Child trafficking educational summit in Colorado Springs to present solutions | News

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Each year thousands of children in the United States are preyed upon, exploited, held captive, forced into labor and sold into sex and human trafficking markets. And with some half a million unaccompanied minor immigrants crossing the southern border and being released to adult sponsors under what critics call a fairly lax system, more are ending up in the same situation.

“There’s a serious problem,” said Tara Lee Rodas, who recently became a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services whistleblower, when she reported that children were being handed over to gang members and people with criminal convictions.

“I don’t believe people know there’s a problem, and the reason I can say that with confidence is that I had no idea what was going on. But kids were telling me how they were lured and didn’t know who they were going to,” she said.

To help people learn more about the problem and ways to prevent trafficking, including of their own children, a slate of big-name speakers that include Rodas and Ret. Army Lt. General Michael T. Flynn are coming to Colorado Springs this month as part of a nationwide tour by Florida-based America’s Future.

The two-day educational summit will be held Sept. 20-21 at the Church at Briargate, 9550 Otero Ave. Anyone interested can register to attend at www.americasfuture.net/get-in-the-fight-colorado-summit. The cost is $40 for both days.

A summit panel will be held from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sept. 20, with an overview of local laws, best practices and other information from experts.

A full day of training on Sept. 21 begins at 9 a.m. and runs through 4 p.m. The moderator is investigative journalist Lara Logan.

Flynn, who was National Security Advisor under the Trump administration, will speak as chairman of the board of America’s Future, a 78-year-old nonprofit that “preserves individual rights, promotes American values and traditions and protects the nation’s Constitutional Republic.”

Colorado is the sixth state for the organization's “Get in the Fight” campaign that began in December of 2022. Each presentation is tailored to the individual state’s issues, said Mary Flynn O’Neill, executive director of America’s Future and Flynn’s sister.

Colorado earned a "C" grade on the 2023 Report Card of Child and Youth Sex Trafficking by Shared Hope International, failing with an "F" in "continuum of care" and received "Ds" in the categories of identification of and response to victims, and prevention and training.

“People will take away a lot of training, tools and knowledge that will help them combat any type of child exploitation and trafficking that’s in their area,” she said. “We’ll help them understand what it is and give them information about what’s going on in their communities, warning signs and how they can respond.”

If Rodas, the whistleblower who will speak at the summit, hadn’t seen some unaccompanied immigrant children being placed into the hands of sponsors who have a criminal history and gang affiliation, she told members of Congress about two months ago that she wouldn’t have believed the federal government was using taxpayer dollars in such a way.

“It’s shocking and shameful,” she said during her July 9 testimony during a U.S. Senate hearing titled, “The Exploitation Crisis: How the U.S. Government is Failing to Protect Migrant Children from Trafficking and Abuse.”

“What keeps me up at night is wondering about the safety and well-being of children,” she said.

As examples, Rodas spoke of a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl who went home with a North Carolina man who claimed to be her older brother. But on his social media he was photographed touching her inappropriately; he later was traced to online child pornography. Rodas also mentioned a 13-year-old girl from El Salvador who had been released to an adult sponsor in Ohio with confirmed MS-13 gang affiliation, which she called “unthinkable.”

A sophisticated network begins with children being recruited in their home country and smuggled to the U.S. border, where the federal government delivers them to a sponsor, some of whom are criminals and traffickers, she said.

The Department of Homeland Security was flagged two weeks ago for not knowing the location of 291,000 unaccompanied minors who were handed over to adult sponsors after illegally entering the U.S.

Rodas, who remains working as a federal employee for the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency in Washington, D.C., said she does not speak on behalf of any government agency or the federal government itself but talks about child trafficking from a personal level.

She was on loan as a federal employee to the Department of Health and Human Services, as a volunteer responding to the Biden-Harris administration’s call in early 2021 for assistance with the border crisis when she said she uncovered some disturbing aspects. She served as deputy to the director of the federal case management team at the Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake site, where 8,300 children were funneled through.

“I thought this was going to be the humanitarian mission of my life,” she said in a phone interview Tuesday. “I thought I would be able to do something really incredible for children. I had no idea they were trafficking kids until I reported that MS-13 (an international criminal gang that originated in Los Angeles) were getting the kids.

“At the time I learned about this came the overwhelming horror: can any of these kids be saved? I thought it was hopeless. But there are organizations saving kids, and the average person with a little information could save a child.”

Parents, teachers, business owners, neighbors and others who attend the local summit will learn indicators such as if a child shows up with expensive gifts, like new shoes or clothes, or if they are on their cell phone more than usual, Rodas said.

‘Yes, there’s a problem, but there are solutions,” she said. “We need people to get involved. Protecting children is a bipartisan issue.”

America’s Future also operates a legal resource center and advocates for policy changes.

The organization is backing Congressional reversal of Department of Health and Human Services rules that allow for optional vetting of sponsors, not considering a sponsor’s criminal record including illegal drug use and history of child abuse or neglect, not sharing a sponsor’s immigration status with law enforcement, “weak standards for post-release home studies to determine a child’s status or safety once in the custody of a sponsor” and restrictions on whistleblowers to disclose suspected wrongdoing.

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Child trafficking educational summit in Colorado Springs to present solutions | News

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