The Biden administration is in fact the “middleman” in a child smuggling operation at the U.S border, for which someone needs to go to jail, says Sen. Josh Hawley.

Whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas told a House hearing Wednesday of the “sophisticated network” of child immigrant smuggling she witnessed at a Department of Health and Human Services emergency intake in Pomona, California.

“I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes,” she testified to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement. “Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with recruiting in their home country, smuggled to the U.S. border, and ends when [the Office of Refugee Resettlement] delivers a child to a sponsor.

“Some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of transnational criminal organizations. Some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income. This is why we are witnessing an explosion of labor trafficking.”

Is the Biden administration really the middleman in a child trafficking enterprise?

“Yes, absolutely,” Hawley told the Heartlander in an interview Thursday. “And you can see that in the numbers. The Biden administration changed the rule to allow kids to be smuggled across the border. Now we’ve had over 300,000 of them – 300,000 who have been smuggled across the border. Almost 100,000 of those are now lost to the Biden administration.

“They just turn them over to sponsors that often are smugglers, child traffickers. Now they’re gone.”

Hawley says the immigrant children are being forced into illegal child labor;  being forced to work overnight shifts in factories; being denied food and education; and even being sex-trafficked.

“That’s what this administration is allowing to happen,” the Missouri senator said. “It’s modern-day slavery, and they are facilitating it. They are just facilitating it because they want that border open. 

“There needs to be an FBI investigation into what’s happened at (the Department of Homeland Security) and Health and Human Services. This administration is allowing this. And No 2, the FBI needs to go and get every one of these kids that’s now been forced into slavery.”

Why isn’t this a bigger story, in a news media that scorched then-President Trump for having kids in “cages,” when in truth they were holding facilities created by the Obama administration?

“Oh, because since the Biden administration is doing it, Democrats now have no interest,” Hawley says. “Suddenly the party of protecting kids’ safety, which is what they said years ago now, is literally turning children over to slave traffickers – in our country. They’re allowing children to be exploited. They’re allowing children to be sold into slavery.

“It’s unbelievable, and they just couldn’t care less because it’s their patron saint, Joe Biden, who’s doing it. It is wrong. They need to be held accountable. There are people who need to go to jail for this, and it needs to start with an FBI investigation.”

In another, much more positive, development involving the Biden administration, Hawley is celebrating the Senate’s unanimous passage Wednesday of his “Justice for Jana Elementary Act.” The bill would force the federal government to clean up waste and test for radiation at and near Jana Elementary School in the Hazelwood School District in suburban St. Louis.

The radiation is a lethal relic of Cold War atomic bomb processing in the area, which left piles of radioactive waste buried and reburied through the years – including near Coldwater Creek, which flows within about 1,000 feet of the school. Jana was closed for the school year last October, and then permanently in March due to new private tests showing high levels of radiation.

A lone senator blocked Hawley’s bill last month on behalf of the Biden administration, Hawley told The Heartlander at the time.

What’s changed?

“Public pressure,” Hawley said Thursday. “It is hard to look these kids at Jana Elementary in the eye. These are kids that haven’t done anything wrong. The federal government has put radioactive material around their school. I mean, what do you say to these kids? Like, ‘Oh, just live with it?’ It’s pretty hard. 

“So, I went after it with the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, last week and she finally said that she would support my bill. And I think it became pretty hard after that for the administration to oppose it. I’m sure that they’d still love to kill it, and I’m sure they’ll try to, but it was a big step forward. 

“The Senate unanimously passed this bill yesterday that would order a federal cleanup of Jana Elementary and build a new school if necessary. So this is a big step forward. We’ve got a ways to go. We’ve got to get it passed in the House. But I’m pleased with the progress so far.”

On Tuesday U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, filed the House’s companion bill to Hawley’s.

“It should be an easy bill,” Hawley says. “It fixes something the federal government has done. This isn’t a natural disaster, even. This is federal nuclear contamination. The federal government needs to clean it up and do right by these kids in the school district.”

And yet it’s been anything but easy, despite the unanimous Senate vote Wednesday. Why is that?

“Because they don’t want to take any responsibility,” Hawley offers. “It’s the same reason the president has never responded to me for months. I have been writing to him, calling him, asking him to order a cleanup at the elementary school, and they just ignore it. 

“They don’t want to take any responsibility for anything, and they’re not interested in helping real people. They’re interested in protecting Hunter Biden, and they’re interested in all of the giveaways to their corporate interests. They’re not interested in helping real people. 

“And so you’ve got kids – don’t give them any money, they’re not big-time donors. And therefore Joe Biden is not interested. It’s sad.”

The federal government likewise seems to have no interest in pursuing Ray Epps, a Jan. 6 instigator who many believe might have been an FBI plant – and who took to CBS’ 60 Minutes to deny it.

It begs the question: Why is someone who was caught so prominently on video exhorting on the Capitol incursion roaming around a free man when so many protestors are locked up?

“I have no idea,” Hawley told The Heartlander. If there’s other video showing otherwise, Hawley says he’d like to see it, but the videos of Epps everyone has seen “show him, if memory serves, moving barricades, urging people to go to areas he knew was blocked off, talking about storming the Capitol. 

“This Justice Department is charging people with misdemeanors for trespass left and right because they walked where they shouldn’t have walked. And then this person who is on video urging people to attack and storm the Capitol and directing them to do it, the FBI has no interest in them. 

“I can’t explain it. 

“If there’s some reasonable, rational explanation for it, by all means come forward with it. Let’s have it. But it sure looks to me like this is a guy that they seem to be protecting while they go after everyday citizens. And I, for the life of me, can’t figure it out.”