One of President Donald Trump's Cabinet officials bought into a conspiracy theory that his agency helped enslave children.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told his colleagues that he had shut down the connection between the government and a child trafficking ring that doesn't exist, The Daily Beast reported Wednesday.
"The Health and Human Services Secretary was referring to an unsubstantiated allegation made by Donald Trump that more than 300,000 migrant children disappeared during Joe Biden‘s presidency," said the report.
Trump suggested that the Biden administration lost 300,000 immigrant children who were likely lured into trafficking or forced labor camps. The story dates to a Nov. 26 interview with Trump advisor Tom Homan, who was ultimately named as the so-called "border czar."
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"Shame on them," Homan said of the Biden administration. "They have over 300,000 children that they have released [to] unvetted sponsors that they can't find."
"Many are going to be in forced labor. Many forced sex trade," Homan added. "We need to save these children."
During his vice presidential debate, then-Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) claimed the Department of Homeland Security "effectively lost" a total of 320,000 migrant children.
The actual story is that an August 2024 report found that 32,000 unaccompanied minors failed to show up for court dates at immigration courts from 2019-23. The report said that 291,000 children didn't get a court notice at all in the four years spanning the Trump and Biden administrations.
Trump parroted the claim in his interview with TIME magazine at the end of 2024.
“We have 325,000 children here during Democrats — and this was done by Democrats — who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead,” Trump said in the TIME interview. “And what I will be doing will be trying to find where they are and get them back to their parents.”
During the Cabinet meeting, Kennedy claimed, “We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking."
“During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that,” he added.
“We’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration,” he said.
He did not provide a timeline for how long he thinks it will take to find the "300,000 children."
During his first term, Trump's administration took children away from migrant parents entering the U.S.