Cherokee Nation denies it helped enable trafficking of migrant children
Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. has refuted allegations that Cherokee Federal, a division of the tribe’s business arm, Cherokee Nation Businesses, has played a role in the sex trafficking of migrant children at a California emergency intake facility.
"For over two years, Cherokee Nation and Cherokee Federal have been wrongly and unjustly smeared through unhinged conspiracy theories spread by a select few," Hoskin said.
In 2021, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded Cherokee Federal a $706 million contract to process unaccompanied children at a facility in Pomona, California, and reunite them with families and/or sponsors.
Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA,) Bill Cassidy (R-LA,) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) hosted a roundtable discussion in Washington July 9 in which HHS whistleblowers Deborah White and Tara Rodas accused the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and Cherokee Federal of prioritizing “speed over safety” in releasing unaccompanied minors.
They cited instances in which children were turned over to poorly or entirely unvetted “sponsors,” including criminals and, in one case, a member of the violent MS13 gang, despite an urgent “do not release advisory” which Rodas sent to HHS officials and Cherokee Federal staff.
Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), who serves on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, participated in that roundtable. During a recent community meeting in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, he denied that Cherokee Federal engaged in placing children in unsafe situations.
"During that hearing, I was talking about HHS and their decision-making and some of my colleagues were talking about Cherokee Federal," Lankford said. "I think that was unfair of how that was pulled in, because that wasn't their job for the final selection."
Cherokee Federal's job was to take care of the children after they crossed the border, Lankford said.
The New York Times in 2023 reported that the Biden administration had lost track of 85,000 children.
The Center for Public Integrity says that figure is misleading and only represents the number of children who could not be reached during follow-up welfare checks.
FILE - A USDA Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations client receives food being distributed at a housing complex in Porum, OK, Nov. 18, 2016.
Senators to Agriculture Department: Act swiftly to restore food deliveries to Indian reservations
A bipartisan group of senators is urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, to address severe delays and issues in a federal food distribution program that delivers food to eligible households on Indian reservations and other designated areas. The program is known as the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, or FDPIR.
“Families that participate in this program do so at the expense of being eligible to participate in other federal food assistance, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),” reads an August 23 letter to Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack and signed by Senator Jeffrey Merkley (D-OR) and six Senate colleagues.
“Further, many Tribal households choose to participate in FDPIR over SNAP because they do not have access to grocery stores so families have limited options for assistance, should they face delays in their FDPIR deliveries.”
In March, the USDA consolidated the food delivery contractors to a single contractor in Kansas City, Missouri, over the objection of tribal leaders. Since then, deliveries have been sporadic, at best.
A tribal program director on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota spoke to VOA on condition of anonymity.
“The program usually serves 1,100-plus people a month; about a hundred of them are elders,” she said. “We usually get four to five trucks of food a month. But our May trucks were delayed, and by June, we ran out of meat and frozen foods. In July, we didn’t get our trucks until the end of the month.”
The FDPIR is billed as a supplemental food program, but for many families on the reservations, these deliveries make up their entire monthly food supply.
“We normally receive ours the third Monday of every month,” she added. “But in July, we didn't get our trucks until the end of the month, and we’re still waiting on our August deliveries.”
Some tribe members have the option of shopping off-reservation, using monthly, electronically-delivered SNAP benefits – that is, if they have transportation and can afford high supermarket prices.
“We also have a mobile vendor,” she said. “They come around the day before SNAP benefits come out. They charge whatever they want.”
Senate lawmakers have given the USDA until September 9 to report and document reasons for the delays. The USDA says it is working with the Missouri contractor to fix the backlog but tribal leaders say they aren’t working fast enough.