An NGO with a Steeple: Why the Bishops Can’t Afford to Close the Border

How the American Church traded prophetic distance for a human trafficking contract.

Tara Lee Rodas thought she was answering a call from God. It was 2021, and the Biden administration had issued a desperate plea for federal employees to volunteer at Emergency Intake Sites for the surge of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) flooding the border. Rodas, a dedicated public servant and a woman of faith, raised her hand. She landed at the Pomona Fairplex in California—a sprawling, makeshift city of cots and confusion.

She arrived expecting to place vulnerable children into loving homes. She expected a rescue mission. What she found was a logistics operation.

Rodas watched as the system—frantic to clear bed space and secure grant metrics—began handing children over to “sponsors” with barely a glance at the vetting paperwork. She saw red flags ignored. She saw children released to addresses linked to labor trafficking rings. And when she blew the whistle, she realized she wasn’t witnessing a glitch. She was witnessing a feature.

In her testimony to Congress, Rodas delivered a line that should haunt every pew-sitting Catholic in America: “We are luring children to the United States to be the white-glove delivery system of these children to known MS-13, 18th Street Gang, Russian Balkan crime syndicates”.

And that ‘we’? It isn’t just the federal government. It’s the Catholic Church.

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