Weaponizing empathy

The news of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump spread across the nation within minutes of the bullet grazing his right ear. By God’s providence, the president chose that exact moment to gesture toward an immigration chart. This slight movement—within an inch of ending his life—took him out of harm’s way.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for the swelling tsunami of unaccompanied minors who are trafficked each year across the porous U.S. southern border.

Indeed, since President Joe Biden took office, more than 460,000 unaccompanied minors have been released to unrelated or distantly related sponsors in the United States. As of 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services was unable to locate more than 85,000 of these children. Shevaun Harris, the secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families, told a Senate panel that less than 10 percent of children apprehended crossing the border are being released to their parents.

We know this because of recent investigations by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as well as roundtable hearings by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. They found that many of these lost children—nearly one-fourth of all unaccompanied minors who have come to the southern border—are being exploited for labor or sex in the United States. As HHS whistleblower Deborah White told Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, at a hearing earlier this month, the Biden administration’s emphasis on speed over proper safety precautions has resulted in “taxpayer-funded child slavery.”

White testified that the Biden administration has failed to follow proper safeguards such as fingerprinting sponsors and conducting home visits before releasing children. Congressional investigations have also found that many of these sponsors have ties to the MS-13 gang, were previously denied approval, or already had three or more unaccompanied minors in their care.

White also explained that children had been sent to addresses of unsafe or abandoned homes. In one case, a child was sent to an open field. In another, more than 50 children had been released to the same address. As The New York Times reports, these situations point to poorly concealed child trafficking schemes.

Tara Rodas, another HHS whistleblower who worked with White, later described on a podcast how cartels are bringing children to the southern border “from Guatemala, El Salvador, all over Central and South America with smugglers.” From there, “the smugglers give them the name and address to where they’re going, the children turn that into Border Patrol, Border Patrol turns it over to us at HHS, and then we send the child to that person. It’s really end-to-end delivery.”

In one instance, a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl named Carmen was released to a man who claimed to be her brother. Months later, he posted photos of himself touching her inappropriately while Carmen appeared drugged and “for sale.” Caseworkers also found child pornography on his social media. To this day, Rodas has no idea what happened to Carmen.

For many years, certain evangelical leaders and the progressive left disavowed former President Donald Trump’s “inhumane” border policies, citing images of children in cages. Women, especially, were pestered with Bible verses about “welcoming the stranger” and showing hospitality to the least of these. Indeed, they told us that Jesus was an immigrant in the land of Egypt, so we too should welcome those who are foreigners in our land.

These were distortions of Scripture. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus didn’t “immigrate” to Egypt by illegally crossing a border. They simply stayed in another Roman province to avoid dangers in their own. And there is nothing in Scripture or Christian theology that requires an open border.

The effect of this heavily marketed open-border campaign, however, led many well-meaning Christians to support, in effect, an unprecedented open-border policy.

Far from caring for the poor and fatherless, the lax policies governing the southern border exploit and harm unaccompanied minors who are being trafficked into the United States. Instead of providing safeguards and safety checks at our border, the United States is encouraging child labor and sexual exploitation. This is false empathy. Its sweet and inclusive language conceals crimes against the poor and vulnerable among us.

We should judge public policies, not by the rhetoric in which they’re clothed but by the known and likely effects. As the last four years have shown, a strong and secure southern border is not cruel. On the contrary, it protects both American citizens and illegal immigrants.