of a potentially criminal or drug-addicted sponsor. At this point, ORR considers its work largely done,” the Senators write. To learn more about the problem of child trafficking and about Aaron Stevenson and Tara Rodas’ efforts against it, visit https://truthtrench.org/defendthechildren/