Robert Kennedy Jr. has claimed he is shutting down an alleged government connection to child sex trafficking that has been widely discredited as a conspiracy theory.
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.
Trump suggested the children may have been trafficked as sex slaves, although there is no evidence to support his claim.
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RFK Jr.’s claim at a White House Cabinet meeting was the latest in a series of accusations by Trump officials against the previous administration that some experts have said are a distortion of the facts.
“We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy said on Wednesday.
“During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that,” he continued.
“We’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration,” he said.
The country’s top health official made the claim as top Trump officials touted their accomplishments during a Cabinet meeting to mark the first 100 days of the president’s second term.
Kennedy’s accusation about missing migrant children was similar to ones made by Trump both in interviews and on the campaign trail.
“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 his December TIME interview for ‘Person of the Year’. “And what I will be doing will be trying to find where they are and get them back to their parents.”
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has also vowed to track down migrant children he accused the Biden administration of losing. Homan claimed many of them would be in forced labor and the sex trade.
Republicans started making accusations that some 300,000 migrant children were missing after an August 2024 report by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office.
It found that 32,000 unaccompanied minors failed to show up for immigration court hearings from 2019 to May 2024. Another 291,000 migrant children did not receive court notices.
The report stated that those who do not appear for court are “considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
The policy director of the American Immigration Council, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, told the BBC the numbers indicated a “paperwork issue” rather than “anything nefarious.”
He said there are valid concerns about children being exploited, but they can’t the children are being trafficked.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement within HHS is typically responsible for unaccompanied migrant children taken into custody. The department is tasked with then finding sponsors for them.
During his confirmation hearing before the Senate in January, Kennedy repeated the claims that the migrant children were being sex trafficked and enslaved.
He told senators finding the children was a top priority of the Trump administration.
