The New York Times is attacking Rachel Campos-Duffy, a co-host on Fox & Friends Weekend, for citing its reporting regarding President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) losing contact with tens of thousands of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) who have been released into the United States.
In February 2023, the New York Times issued a bombshell report, revealing that the Biden-Harris administration was releasing UACs to adult sponsors in the United States — the majority of whom are not their biological parents — as quickly as possible.
As a result, the Times discovered, HHS officials “could not reach more than 85,000 children” after they were released to adult sponsors in the United States.
The Times reported:
But as more and more children have arrived, the Biden White House has ramped up demands on staffers to move the children quickly out of shelters and release them to adults. Caseworkers say they rush through vetting sponsors. [Emphasis added]
While H.H.S. checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.
[Emphasis added]
Late last week, the Times attacked Rachel Campos-Duffy for having cited their report during an interview in June with former President Donald Trump. In the interview, Campos-Duffy abbreviated the Times’ reporting and referred to the UACs as “lost.”
“Will you commit to finding those children?” Campos-Duffy asked Trump.
The Times claims that Campos-Duffy’s characterization of the UACs as “lost” is inaccurate because “the Times did not report that the children were ‘lost,’ but that they were more susceptible to exploitative and illegal working conditions.”
Fox News defended Campos-Duffy, saying her using the term “lost” to describe the UACs that HHS could not reach after they were released to adult sponsors is “an issue of semantics” and nothing more.
In August, evidence mounted that the Biden-Harris administration’s decision to release UACs to adult sponsors as quickly as possible has spurred an explosion in labor and sex trafficking among such migrant children.
A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General (IG) report found that many UACs, as a result of the Biden-Harris policy, are “at risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor” within the United States.
Last October, Office of Refugee Resettlement Director Robin Dunn Marcos admitted that background checks on adult sponsors are done in “some cases,” but not all. Dunn Marcos said the agency does not do home visits in all cases to check on UACs.
In February, HHS IG Christi Grimm published a report revealing that in 22 percent of cases, the agency did not conduct proper and safe follow-up calls to check in with UACs released to adult sponsors in the United States.
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 of them UACs, were discovered illegally working brutal and often life-threatening jobs.
In April of last year, an HHS whistleblower testified before Congress and warned that the agency is facilitating a “multi-billion-dollar child trafficking operation” where UACs are being mass released to unvetted adult sponsors.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
