Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#545 The Lost Voices of Children: "We're the Government, We're Here to Help"
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What if the organizations meant to protect vulnerable children are the very ones profiting from their plight? Join us as we confront this alarming issue with crime investigator and journalist Tom Hampson, who unveils the shocking reality of missing unaccompanied minors at the U.S. border. Discover how nearly 450,000 children have crossed into the country over the past five years, yet 323,000 remain unaccounted for. We critically examine the roles of NGOs, revealing the staggering financial gains they receive, and question their genuine motives. This conversation highlights the harrowing experiences of children and women, shedding light on exploitation and trafficking and questioning the systemic failures that allow this to continue.
Hear real-life stories that underscore the desperate need for compassion and systemic reform. This episode further explores the critical juncture of Western civilization, advocating for a return to Judeo-Christian values to inspire meaningful change. The discussion ignites a call to action, urging us to foster a spiritual revival and rekindle our commitment to safeguarding the most vulnerable in our society.
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I'm with Tom Hampson, a good friend of mine, who's also a crime investigator, a crime journalist and reporter. Tom, you wrote an article recently. We're the Government, we're here to Help. It's talking about hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors coming across the border, that have come across the border in the last couple of years, illegal immigrants that are missing. When we hear that, we think, well, we're trying to be kind and compassionate, letting all these children across the border, but in reality it's something much different, isn't it? What did you find when you were investigating this?
Speaker 1:Well, actually it was the Auditor General of the Department of Health or Department of Homeland Security that put a spotlight on the issue and they looked at the unaccompanied minors that were brought in in the last five years. And in the last five years it's almost 450,000 of these children that came across the border, that were picked up by Border Patrol and moved into the interior of the country. Now, of those 450,000, 323,000 of them are missing. They have no idea where they are. Now, the really shocking thing about it is that these nonprofit organizations that are hired by Homeland Security to move the kids from,000 unaccompanied minors, they were paid $5 billion just for that one year, $5 billion and they have no idea where most of those 127,000 kids are.
Speaker 2:As I'm looking at your report 2019, there was about 68,000 unaccompanied minors. Then in 2020, I know Trump was really trying to build that wall and try to clamp down on them it shrunk down to 15,000, which is still a lot of unaccompanied minors 15,000. But it was a huge reduction from what had been going on. And then you see, in 2021, from 15,000 up to 120,000, and then 2022, 127,000, 2023, almost 120,000 again. So this is a huge jump.
Speaker 2:You know, when I start to think about the chaos that is going on at the border, start to think about the chaos that is going on at the border. And again, you know I'm Catholic and you know there's another collection being taken up for Catholic relief services. But when you really look into it, tom, they're not doing anybody any favors. These NGOs who sound again, you know we use these words and we should with, with, with kids. Right, we have to watch out for them, we have to be kind, we have compassion, we have to care about them, but what we're doing is we're facilitating a, a, a, one of the, probably the potential for them to come across, to be sexually abused, to be used in all kinds of different ways. They can't even find these kids, tom, unpack that a little bit for us, will you?
Speaker 1:Well, first, it isn't just that they're being sexually exploited once they get here, or labor trafficked once they get here. A great many of the women, and I presume the female children, are sexually assaulted on their way here. There have been many reports of these so-called rape trees where they show the underwear of the women that has trophies that these cartel guys get for bringing them across the border. So now they get. You know that's what it costs them to get across the border. The cartels also charge between $6,000 and $15,000 per person to bring them into the country.
Speaker 2:So, tom Tom, I just read a report. I mean just to to pause here for a second, just to show how horrific this is. I just read a report that there was one young girl, 12 or 14 years old, that had semen from 22 different men in her. When they did an exam, 22 different DNA they found in her.
Speaker 1:That's not right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean again, when we open up these borders, when these NGOs from Christian organizations or any other organization go down there to facilitate this, we think we're being kind and compassionate, but we're really opening the floodgates to more and more and more of these coming in, more money for the cartels, more rape and suffering for the actual children and, as you said, women coming across the border, and the amount of money that's going to these NGOs is phenomenal, isn't it?
Speaker 1:It is, and you know, I point out in the article that the cartels only get between $6,000 and $15,000 for bringing people across the border.
Speaker 1:Per person At these 450,000 people that were brought in on. They were probably ten thousand dollars that they might have got per child. Well, who's paying for that? Who's paying that, that fee to bring the people across there? Somebody is some, so somebody's making money off of this besides them. But the shocking thing is that these, these ngos, are getting paid $42,000 per person, at least for the minors, $42,000 to move them from one place to another. So they're making more than the cartels. So I really have to question the motivation of many of the nonprofits, including the Christian nonprofits, for engaging in this kind of activity. Are they really looking out for the children or are they just looking out for their own bottom line? And because they're making millions of dollars off of this billions.
Speaker 2:And the more, the more we get down there and help them move these, these children again, without knowing where they're going. I mean, if I'm getting paid $49,000, tom, and as an organization I'm going to at least know where these kids are and report it Right, and then check on their health right, make sure that wherever I place them they're doing well. But this obviously is not happening because we don't even know where they are Well you know you look at the.
Speaker 1:If you look, just take a logical look at some of the things that are going on. The NGOs. They take this $42,500. Well, that money is used from many different things. Part of it is used to hire transportation companies to transport the children from one place to another. Some of the money might be used to get the pay for the first month's rent wherever they're staying. Part of the money might be for some other services that the child might need. So there's a lot of people that are taking a piece of those billions of dollars to come in, piece of that of those billions of dollars to come in. So so you have to wonder is this really being done for humanitarian reasons or is it being done for for pure capitalistic reasons? And all on top of that, it's all illegal. Everything, this movement of the people from one place in the, from the border to the interior of the country. Even though the government's doing it, it's not doing it in accordance with what the law is. They're not supposed to be doing that. They're supposed to be detained.
Speaker 2:When again, when you think about when? We lose respect for the law, when we no longer have a border, that means anything. We create disorder, so we're going to create chaos. Always in civilization, when you have chaos, there's going to be sin. There's going to be people coming in to take advantage of that chaos. The suffering always comes down to the poor, the most innocent, vulnerable. So these are going to be the women and children, and this happens over and over again.
Speaker 2:I think, when we start to think about these elections coming up, tom, and the lawlessness going on at the border in our cities all over it's amazing amount of lawlessness, right. I mean the violence, the crimes, et cetera, etc. Going up all the way across. We're going to see more and more victims of this. This is human victims, right, and when we see this and and all of these people making money on, on on each one of these people and we're the taxpayers we're always getting foot with the bill and and you know, what's amazing to me is young people are still voting for socialists, right, and not only young people.
Speaker 1:Well, one of the things that happened a few years ago was I think it was when President Trump first took office there was this criticism that they were keeping some of these unaccompanied minors in cages. There was this criticism that they were keeping some of these unaccompanied minors in cages, and I remember them having hysterics about keeping them in cages. You know little children in cages like animals or something. It wasn't like that. They were detained in this area, separated from the people that they came across the border with, to find out whether or not the people bringing them across the border were really their family members. So they were separating people from what was purported to be their family members and most of them turned out to be what we call now unaccompanied minors, because the people that they were with weren't their family members. The people that they were going to are not their family members.
Speaker 1:And now we've got all these NGOs facilitating this whole operation and it went from in the tens of thousands a year under the previous administration to hundreds of thousands a year during the current administration of just the kids.
Speaker 1:It's in the millions for the adults. You know it's. It's in the millions for the adults, and those two are being nonprofit organizations are being used to facilitate their movement into the interior of the country as well, and so there's a there's a huge dollar cost to this, but even more so, there's a huge cost to cultural cost to us, because these groups, like the you know the Haitians that they moved into into Springfield Ohio they've changed the character of the culture in that town, the. The townspeople that were in Springfield Ohio have a hard time getting health services because they're being over. Health services are being overrun by these immigrants that are there, the they're, they're driving vehicles, the and the accident rate in that town has just gone through the roof, the. The streets are unsafe because these people don't know how to drive and yet they're driving. So there's a number of other consequences that go along with this, and these nonprofits are profiting from being complicit in this kind of cultural sabotage.
Speaker 2:Moving off just the border alone. But certainly tied up with that is what's happening with FEMA right now with this hurricane coming through. So report after report from the people that actually were affected by this said was FEMA there to help you? And we know that they said they don't have the money because they've been helping the immigrants and this immigrant crisis, because they've been helping the immigrants in this immigrant crisis. And so the people are saying no, the only help we got were from neighboring towns, neighboring states, people on their own, coming in with pickup trucks and trucks bringing food and water and shovels to try to help people. So here we are again, double dipping, right, so the government takes the money.
Speaker 2:In a socialist system, what they'd say is they're going to go help the citizens when we need it, but they don't. And so what do we do? We have to pay our taxes and then we have to get in our truck and help the people anyways, and this is all a facade, again, you know. So we bring the immigrants in and this is all a facade, again, you know. So we bring the immigrants in. If the organization, if the government itself, if this so-called cabal that we have in power right now, if they cared about these kids, if they cared about actual families, they would be at least making sure we know where they are. Right, right and and again. You know, when you go from 10 000 to hundreds of thousands, to 10 000, maybe, maybe we were able to at least track where some of these kids went. Now we've totally lost control, haven't we?
Speaker 1:well, yeah, and I I don't really think they care that much, they're just, they're just going through the motions, the yeah, this, when you look at the numbers, what this, what this amounts to, is, if you have four children as a, as a parent or as a guardian, you have, you have a guardianship over four children and you've lost three of them. What kind of guardian are you? Yeah, what? What do you really care? Can can you make the case that, well, I really care about these kids and and, look, I took them in, but but you lost three of them. How serious.
Speaker 1:This is ridiculous five billion dollars a year five billion just in one year, in 2022, and it was 5.4 billion in 2022, 4.9 billion in 2023. So you're talking billions of dollars. This is not chump change, yeah.
Speaker 2:And when I think about the ideologues, the HHS is in charge of this thing and so it says at this point once these miners, the Border Patrol agents encounter these miners, who generally arrive with a group of others, mostly adults, the unaccompanied minors are separated out and housed separately from the adults. At this point the Department of Health and Human Services takes control of the children. When I think about Richard Levine is second in charge of the HHS, is second in charge of the HHS. So here's somebody that runs because of their ideology. Who's appointed because of their ideology, right? Richard Levine is Rachel Levine. Hey, whatever his issue is, he condones these gender ideologies and affirmation putting kids on puberty blockers, et cetera, et cetera. Here's my point In here in Illinois, catholic organizations that would place kids in foster homes, in orphanages, they were run by nuns, sisters, great organizations. They are no longer here. They're out of business in Illinois because they wouldn't put them with these ideologues right.
Speaker 1:The same-sex parents. They would say, no, we're not going to do that, and if you don't agree to that, then the government won't allow you to provide services which is insane.
Speaker 2:It is insane because we're not saying I mean Catholic orphanage services. They never said that no kids can be placed with same-sex couples. They said we're not going to do it. I mean there's plenty of other organizations that we're doing, but the Catholic organizations here in Illinois placed a lot of kids in foster home and a lot of kids in orphanages.
Speaker 2:Now you take them out and you bring in more immigrants with less resources to be able to actually put them and place them in homes that have been vetted really well, and what's going to happen, tom? Again, you're going to have a lot of kids falling through the cracks, and this is really the sad thing. And this is again when we live in a world of moral relativism. When we have no truth, no objective truth, no standards at all, it becomes chaos, and the border crisis, to me, tom, is just another manifestation of this disorder that we're seeing all around us today.
Speaker 1:Well, you're going to see, when you think about the number of potential well-qualified foster parents, more of them are going to be heterosexuals than homosexuals, a lot more so. Basically, when you take some, an organization like catholic charities, out of the mix, where most, where all of their placements would be with heterosexual couples, you've basically eliminated the largest group of people who are who would be good foster parents for these kids.
Speaker 2:Well, at least, at least they were vetted right.
Speaker 2:At least you know they went through a vetting process and so they you know they've been doing this for a long, long time. Yeah, so they had networks of these foster homes and networks of foster homes that would that weren't going to adopt the kids per se, but would give them a place while they're waiting for adoption, give them a place to stay. Some foster families, of course, adopted kids, but once they adopted a couple, sometimes a couple of kids, sometimes they couldn't handle anymore. But yet Catholic orphan services and foster care services they knew that these people would take in at least short term, take in some of these kids that really needed a family for a month or two or three, while we're waiting to find them another home.
Speaker 2:And so these were all relationships, Tom. These were people that they knew, these were people that I could just call hey, Tom, I got this kid. I know you're busy, I know you're packed over there, but just can you take him for a few weeks? I know he's going to be in a good place. He's really been through a lot, right, or she's really been through a lot, or raped or whatever. And you knew how to treat this young person, how to bring them into a loving home, and can you imagine if they get put in a place where they just suffer more violence?
Speaker 1:It just makes you sick. Well, and I question a lot of these foster placements that are being made. I know that in California I don't have the figures here for Illinois, but I know in California a few years ago they had at least 3,000 homes that were licensed to be foster parents that another agency went in and took a look at all the addresses and found that there was a sex offender at 3,000 of these homes that were licensed to be foster parents. Now this kind of thing is happening all over the country. One of the dangers is that predators go where the kids are and if you have a big need for foster parents, a predator is going to try to be a foster parent. I can guarantee you that that's going to, that that's going to happen and that is what a terrible.
Speaker 1:proper vetting for these people yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when you have chaos like we have now, can you imagine again a young child that may have been sexually abused on the way here, separated from their family and put into a foster home with a predator? It's almost unbelievable, it makes you sick. And now we have hundreds of thousands of these kids. You know you write in the article again just to reiterate what you said. So cartel traffickers are reportedly paid between $6,000 and $15,000 a year. These NGOs are making $42,000 per child. I mean, it's huge money. Like you said, everybody's got their hand out in this. This is a goldmine, you wrote, for everyone involved, except for the children, except for the children.
Speaker 2:And this, I think, tom, is what we have to keep in mind when we're talking about this stuff at the children except for the children and this, I think, tom, is what we have to keep in mind when we're talking about this stuff. At the border, I get into discussions with people and of course, you're a hater, you don't have compassion, you're not kind to these young kids coming across the border and, at the end of the day, everyone that makes it across this border has probably been abused in some way. We know the numbers are high. We know the numbers are high. The cartel is moving them over. The cartel is now finding out it's more lucrative to move people than drugs right now.
Speaker 1:Well, and they're probably involved in the transportation business up here too. They probably own some of these, some of the other things that you know. I am a believer that nonprofit organizations, and certainly Christian organizations, should not take a dime from the government, and a lot of the counter argument is well, they wouldn't be able to afford to handle all these kids. Well, maybe if they, if there was nobody to handle them, maybe they'd stop allowing them in. You know, if you have an organization like that, I don't think that you should be able to get the money from the government, because the government is. The larger the government becomes, the more money it gets, the more corrupt it.
Speaker 2:The more money it gets, the more corrupted it becomes and it corrupts everything around it you know, tom I, we work with some organizations down in mexico that work with the very, very poor and kids that are homeless, kids that come from very poor families, that maybe the father and or mother are addicted in some way drugs, alcohol, etc. They will sell their children. They will sell. I mean, the cartels are there. First of all, the nuns told me this that go into these mountain areas and they said you know, the cartels will go in there and take the kids right off the street in these poor towns. But there's other kids that are actually just sold for not that much money from their parents, from their father, for, you know, $1,000 is a lot of money to them.
Speaker 1:And you give them $1,000 American.
Speaker 2:They will sell. Then they take that child across the border and you know this is where there's a major abuse coming in. And again, when I think about these children, you think about a smiling little kid and then you see the light coming out of those kids' eyes and what a travesty we're talking about here. So when somebody starts to talk to me about promoting kindness, love and generosity, chaos and disorder is not the way you do it, is it? Tom?
Speaker 1:No, Well, no, and yeah, they're being sold all throughout Latin America and that's nothing compared to the kids that are in Asia, in India I can't remember the name of that movie where it showed all of the orphans that are living on the streets in India, that are just subject to constant exploitation and and and parents who can't afford to take care of their kids will sell them to somebody else to be a slave, to be to, to be for, for sex, whatever. It doesn't make any difference. They just sell them for, for whatever they can get for them. People in this country don't seem to be able to identify with that. They can't comprehend that that's something that would happen, but it happens all the time, it happens every day, everywhere around the world, and a lot of those kids are winding up here. Some of them are some of these kids who are now the unaccompanied minors that are somewhere in the United States that are being exploited by whoever brought them in.
Speaker 2:Tom, this is a big deal, isn't it? It's a big, complex problem. We know, though, at the end of the day, when you're talking about border, just to open your border up like this and facilitate this type of a mass movement into our country is not good for the country. As you said, the resources that we have are not unlimited. Even if these kids, if we could take care of them all, we have to find out where they're at. There's no way you can take care of all these kids until you know where they're at.
Speaker 2:You know where they're placed, and we're generous people here in the United States in general, but if you break down the country and you break down the culture and you waste the amount of money that we're wasting to fuel everybody's pockets and this is the bottom line story here, this anytime you get into situations like this, it's these agencies, especially the government itself, that's lining the pockets of themselves and other people. It's growing, the government grows like a cancer. You've got politicians holding their hands out, you've got all these NGOs holding their hands out, and, at the end of the day, the victims are the children, the poor. I wish we could solve all of those problems, but what you know is without an ordered, structured society it's not helping anybody.
Speaker 1:Well, and you also know that the way things, these kinds of problems expose the lie that is, the government's concern for the welfare of children. You cannot be concerned for the welfare of children and allow something like this to happen. It's just not possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that might be a good way to end. This is to keep in mind the hypocrisy of saying that we care about children to your point and yet we don't even know where they are Right. Hey, tom, god bless you, thanks for being with me.
Speaker 2:Another cheerful one. Yes, well, you know what? I'll tell you what. We have an election here, tom, and you know we either restore order and then you know we're not done, are we? I mean, let's just say we were able to close the border and restore order. People got to wake up to the fact that life is short and the problems that we're outlining today we have to start to look around and see how we're going to help. You know who we help, how we help and and do it in a, in a, in a proper light, because there's certainly a lot of people that need help today, but we work a lot right here in the United States, tom, right With exposing what's going on in our own school systems those kids that are being sexually abused.
Speaker 2:It's happening right here in our country and I and I said I was going to end but. But but you know you, your stats in our presentation show that we have 60 million adults walking around here in the United States that were sexually abused as children.
Speaker 1:That's a huge number.
Speaker 2:Tom, one in four girls, one in six boys was sexually abused here, and those numbers are going up, aren't they Right?
Speaker 1:And half of them are being abused in our schools, and we've known that forever, and nobody has done anything about it other than just give a bunch of lip service to it and do some pathetic training that has no effect whatsoever.
Speaker 2:Well, let's say this because let's leave on a higher light. You're right, I mean, we don't want to leave on a bummer. It was the Judeo-Christian ethic that changed Western civilization, that brought us to a point where we could take care of our children, that we didn't have homeless kids, like you said, in India and other countries. What made that different, tom, was a Judeo-Christian principle. We based our society on that and we started to prosper and we were able families were able to support their kids. We're able, and these were not small families. I mean, we might have smaller families today, but you know we had six, seven, eight, 10 kids. It was not uncommon, you know, and in those times we were still able to keep them in our homes, you know, provide some opportunities for them in this country and in Western civilization as a whole. And when that's fading today, again you have this chaos coming in and this is pretty clear to see isn't it?
Speaker 1:Well, there was a time when, during the growth of the Christian, of Christianity around the world, that the majority of Christians took seriously the call to take care of the least of these. And they did. They went out and the children that were left to die of exposure, they would pick them up and adopt and take care of them. The children, the orphans they would bring into their own homes. They took care of people. They wouldn't tolerate this many children or any children being missing. They would look for them. They wouldn't allow a government to set up a system that allowed this kind of thing to happen. But today, people are more concerned about you know what they're going to do this weekend than they are about the people around them, and I think we need to have a new awareness of what's going on around us and begin to fear God again. I think that would that would might help us, might spur many of us to do what we're we're asked to do as Christians.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's a positive thing Get back down on your knees, you know, and let's bring this Judeo-Christian this, this principle, let's bring Christianity back into Western civilization.
Speaker 1:Now, I don't think that that's going to happen overnight but we have a chance here in the United States at least there could be a revival at any moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there could be, and if there's not, god bless us. Hold on, buckle up, brother. Hey, good to be with you. Thanks everyone, thanks for joining us. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.