Guests – Aarron Stevenson, Joel Strabala, Tara Rodas
Former DHS Whistleblower Exposes Child Trafficking Networks
Aaron Stevenson, intelligence analyst and fired DHS whistleblower, joined Winn Tucson to discuss the crisis of missing migrant children in America. Stevenson was let go from his position after exposing an emergent complexity in child trafficking networks in 2021.
"These kids are first recruited in their home country to basically go into America. This is the element of trafficking called fraud for seclusion," Stevenson explained. "The trafficking networks start down there. They're either lied to, kidnapped and stolen, or flexed into positions thinking their child can make more money in America."
According to Stevenson, the cartels target vulnerable families living in poverty, particularly following the COVID lockdowns when global economic disruption created desperate conditions. Families often invest all their hopes in one child, paying thousands of dollars they don't have to send them to America.
The process begins at the border, where Department of Homeland Security (DHS) takes custody of children through Border Patrol or Customs Border Protection. Within three days, children are transferred to Health and Human Services (HHS) for case management to connect them with alleged sponsors.
"The Biden administration relaxed rules and processes," Stevenson noted. "You can't just accept testimony from a child or sponsor. You have to prove it. This is where the ownership of authenticity is on the alien to prove."
Stevenson emphasized the critical need for biometric identification rather than biographical information, explaining that data integrity was severely compromised starting in 2021. The relaxed standards enabled trafficking networks to flourish.
The Scope of Missing Children and Detection Challenges
Over 600,000 migrant children have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without a legal guardian or parent since 2019, according to government data. Conservative estimates suggest more than 500,000 children are currently unaccounted for in the United States.
"We know about the hard numbers that came through the unaccompanied child program. But there's also other ways to traffic kids into the country - you can just smuggle them across the border," Stevenson explained. "That number of 500,000 is going to end up being much larger."
The whistleblower revealed that many of these children are exploited for sex trafficking, labor, and even organ harvesting. The problem is exacerbated by sponsors receiving hundreds or even thousands of children, despite the program not being designed to work that way.
Stevenson first blew the whistle when he discovered watchlisted cartel members were getting access to these children: "The first instance of a watchlisted criminal getting one of these kids was February 2021. Within three months there were three records from different gangs in different countries - MS-13, Aitenshuk gang, and a Balkan crime group. These different gangs from across the world were all utilizing one pool of supply for these children."
Despite sending notices about this emergent pattern to various intelligence and law enforcement agencies, Stevenson found the information wasn't prioritized by the Biden administration. Eventually, for sharing this information, he was fired because his superiors claimed they "lost confidence" in him.
Solutions to Find Missing Children and Dismantle Trafficking Networks
When asked how to locate hundreds of thousands of missing children, Stevenson expressed optimism: "I believe they're findable. I believe this is a solvable problem because it's just a matter of effort and being aggressive with the tools we have."
He outlined a systematic approach beginning with intelligence gathering: "You approach this problem first with an intelligence solution, meaning information dominance. You have to have complete control and jurisdiction over all elements of data."
Stevenson explained that the government already possesses substantial information about both the children and sponsors, including photographs, names, dates of birth, and immigration records. The challenge is not a lack of data but rather the government's inefficiency in coordinating its information systems.
"The US government is very good at finding people if they want to," Stevenson asserted. "We recall January 6th - on January 7th, I remember seeing news reports of them making arrests in West Virginia. We can find people very easily."
He emphasized that the current administration's declaration of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations provides numerous tools to combat these networks. However, he cautioned that "your personnel is going to be your policy at the end of the day."
To be successful, Stevenson recommended a three-phase approach:
Recover the children from dangerous situations
Defeat the trafficking networks themselves
Dismantle the trafficking infrastructure, including complicit NGOs and government programs
"This will give you better perspectives on the complexities and sophistication that these cartels have heavily expanded," he noted. "This is an effort which, if chosen and fully applied, can do a lot of damage to the damage of this country."
Tara Rodis: HHS Whistleblower Confirms Systemic Failures
Tara Rodis, another whistleblower who worked within HHS, confirmed Stevenson's accounts. She was in Washington D.C. attending a House oversight hearing on leveraging technology to strengthen immigration enforcement.
Rodis revealed that in 2021, she tried to prevent children from being placed with known MS-13 members by issuing "do not release" orders. "Do you know they released both of those kids to that household? And when they found out it was me who tried to stop the kids from going there, I was called in for a 'perp walk.' They threatened me with investigation, walked me off my job, and took my badge."
She described horrifying situations where trafficking rings received multiple children: "We had 44 children in one apartment building. We had sponsors getting multiple children at multiple addresses. We had a place in Houston, Texas that had over 300 children in like a two square mile area."
Rodis expressed shock at discovering the extent of child exploitation: "I didn't understand how trafficking worked. I didn't really realize that there were people who viewed children as commodities. I had never heard of young children being sexually assaulted and abused. I just didn't know."
She confirmed that during her time at HHS, children were handed over to people the agency had never met in person: "No one at our site actually saw the sponsor in person. It was all just trading documents over an application called WhatsApp. There were no agents, no law enforcement looking at identity documents to see if they were even real."
Rodis welcomed recent technological improvements discussed at the oversight hearing that could help screen potential sponsors. She also supported the Trump administration's plan to reinstate DNA testing to verify family relationships.
Tucson's Proposition 414: Sales Tax Increase Under Scrutiny
The program shifted to local Tucson politics, where Joel Strabala provided updates on Proposition 414, a ballot measure that would increase the city's sales tax by half a percent, bringing it to 9.2%.
Strabala, who has been observing the election process, reported that as of the latest tabulation, approximately 28,000 ballots had been processed. With about 8,000 ballots arriving daily via mail, he estimated another 40,000 would arrive before the election concludes on March 11th.
Breaking down voter participation by party affiliation, Strabala noted that of Tucson's 127,885 registered Democrats, about 24,000 had returned ballots. Among 65,956 Republicans, nearly 16,000 had returned ballots, while 12,000 of the city's 108,357 independent voters had cast their votes.
The proposition, which claims that approximately 66% of the new tax revenue would fund first responders (police and fire), with the remaining 34-35% allocated to "community resilience" programs, has faced criticism for being fiscally irresponsible.
Strabala argued that the city's existing $2.4 billion budget should be sufficient: "They want $80 million. That's really 1% of their budget. Why do they need to raise sales tax by a half a percent? They can squeeze their belt and squeeze out 1% of their budget into savings."
He pointed out that Mesa, Arizona—a city of comparable size to Tucson—allocates approximately 50% of its budget to law enforcement, while Tucson only spends about 30%.
The sales tax increase would impact not only city residents but also those living in surrounding areas who shop in Tucson. "I would see more people, if they buy big-ticket items, they're going to leave the city and buy it out in the county," Strabala predicted. "People are struggling. They can't make ends meet, and raising their taxes by a half a percent—that's several hundred to a couple thousand a year."
For voters who still have ballots, Strabala reminded them of important deadlines: ballots must be postmarked by March 5th to be counted. After that date, voters can drop ballots at three receiving sites in the city or vote in person at seven voting locations on election day, March 11th.