An Orwellian Protection Racket: How the Trafficking Victims Protection Act Creates New Victims—And Why Proposed Reforms Are Not Enough

Funding and contracting trends suggest a White House policy to keep the child smuggling and trafficking pipeline open—with ready capacity for future surges

Early this month, against a background of border success headlines, the Trump administration announced the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would not renew its $11 million contract with Catholic Charities of Miami, Florida, citing a reduced need for shelter, care and placement services for the unaccompanied alien children the U.S. continues to accept at our borders. The end of Catholic Charities’ “legacy migrant kids program” in Miami, created in 1960 as a humanitarian stop-gap after the communist revolution in Cuba, is celebrated by restrictionists who understand how an open border creates an attractive nuisance that lures vulnerable children into harm’s way. But a deeper look into head counts, budget data and contracting trends tells a more complicated story about how Trump administration policies sustain the unaccompanied children (UC) program.

The Catholic Charities wind-down is real. So are the deportations, the record-low refugee admissions cap, and the enforcement posture. What has not changed is the statutory pipeline for unaccompanied children—nor the funding that sustains it. Analysis reveals that even while alien adults and families are being actively mass deported and turned away, the border remains wide open for more unaccompanied minors because the Trump administration has not urged Congress to dismantle the legal machinery that incentivizes organized smuggling of children. Instead, the administration and Congress are continuing suspiciously high levels of funding to the Unaccompanied Children program and to the NGOs that thrive upon it.

While the administration’s decision to end the Catholic Charities program in Miami is a positive step, the Trump administration downplays the fact that children are still arriving and being admitted. “Promises made, promises kept,” Border Czar Tom Homan recently told Rob Schmitt Tonight. “We’ve got the most secure border in the history of the nation. Illegal immigration at the southern border is down 97 percent.” Praising the administration’s policies, Homan suggests that the child smuggling documented during the Biden years is all in the past, and that this fact lifts Border Patrol and ICE officers’ spirits:

These men and women took an oath to enforce immigration law. I was down on the southern border many times during the Biden administration, and the morale was in the toilet. I mean, they considered themselves Über drivers, and tourist agents, because they were simply processing people to release them—and many times delivering the children to the same people that paid for their smuggling, which is a felony. And ICE agents, their hands were tied.

Well now, morale is sky-high. The men and women of CPB and ICE are getting to do the job they signed up to do, and upholding the oath they took, and this country is safer because of it. So, they’re proud to serve with this president.

But Homan’s secure border celebrations are premature—because the statutory machinery that turns children into cartel currency is still in force.

During the Biden years we witnessed how the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), a federal law originally justified on grounds of safeguarding minors in federal custody, continuously creates new victims by actively luring unaccompanied children into the hands of Mexican cartels—then promising to “protect” them by disappearing them back into the cartel’s hands, screened by lawyers’ paperwork. During recent years, UC referrals to ORR shelters surged from 15,381 in FY 2020 (held back by Trump’s “Title 42” and other policies) to a record 128,904 in FY 2022—a 738% increase (see graph, below). Under the statutory scheme, minors are sheltered until ORR can locate a suitable sponsor to take custody. Surges of unaccompanied children overwhelmed federally-contracted facilities, leading to the use of military bases and arenas as temporary influx sites to provide short-term shelter for these vulnerable minors.

Unaccompanied Children Program Referrals vs. Funding (FY2017-FY2027)

Referrals have dropped sharply, yet funding and contracting maintain significant capacity

SOURCES: Referrals to ORR (2025 UC referral figure is “unreconciled and subject to change”); funding data: CRS R43599 (Sept. 5 2024); FY 2025 budget figure was set by CR; FY 2026 budget as enacted; FY 2027 budget requested by HHS

President Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services recently told the Miami Herald that the daily population of children in the agency’s care had fallen to 1,900—a plunge of 91% from a peak of 22,000 during the Biden years. HHS cites this decline as justification for an only moderately reduced FY2027 budget—$3.4 billion requested, down from $4.2 billion in FY2026. Why not bigger cuts? According to the justification: “While the Administration has successfully created a whole-of-government disincentive to illegal immigration, migration numbers vary considerably from one year to the next, even from month to month, and are largely unpredictable.” Thus the 2027 budget request suggests a disconnect between secure border rhetoric and the underlying legal structure that remains unchanged.

How Federal Law Incentivizes Cartel Debt Bondage

As Tom Homan understands, sponsors who pay smugglers to bring children into the United States are committing a felony under 8 U.S.C. § 1324. Former immigration judge Andrew Arthur explained in his August 25, 2025 op-ed for the Center for Immigration Studies how the federal human smuggling statute criminalizes knowingly encouraging, inducing, or bringing an alien into the country for financial gain (or in furtherance of a violation of law), turning the sponsor’s payment, or promise to pay, into the very act that executes the smuggling contract that federal agents were then required to facilitate. “There’s no exception for adults who conspire to smuggle kids here,” Arthur writes, “and if DHS throws a few would-be sponsors cum conspirators in jail for a decade, you’ll see the child-smuggling industry dry up quickly.”

How does federal law enable the perverse effect? Allowing the child to remain in the U.S. ensures that the smuggler completes the job—and can get paid. Section 235 of the TVPA promises safeguards for unaccompanied alien children. In reality, it delivers the opposite: a screening process that funnels vulnerable minors into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), hands them to sponsors often tied to the very cartels that brought them here, and retains no meaningful oversight responsibility.

Section 235 requires immigration officers to screen Mexican and Canadian children within 48 hours of apprehension. Officers must determine whether the child is a victim of “severe trafficking,” faces a credible fear of persecution, or is at risk of being trafficked upon return. If any box is checked—or if the child comes from a non-contiguous country (such as Guatemala)—the minor is transferred to ORR custody, placed with a sponsor, and offered a pro bono attorney to provide legal “defenses” against return. But the system’s language is Orwellian doublespeak. The very act of screening for risk becomes the trapdoor into the system that exposes children to that exact risk. “Protection” here means laundering children right back into the cartels’ hands. And the legal “defense” offered actually “defends” the child against a safe return home.

Whistleblowers who reported to Senator Chuck Grassley during the Biden years documented specific cases in which ORR released children—including infants—to sponsors with confirmed MS-13 gang affiliation despite repeated “do not release” warnings. Senator Grassley’s office later published internal HHS records corroborating these accounts, showing children placed with sponsors who had criminal gang histories. These same concerns were raised by counter-trafficking expert Jarrod Sadulski, Ph.D., who told senators in 2024 about how cartel members hand pieces of paper to children with names and phone numbers of “sponsors the child is supposed to ask for” upon reaching the United States. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador told Tucker Carlson that MS-13 has evolved into a “satanic” organization that performs rituals, including the sacrifice of infants, and that he has personally seen the altars used in these ceremonies. In one documented case Bukele recounted, a former MS-13 member left the gang after being ordered to participate in the ritual sacrifice of an infant: “They took him to a house where they were about to kill a baby … the others replied, ‘Because the beast asked for a baby, so we have to give him the baby.’”

The horrific, documented risks to children illustrate what Senator John Cornyn has recognized as a “perverse incentive” created by Section 235. But even award-winning investigative journalism, including Hannah Dreier’s Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series, stops short of explaining how the scheme set up by Congress directly facilitates cartel debt bondage. Dreier’s series “Alone and Exploited” powerfully documents children laboring in brutal, illegal jobs—yet largely attributes the exploitation to vetting and oversight failures rather than the cartel debt-enforcement mechanism. In one profile, Dreier describes the cartel operative who smuggles children—not as an enforcer of coercive debt. Instead, she calls him “technically a human smuggler, but in this case, more like a travel agent” who simply helps the child reach the United States. Thus the statutory system reliably delivers the child to the point where debt enforcement becomes feasible on U.S. soil—and readers of the New York Times are given no vocabulary to articulate a complaint.

Absurdity: A state of being unreasonable, meaningless, or so unsound as to be irrational.

This architecture did not arise by accident. The provisions in Section 235 originated in legislation drafted by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office in 2000. “In one way or another,” Feinstein wrote in comments accompanying her S. 3117, “we have been affected by the six-year-old shipwreck survivor from Cuba, Elian Gonzáles. His tragic story brought to light the plight of … youngsters who find their way to the United States, unaccompanied by an adult and, in many cases, traumatized by the experiences provoking their flight.” Elian, rescued at sea after the vessel his mother was on sank, was returned to his father in Cuba under international law and diplomatic norms. But the dramatic, widely-publicized case generated a politically polarized narrative: should children be allowed to claim U.S. asylum independently of their parents? Congress eventually responded in 2008 by enshrining Feinstein’s attractive danger into Section 235 of TVPA, following the reasoning that unaccompanied minors should receive American “protection” from their own families and home countries. What arguably began as confusion over a handful of outlying cases, like the absurdly improbable journey of Elian Gonzáles, became the legal foundation for industrial-scale procurement.

Humanitarian Industrial Complex

And while the system keeps quietly humming along, more federal dollars are being plunked down for more services to “protect” children, including enhanced sponsor vetting and improved access to lawyers. Catholic Charities may be among the oldest and best known non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to provide shelter and services for illegal alien children. But the network of tax-exempt groups that soak up federal dollars for shelter, transportation, legal services, medical care and more—groups that mushroomed during the Biden years—already had deep roots in Washington.

The ACLU led the coalition of more than 60 organizations that lobbied for the original Section 235 language that made this entire system possible. The charity Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), founded in 2008 by Microsoft Vice Chair Brad Smith and Angelina Jolie in tandem with passage of the Section 235 amendment, has operated as the central engine of this legal pipeline. KIND’s advocacy aligns closely with the TVPA’s requirements: Their attorneys navigate paperwork, secure placements, and fight deportations. The operational effect of this apparatus is to convert the statutory promise of legal protection into a reliable infrastructure—one that advertises to sending communities, processes arriving children, and defends against return. Whether intended or not, this infrastructure sustains the very influx it was built to address.

KIND received over $62.5 million in government funding in 2024 alone before contracts were terminated in early 2025, and has been an aggressive lobbyist to preserve the status quo. KIND coordinates with corporate legal departments and others who step in as the child’s legal representatives. These attorneys file for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), asylum, or T-visas—filings that keep the child in the country while the NGO lawyer is the go-between that interfaces with child sponsors, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the court system. Since its founding KIND has trained thousands of attorneys and has served more than 18,000 children, drawing legal talent from more than 800 global partners—law firms, corporations, law schools and bar associations. KIND reported leveraging $137.5 million in pro bono legal services in 2024—that figure represents the market value of attorney time contributed by partner firms, meaning federal funding of $62.5 million corresponds to roughly two additional dollars of private legal capacity for every dollar obligated.

Meanwhile, Democrats continue to aggressively defend and expand the legal services apparatus. It’s not every day that senators complain about a request for proposals (RFP), but on March 24, 2026, Senators Ron Wyden and Patty Murray sent a pointed letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. demanding that the Trump administration restore full in-person legal orientations and guarantee representation for every child, claiming any reduction violates TVPA obligations. But this entire debate over the layers of procedure and “protection” is a strawman—it creates the illusion of reform while leaving the fundamental loophole in Section 235 untouched. The NGOs will insist “asylum” is legitimate, but the statute was never meant to create an open market for cartel debt bondage—it was supposed to protect victims, not to produce more.

By creating a pathway for children who claim trafficking or persecution risk, the law advertises to cartels: bring in children under debt bondage, and the U.S. will protect the arrangement. The cartels oblige. Children pour across the border because their families are told the screening will route them into ORR care and legal representation. Mexican children, by contrast, face swift return—creating a revolving door for juvenile cartel runners. Enforcement against runners is just a small part of the problem for the rule of law. The much bigger problem is the statutory one-way shuttle offered to every other child.

Why Proposed Legislative Actions Are Not Enough

Todd Bensman, now Senior Advisor to Border Czar Tom Homan, documented how differential treatment of minors turned every child into a prized “Golden Ticket” at the border. In his 2019 reporting and 2023 book Overrun, he traced the incentive all the way to the border handoff point where the child became the “ticket” that unlocked speedy release for fraudulent family groups. Yet once that ticket was redeemed at the border entry point and the child transferred to ORR custody, analysis ends. Exposing the system was necessary, yet exposure without remedy can function as promotion.

We border watchers have been waiting for the Trump administration to pivot to ending the underlying screening loophole and fully securing the border as promised. Unaccompanied child numbers exploded under Biden policies, reaching a staggering peak of 128,904 children placed with sponsors in FY 2022 alone. Even now, with stricter enforcement, ORR placed 23,997 unaccompanied children in FY 2025. Legislative fixes have been proposed, but nothing currently on the table would end the debt bondage crisis. Without repealing the screening loophole, those numbers will balloon again the moment any future administration relaxes pressure at the border.

A longtime critic of Section 235 of the TVPRA, Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies says the “best solution would be for Congress to scrap the current HSA/TVPRA process for unaccompanied children and start over.” In his August 25, 2025 essay “It’s Time for Congress to Protect ‘Unaccompanied Alien Children,’” Arthur suggests three legislative fixes:

• Create a role for law enforcement (DHS) in the sponsor vetting process;

• Amend the INA to specify classes of individuals who are barred from sponsoring UCs; and

• Eliminate the “non-contiguous country” distinction for UCs and hand all UCs over to USCIS officers for screening for credible asylum claims.

Enhanced sponsor vetting and placement restrictions sound like a no-brainer if you’ve listened to Congressional testimony or followed border reporters like Anthony Rubin, who documented children describing crimes they survived and witnessed on their migration journeys. Provisions in the Kayla Hamilton Act (H.R. 4371 / S. 3054), which passed the House on December 16, 2025 but has seen no movement in the Senate, would address sponsor vetting and data sharing, creating a role for DHS in the process. The HHS budget justification also explicitly includes a legislative proposal matching Arthur’s third recommendation: treat children from non-contiguous countries the same as those from Mexico and Canada by requiring expedited removal proceedings following screening.

These adjustments sound like progress—until you read the fine print. None of the legislative proposals touch the core screening mechanism nor the presumption that unaccompanied children should be permitted to apply for U.S. immigrant status. Arthur’s strong rhetoric to either rescind the law “or at least fix the most glaring issues with the current UAC process” concludes with proposals to make those issues just a bit less glaring—far from his call at the top of his piece for Congress to “close that loophole” and “show courage when kids are on the line.” These proposals simply layer more bureaucracy, more contractors, and more Orwellian “protections” on top of the same trapdoor that funnels children into the cartel pipeline.

These half-measures are not real reform. They are the protection racket refining itself—more forms, more fees, more “processes”—while the fundamental architecture that manufactures victims and guarantees cartel profit remains untouched. As long as the screening provision stands, the influx will not stop. The disappearances will not stop. The system is designed to generate the very victims it claims to protect.

Conclusion

The 2008 amendment created the enduring structural incentives that protect the cartel protection racket, and current funding and contracting trends suggest this racket will persist. President Trump has virtually ended new refugee admissions, but Congress and the administration have kept the UC Program fully funded at a multi-billion-dollar scale.

And sustained funding suggests a continued influx of minors is anticipated, even as family enforcements ramp up. The capacity to process and fund thousands remains fully intact, as shown by the FY2027 request of $3.4 billion, supporting roughly 6,500 beds, and a $225 million task order awarded to MVM on April 1 for the nationwide transportation of unaccompanied minors and family units through fiscal 2026. While enhanced vetting means per-child costs may rise due to longer stays, operational changes don’t neutralize the fact that the budget requests clash with stated policy goals—and with child safety. The Orwellian protection racket has a mind of its own, operating on a separate logic, preserving the capacity of the very pipeline the administration has pledged to dismantle.

The human cost is heartbreaking. HHS data confirm that tens of thousands of children have been lost to follow-up. Reforming Section 235 is not a partisan issue—it’s a test of whether the United States will continue to play pied piper to children. Congress created the system. Congress can end it. Eliminating the screening provision and returning children swiftly and decisively to their home countries is the only solution that ends the scheme.

The author Amy Suzanne Martin holds a Juris Doctorate and a Master of Arts in rhetoric—the study of persuasion and propaganda. She writes as @KimWexlerMAJD on X.