At Tuesday evening’s vice-presidential debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) said Vice President Kamala Harris’s “wide open southern border” is the “real family separation policy” occurring in the United States.
“You ask about family separation,” Vance said in response to a question from moderates:
Right now, in this country, we had 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost. Some of them have been sex trafficked, some of them hopefully are at home with their families, some of them have been used as trafficking mules. [Emphasis added]
“The real family separation policy in this country is Kamala Harris’s wide open southern border,” Vance said.
Indeed, a DHS Inspector General (IG) report revealed that hundreds of thousands of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) are “at risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
The report noted that from Fiscal Year 2021 through Fiscal Year 2023, President Joe Biden and Harris’s agencies have released about 365,705 UACs into the U.S. interior. For comparison, the last two fiscal years of the Trump administration released just about 83,100 UACs into the U.S. interior.
The influx of UACs coupled with the failure of Biden and Harris’s agencies to provide adequate oversight of UACs once they are released into the U.S. interior may be a major contributor to an explosion in child labor trafficking in recent years, the DHS IG report suggests.
The Department of Labor, in Fiscal Year 2023, found an 88 percent increase in child labor trafficking compared to Fiscal Year 2019. Last year, nearly 6,000 children, many UACs, were discovered illegally working brutal and often life-threatening jobs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
