As the U.S. has been inundated with a record number of immigrants illegally crossing the border, the unaccompanied children crisis also has spiked. Unaccompanied children are those who cross illegally without a parent or guardian.

The government typically pays to send them to a sponsor. But whistleblowers say the sponsors are vetted through little more than an honor system, and the kids are sometimes trafficked into the hands of criminals and gangs.

“It’s nothing less than taxpayer-funded child slavery. Nothing less,” said federal whistleblower Deborah White. In 2021, she took an emergency assignment helping process the masses of unaccompanied immigrant children flooding illegally into the U.S., as President Joe Biden took office and the border crisis exploded.

Most of the kids coming across without a parent already know someone in the U.S. who will take them in or sponsor them, White said.

“Typically the children will come with information either pinned onto them, [or] it can be Sharpied on their arms at times… But all of that information is then taken by the Border Patrol and then put into their systems over at Border Patrol,” she said.

The children then go to undocumented people already living in the U.S., she said.

I asked how the government ensures it’s not facilitating the trafficking of a child into the hands of somebody who’s mistreating them, or even a pedophile ring.

“And that’s the crux of the matter, is that we didn’t have that ability,” White said.

As she tried to do due diligence, she says she uncovered many suspicious indicators of child trafficking, such as not just one or two children being sent to supposed sponsors in the same location, but hundreds.

Experts say children crossing illegally into the U.S. without a parent can find themselves placed in homes where they work exhausting jobs to pay smuggling fees and expenses to their sponsors.

The potential for abuse has grown with the numbers. In 2020, Trump’s last year in office, 15,128 children who’d crossed the border illegally were sent for placement with sponsors. In 2023, that number ballooned eight times to 117,789. The total over 5 years: more than 448,000 children.

We went to Michigan to speak with high school teacher Richard Angstman. He says he and his colleagues began noticing more immigrant students coming to school overtired and unfocused.

In fact, a New York Times investigation focused, in part, on the Grand Rapids area. It exposed children working on overnight shifts and dangerous factory jobs that can violate child labor laws.

Angstman said the kids’ ages range from 14 all the way up to 19 or 20.

I asked if it’s legal for a 14-year-old to work in a place like that.

“Not that many hours,” Angstman said. “We could kind of tell that some of them probably were being forced.”

The companies accused in the Michigan scandal promised investigations. The Labor Department opened investigations, too.

“Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” airs at 10 a.m. Sunday, WJLA (Channel 7) and WBFF (Channel 45).