How The Free Press spun Trump's cruelty toward migrants as a heroic campaign to "save" kids
As Bari Weiss guts CBS News -- and sets her sights on CNN -- the publication she founded continues to sanitize this administration's worst abuses
If recent reporting is correct, once the pending Paramount/Skydance takeover of Warner Brothers is complete, Larry and David Ellison plan to put Bari Weiss in charge of CNN, one of the largest networks on the planet. This would expand Weiss’s already enormous influence to include global news, shaping how U.S. politics is covered internationally.
It’s hard to overstate how destructive this could be. Weiss has already come under heavy scrutiny for the train wreck she caused after the Ellisons put her in charge of CBS News and 60 Minutes. If the Ellisons give her control of CNN, it will be because they approve of her editorial vision — and her willingness to launder far-right policies and propaganda to make them more palatable to a mainstream audience.
The best indicator of where she’d take two of the most prestigious names in broadcast news is her record as editor-in-chief of The Free Press, the publication she founded. In my last post, I looked at how The Free Press’s coverage of the refugee resettlement program sanitized MAGA and Trump administration rhetoric, praising Trump for “fixing” a refugee program he’s aggressively sought to eliminate for everyone but white South Africans.
Today, I want to look at another issue where The Free Press’s coverage has been sensationalist, overtly partisan, and consistently wrong on the facts: what happens to kids who show up at the border to request asylum.
Until recently, the reporter covering these issues was Madeleine Rowley, whose articles on the resettlement program and Trump’s importing of Afrikaners I discussed in my prior post. As I previously explained, Rowley was formerly a fellow at the anti-immigration Manhattan Institute. Since then, she has left The Free Press to join Manhattan full time. She announced the move on X, and added that she’s “excited” to be working with Christopher Rufo, the activist and pundit (and Free Press contributor) who unleashed the racist lie claiming Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, a rumor embraced by Donald Trump during his 2024 presidential run.
Rowley’s return to a think tank pushing anti-immigrant policies is a natural next step for a reporter who devoted herself to amplifying right-wing storylines about migrants and asylum-seekers. In the months leading up to the election, Rowley’s coverage for The Free Press was virtually indistinguishable from the anti-immigrant narratives pushed by Trump. She amplified the accusation that the Biden administration and the NGOs who work with migrant minors were wasting billions of dollars while “losing” hundreds of thousands of children. She pushed the dubious claim that Biden’s border policies precipitated a surge in sex trafficking. And after Trump returned to office, Rowley uncritically pushed the MAGA narrative that the new administration was cleaning up Biden’s mess, heroically saving migrant children from abuse and exploitation.
There was no evidence for any of this. While the Biden administration did struggle to manage a post-pandemic surge of migrants at the border – and while there’s plenty of room to second-guess how they handled that crisis – there’s nothing to show that they “lost” children. Nor is there evidence that their decisions prompted a surge in sex trafficking. In fact, the only evidence Rowley offered for the latter actually suggests that Biden was more attentive to sex trafficking victims than Trump.
The evidence we do have shows that Trump has been eager to sacrifice the health and well-being of migrant kids to his broader goal of mass deportations. He has cut resources and manpower for sex trafficking investigations and prosecutions, and has made clear that his priority isn’t to rescue exploited kids, but to incarcerate and deport them.
This was already abundantly clear during Trump’s first term, when he cut funding for trafficking victims, made it harder for victims to get special visas, and separated children from their parents. Biden restored many of those policies, only to face an unprecedented post-pandemic surge in migrants. Trump and his supporters cynically spun Biden’s attempt to deal with that crisis as facilitating sex trafficking, while preposterously claiming that detaining children, separating them from their families, and deporting them is somehow more humane than placing them with relatives. When Trump returned to office, they then painted him and his aides as valiantly coming to the rescue of “lost” kids.
Most mainstream reporters and media outlets saw through this transparent attempt to present gratuitous cruelty as heroic virtue. Rowley, Weiss, and The Free Press did not. They went along for the ride.
What the law says about child migrants
To understand why The Free Press’s coverage of migration and trafficking is just propaganda dressed up as investigative reporting, it helps to have some basic background on the laws and policies governing these issues – and to separate facts from the misinformation.
Human trafficking – and sex trafficking in particular – is obviously a sensitive issue. A lack of reliable data makes the topic ripe for political manipulation and many advocacy groups, while well-intentioned, have often conflated trafficking with consensual sex work, and pushed claims and statistics about the prevalence of sex trafficking that have been proved to be exaggerated. The MAGA movement has compounded this problem, weaponizing many people’s legitimate fears about child sex trafficking to push a broader anti-immigration agenda. This has only further polluted an information environment already saturated with conspiracy, noise and demagoguery – and contributed to an assault on protections that have long been in place for children who arrive at the U.S. border.
Under current federal law, when children show up at the border without a parent or guardian, the government is required to take them in and provide medical care, housing, and food. The government is also supposed to give them legal representation and afford them due process if they request asylum. This is a decent and humane policy – and, at least on paper, one of the more generous policies in the developed world.
The government’s obligation to the care of migrant children was laid out in a 1997 document called the Flores settlement, which sets minimum standards the government must meet when it comes to caring for children while their cases are processed and litigated. Under Flores, children cannot be held for more than 20 days at any facility that hasn’t been specifically licensed for their care. Federal courts have since ruled that these standards also apply to migrant kids who arrive at the border with their parents. So if the government wants to detain an entire family, it must do so in a way that ensures that the children are treated in compliance with Flores.
Administrations from both parties have been lax about complying with Flores, and have tried at various points to wriggle out of some of its requirements. But Trump has shown particular contempt for the agreement, especially toward court rulings expanding Flores to cover kids who arrive with their families. People like Stephen Miller think those rulings created incentives for families to come to the U.S., because they know they’ll be treated better than if one parent comes alone.
Trump tried unsuccessfully to dismantle Flores by executive fiat in his first term, but was stopped by the federal courts. In the meantime, Miller and “immigration czar” Tom Homan hatched a plan to get around it: They’d just take kids away from their parents. They would keep the parents locked up at a traditional detention facility for prosecution, while sending the kids to a Flores-compliant facility elsewhere in the country. This was the infamous child separation policy. After public backlash – and likely in anticipation of losses in court – the administration (sort of) walked the policy back, though not until they had separated more than 4,000 kids from their parents.
Child separation was a moral and political catastrophe. When Biden took office in 2021, one of his first acts was to create a task force to find separated kids and reunite them with their families. At the time Trump returned to office, more than 1,300 kids remained unaccounted for. Trump eliminated the reunification task force on the first day of his second term.
Trump also instituted a policy in his first term that came to be known as “Remain in Mexico.” Previously, people who requested asylum at the border were released into the country on a type of probation while their cases were adjudicated so long as they were not deemed to be a threat. Immigration hawks loathed this policy, which they called “catch and release,” and which Trump channeled into repeated claims that Biden was allowing “lunatics and criminals” into the country. In truth, the overwhelming majority were peaceful people looking to make a life in the U.S. and who dutifully showed up for their court hearings – at least until DHS started illegally arresting them in courthouses.
As the name suggests, under Remain in Mexico, asylum-seekers were not allowed into the U.S. but were rather sent to Mexico to wait while their cases were adjudicated. For Miller, Trump, and other immigration opponents, this had a number of benefits. Most migrants had nowhere to go in Mexico and were housed in tent camps under awful conditions, which made it much harder for them to secure legal assistance for their asylum claims. Many ended up missing their hearings, and thus their opportunity to argue for asylum.
Minors were supposed to be excluded from Remain in Mexico, but the administration sent many who arrived with their families to Mexico, anyway. That put parents in the position of having to decide whether to send their kids back to request asylum alone, or stay with them in the squalid tent camps. Kids got sick, were traumatized, and – yes – some were sexually abused.
Toward the end of his first term, Trump was gifted with another way to turn back migrants. When Covid hit in 2020, he invoked a law from the 1940s that allows the government to turn away asylum seekers during a public health emergency. Thousands more kids from Central and South America were expelled into Mexico. They, too, were housed in tents under pretty horrific conditions. They too got sick, and they too were susceptible to abuse and sexual assault.
“Biden’s open borders”
After Biden took office and Covid began to subside, a historically large number of migrants started arriving at the border. Trump – and The Free Press – blamed the surge on an “open borders” policy. The truth was of course more complicated. There were lots of reasons for the surge But there was at least a kernel of truth to the lie: It seems likely that when Trump left office, many people who had contemplated coming to the U.S. thought they faced better odds of being granted asylum.
The sheer volume of the migrants arriving at the border took the Biden administration off guard. A large percentage were families and unaccompanied minors. Holding facilities were quickly overrun. Immigration court dockets hit a massive and growing backlog.
Under Flores, the Biden administration had the option of temporarily holding kids at general detention facilities. But officials were also acutely aware of the way the public had recoiled at images of kids in cages during Trump’s term. “At that point the Biden administration then had a really difficult decision,” the head of one resettlement NGO told me. “They could either keep putting kids in these dangerous, overcrowded facilities which we had a reputation for abuse, or they could expedite the process of turning them over to a relative or sponsor.”
The Biden administration chose the latter. To facilitate placement of these kids, they expedited background checks on the sponsors to whom they turned over migrant children.
All of the experts and advocates I’ve spoken to agreed that there were legitimate risks in expediting the vetting process. But they also say that it was probably the best of a bad set of options. “I don’t know what else they could have done,” the same NGO head told me (he asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation). “Yes, there’s slightly more risk with less thorough background checks, but you’re also putting kids at risk by holding them in general detention centers. And what we’re seeing in those centers now is horrific.”
Nevertheless, it was this decision by the Biden administration that would eventually form the basis for the claim that Biden caused a surge in sex trafficking. By speeding up the background checks, his critics claimed, officials had placed kids with people working for gangs, drug cartels, and trafficking networks. This claim, which particularly resonated with anti-trafficking groups with a far-right, Christian nationalist perspective, was often mixed with unsourced horror stories that were difficult to verify.
There is little question that at least some children released to distant or non-relatives were exploited. About a half million kids came to the U.S. in the early 2020s, and migration conditions are ripe for exploitation. Before long, however, a scaremongering narrative began to emerge on the right that the Biden administration was “losing” tens of thousands of children and that his policy of expediting placement with sponsors had put kids into the hands of traffickers. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody – now a U.S. Senator – called on Congress to investigate Biden for “facilitating sex trafficking,” for example. And the Center for Immigration Studies declared that “Biden’s border policies facilitate shocking modern slavery.”
To drive this narrative, MAGA activists seized on – and distorted – three different government reports that raised concerns about migrant children. The first was a disturbing 2021 report revealing abuse at NGO-run facilities where unaccompanied children were held. Spearheaded by Senators Ron Wyden and Chuck Grassley, the report found more than 7,500 “Significant Incident Reports” across 200 facilities between 2016 and 2020. All but about 200 of those of the incidents were child-on-child, which could include a “slap on the buttocks,” or consensual sex between teenagers. Child-on-child abuse is of course still a problem, but it’s also different than abuse by staff. Yet Trump supporters would go on to cite this report – and its bipartisan authors – as proof that children were victimized thanks to Biden’s “open border” policies. That’s a dubious contention given that Biden wasn’t in the White House for any of the five years covered by the report — and that Trump was president for four of the five.
Then came a February 2024 DHS Inspector General’s report on the placement of child migrants. The report criticized the Biden administration for how it expedited the placement of kids with sponsors. It found, for example, that 16 percent of audited cases lacked documentation for one or more of the required components of a background check on a sponsor. In other instances, the office had failed to upload documentation of fingerprint checks or in-home visits. In most cases, the problem was a failure to document, not perform, the actual task – and the number of cases in which proper vetting wasn’t done at all were in the single digits, out of a sample of more than 16,000. Still, the report concluded that these shortcomings had left migrant children vulnerable to explanation.
The final report driving MAGA’s child sex trafficking narrative came in August 2024, also from the DHS Inspector General. It found that, between 2019 and 2023, 32,000 unaccompanied minors had failed to show up for court dates in immigration court – and another 291,000 children never received a notice to appear.
The report expressed concern that DHS may have lost track of these kids, and that the agency “take immediate action to ensure [their] safety.” But it did not conclude that children had been lost, trafficked, or killed, as Biden’s critics have claimed. “This is not a ‘missing kids’ problem; it’s a ‘missing paperwork’ problem,” Jonathan Beier, associate director of research and evaluation for the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program told the A.P. in October 2024.
According to experts, the AP reported, there were “many reasons why the children might not have appeared for hearings or received a notice to appear in the first place.” The AP cited myriad, mundane explanations; “a lack of communication between government agencies could mean a notice is sent to the wrong address if it has been updated with one agency and not another.” Advocates said the problem could be as simple as a sponsor or relative not answering the phone, or getting a new phone number.
The period covered by the IG’s report also included 15 months of Trump’s first term, which made the MAGA claims of “lost” children ironic; Trump’s own DHS had been similarly criticized at the time. And the Trump administration, too, defensively (but correctly!) rejected the accusation that they had “lost” any kids.
Though there were valid concerns about Biden’s response to the migration wave, many anti-trafficking groups praised him for his efforts to fight the exploitation of migrant kids. But as his term gave way to the 2024 presidential race, the Trump campaign, MAGA activists, and right-wing media stepped up the accusations that Biden and NGOs were enabling sex trafficking.
Targeting Biden for “enabling sex trafficking”
Just a few weeks before the 2024 election, The Free Press published the first in a series of breathless reports by Rowley purporting to investigate the sex trafficking epidemic unleashed by “Biden’s disastrous border policies.”
Titled “Inside America’s Fastest-Growing Criminal Enterprise: Sex Trafficking,” Rowley put herself in the center of the action, tagging along with “Lisa” from Shepherd’s Watch, an anti-trafficking group with evangelical Christian ties, as they toured alleged brothels in the Dallas suburbs. “I ask her if the sex trafficking of migrant girls had increased since the Biden administration threw open the border, leading to 8 million migrants crossing the southern border since 2021,” Rowley writes, “‘Yes,’ she says.”
The story leaned heavily on far-right activists, as well as unverified claims from Lisa herself, who told Rowley that online ads for young Latina sex workers had soared. “Since the border opened, Lisa added, over 90 percent of the ads are for migrant girls,” Rowley wrote.
Rowley’s other sources include figures like pro-Trump Sheriff Grady Judd, who boasted about a recent bust of “several dozen traffickers.” Judd, Rowley wrote, “is proof that something can be done about trafficking if law enforcement makes it a priority.”
But if history is any indication, press releases boasting about mass arrests of “sex traffickers” typically result in criminal charges for johns and sex workers, but few charges related to actual trafficking. The same month Rowley’s story ran, for example, Judd himself claimed to have arrested 157 people – including “25 undocumented immigrants” – in a separate “human sex trafficking operation.” Only one of those arrested was ultimately charged with sex trafficking.
Moreover, Judd has seemed unconcerned about sexual abuse when immigrants aren’t involved. Rowley’s admiring portrayal came just weeks before he made national news when rape survivors accused Judd’s deputies of harassing and smearing them when they tried to report sexual assault. One 12-year-old girl was not only threatened with criminal prosecution, Judd’s office forced her to write letters of apology – to both her rapist and to Judd. Her rapist is now in prison.
But perhaps the most egregiously misleading part of Rowley’s story was her use of data tallying investigations into potential trafficking. The Department of Health and Human Services oversees a small office called the Office on Trafficking in Persons (TIP), which investigates claims of people who say they’ve been trafficked. If it finds them credible, it certifies the victims, making them eligible for federal aid as well as a T-visa, a designation that permits undocumented trafficking victims to stay in the country if they assist in criminal investigations.
According to Rowley, TIP certified about 625 victims per year during Trump’s first term. In Biden’s first year, she wrote, “that number jumped to 1,143. In 2022 it jumped again, to 2,226. Last year, the number stood at 2,148.”
Rowley cited these figures as evidence of an explosion in sex trafficking under Biden. But these numbers don’t tell us that at all. The number of cases TIP certifies is not a reliable proxy for sex trafficking trends. Those figures are primarily driven by how much staff and funding TIP has to conduct investigations in the first place. They’re a reflection of the current administration’s priorities. Certifications are also dependent on how many victims are willing to come forward – which itself depends in part on a given administration’s willingness to grant T-visas. The victims identified by TIP, after all, are overwhelmingly undocumented immigrants.
As veteran journalist Melissa Gira-Grant, who has covered sex trafficking for years, told me, “I have never seen someone use that information from that office in that way.”
The increase in certifications, in other words, shows only that the Biden administration was investigating more trafficking claims than the first Trump administration. That could have been because Biden’s policies created more incidents of trafficking to investigate. But there’s another, more likely explanation: Sex trafficking investigations just weren’t a priority during the first Trump administration.
Rowley did not address this second possibility in her piece. If she had, she’d have found plenty to support it. Trump made it much harder to get a T-visa. In a 2022 op-ed for The Hill, a sociologist who studies human trafficking and an attorney for trafficking victims wrote that, during Trump’s first term, trafficking victims “faced longer-than-normal delays, increased scrutiny and a greater likelihood of deportation.”
In 2020, Time reported, “Fee waivers on supplemental documents that used to be approved are now routinely denied, and applications are now adjudicated more strictly . . . the administration also required victims to provide more evidence of abuse, which for many is difficult, and further held up the process.” Worse, Trump instructed DHS to start legal action to deport anyone who applied for a T-visa and was denied. It isn’t hard to see how this would make victims much less likely to come forward.
From the time Trump took office in 2017 to the time he left, the wait for a T visa went from eight months to 19 months. The denial rate rose from 18 to 42 percent. Meanwhile, prosecutions of sex traffickers cratered by more than 25 percent.
“The Trump Administration’s immigration policies have made foreign trafficking victims’ lives more dangerous,” an advocate told Time in 2020. “Those policies have made it more difficult to escape. And those policies have made it more difficult to obtain relief. Trafficking victims are living in terror.”
Rowley also could have looked to Project 2025, the policy blueprint that mapped out Trump’s plans for his second term. It explicitly calls for eliminating the T visa entirely. “Victimization,” the document says, “should not be a basis for an immigration benefit.”
Rowley’s 2024 story made no mention of any of this. Rather than acknowledge what had been clear for years – that Trump’s first term prioritized deportations over the well-being of migrant kids – Rowley and The Free Press managed to spin an upside down narrative in which Biden allowed hoards of criminal immigrants to victimize children.
Trump, of course, won the 2024 election shortly after Rowley’s story was published. Months later, he fired much of the staff at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the office that processes T-visas. Lawyers for trafficking victims say that with the current backlog and staffing levels, their clients would have to wait 20 years or more to get a T visa. The “Big Beautiful Bill” also cut off federal aid to people with T visas, like Medicare and SNAP benefits.
Finally, last summer, Trump completely gutted the Office of Trafficking in Persons. He fired half the staff, and the rest were told they would be reassigned. TIP was the primary federal lifeline for trafficking victims, and the main source of the data Rowley (misleadingly) cited to support her contention that Biden had enabled sex trafficking. Trump has now eviscerated that office, and the Free Press has had nothing to say.
Protecting children -- or imperiling them?
Following Trump’s second inauguration, Rowley and the Free Press moved on to another false narrative – that Trump and his appointees were rushing to save the migrant children trafficked under Biden.
In February 2025, Rowley published an article titled “Trump’s opening move against migrant sex trafficking.” Referring back to her previous report blaming Biden’s “open border policies” for facilitating trafficking, she announced that the Trump administration had “released new guidance that will make it more difficult for members of transnational criminal organizations and pimps to ‘sponsor’ teenage migrants and then traffic them for sex or labor.”
This is a gross distortion of what Trump was doing. In reality, as NPR would go on to report, field specialists at the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) were “given a verbal order by their supervisor to halt all releases to sponsors,” (emphasis added) including sponsors who had already cleared the vetting process. The NPR reporter talked to eight immigration attorneys across the country, including in San Francisco, Houston, and Charlotte. “They all told me they’re seeing the same thing with the kids they represent,” the reporter said. “They’re not getting released to sponsors.”
Trump also imposed new policies to deter sponsors from coming forward. About 90 percent of unaccompanied minors have family in the U.S., but some of those relatives or the people who live with them may be undocumented themselves. During his first term, Trump ordered ORR to start sharing information about minors and their sponsors with ICE and Border Patrol.
ORR is an office with a humanitarian mission – or at least it’s supposed to be. The information it collects about migrants is supposed to be used to better serve the people it’s helping. ICE and Border Patrol are enforcement offices. Ordering a humanitarian office to share information with enforcement agencies means that anyone who is undocumented – or living with someone who was undocumented – risks attracting attention from ICE if they try to sponsor a kid.
When Biden took over, he repealed Trump’s information sharing order. Trump has since reinstated it.
Rowley’s piece quoted multiple sources – “whistleblowers” from DHS, prosecutors, anti-immigration activists – who claimed that migrant kids would be safer in a detention center than released to less-thoroughly vetted relatives or sponsors. “Frankly, these children might be better off in government custody than with some of these so-called sponsors,” one prosecutor said.
That’s hard to imagine. Migrant kids today are being held in detention five times longer than in 2024. We’re getting regular reports that kids at these centers are being denied medical care, served moldy and maggot-infested food, and are subjected to verbal abuse by staff. Some attorneys say that kids are being left in facilities where the lights are left on around the clock, which mental health professionals say is a form of torture. We’ve also seen a flurry of reports of physical and sexual abuse. Meanwhile, Trump has eliminated or decimated every federal office that once provided oversight and investigated claims of abuse and inhumane conditions at detention facilities.
“Lawyers around the country who work with unaccompanied children . . . tell me that abuse by fake sponsors is relatively rare, and that most sponsors really are who they say they are: family members,” Samantha Michaels wrote recently in Mother Jones. “The Trump administration, by and large, isn’t saving kids—it’s separating them from loved ones and putting them in detention for months on end.” An attorney for child migrants added, “from our perspective, sponsor reunification is essentially nonexistent.”
Rowley cast Trump’s second-term policies as a heroic effort to stop sex trafficking caused by his predecessor. In reality, these are policies designed to maximize suffering, and to prioritize deportations over the welfare of children. “It’s fake concern on their part,” David Bier of the Cato Institute told me. “The same girls are trafficked in their home countries and they don’t care. They’re better off in the U.S.”
Hero Trump saves kids
Rowley’s last article trumpeting Trump propaganda on this issue was published in August 2025, and was titled “Inside Trump’s Push to Find Unaccompanied Migrant Children.” Framed as an exclusive, it was a dense thicket of misleading statistics, anecdotes, and unskeptical quotes from sources with anti-immigration agendas.
The article first revisited the lie long perpetuated by Trump and his supporters: That the Biden administration “lost” scores of children by releasing them to unvetted sponsors. This lie had gotten bigger since Rowley wrote her first piece on sex trafficking in the weeks before the 2024 election – and it would only continue to grow. In December 2024, Trump put the figure at 300,000, a figure repeated by Tom Homan in June 2025. Last month, Todd Blanche put it at 475,000.
Rowley herself has continued to amplify the “lost kids” lie on X. In a post criticizing Biden’s HHS secretary and Democratic nominee for California governor Xavier Becerra, she claimed that 400,000 kids were not only lost, but “trafficked.”
Rowley’s piece latched on to the preposterous claim already circulating on the right that, immediately upon returning to office, Trump set about “finding” the children Biden supposedly lost. Within four days of Trump’s inauguration, Fox News reported that the administration had already “found 75,000 to 80,000 kids,” More recently, DHS Secretary MarkWayne Mullin absurdly claimed at a press conference that the administration has saved “146,000 kids,” some of whom he claimed “were raped over 600 times.”
Rowley’s piece cited a comparatively modest number, crediting the administration with finding 13,000 children. “We’re working long hours and clearing up about 1,000 calls per day,” Trump’s head of ORR told her. “We’ve come across serious cases in which children were calling in for help, saying that they were being raped.”
These sorts of accounts tend not to offer much in the way of specifics, so while it’s doubtful that 100,000 or more kids have been rescued from being raped hundreds of times, it’s also impossible to verify or refute. Media outlets have confirmed some cases of trafficked kids working in factories, and there have been some cases of sexual abuse. But immigration experts say that, in most cases, “finding” kids is often just a matter of follow-up phone calls or in-person visits to verify that children are with the people they’re supposed to be with.
“Oftentimes, when they say they found them, what they did is they went and they knocked on the door of the address they had on their paperwork, and the kid was there,” one advocate told Politifact. “They didn’t find them necessarily working in a factory in the middle of the night, being taken advantage of. They found them exactly where the kid said that they were going to be.”
Rowley did note that some of the kids in question had merely “missed an appearance in immigration court or weren’t told to appear.” But that brief caveat was mostly lost in a piece praising Trump for “finding” kids who were “lost.”
To illustrate the kinds of harrowing circumstances from which kids were supposedly being rescued, Rowley shared a number of dubious anecdotes. For example, she wrote that she had obtained documents from 2021 through a FOIA request that, by her description, showed minors suffering “suffering sexual assault, suicidal ideas, or confrontations with gangs in their home countries and on their journeys to the U.S.” But more effective vetting of sponsors would not have changed what happened to such kids before their arrivals – and putting kids in detention centers would make them more, not less vulnerable to similar violence.
She also relayed the case of a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl featured in an NGO report from January 2021, who “was having suicidal thoughts because she had six months to pay off about $6,000 worth of the debt she owed a ‘coyote’ . . . At the time of the report, she said she had just one month left to pay it back.” That story, too, had little to do with how we handle kids after they’ve arrived here. Moreover, Biden took office the same month that the report on this girl was released. Yet Rowley cited the case to favorably contrast Trump’s policies with Biden’s.
The rest of Rowley’s piece consisted of quotes from partisan sources praising Trump and criticizing Biden. One source was Grassley, who has spent years wielding the 2021 report he co-authored with Wyden as a cudgel, despite the fact that it mostly covered Trump’s first term. “Sometimes it seems as though the only person in a position of power who cares about the [trafficking] issue is 91-year-old Senator Grassley,” Rowley wrote in one of her prior pieces.
“The previous administration placed unaccompanied migrant children with dangerous sponsors and actively obstructed law enforcement’s and Congress’s efforts to rescue them,” Grassley told Rowley in her most recent article. He then praised Trump for “taking swift action to protect these kids.”
But Rowley’s most shameless source was John Fabbricatore, Trump’s head of ORR, who she has frequently amplified – and who recently told a different Free Press reporter that, under Biden, officials would “just give kids away to people that had little to no real familial connection with these kids. … We found girls that were being raped by men that had taken them that were not their family.”
How credible you find these claims probably depends on how credible you find Fabbricatore. Unlike previous appointees to ORR, who had extensive experience working with refugees, Fabriccatore’s prior experience is that he was an ICE agent for 20 years. He then made a name for himself in 2024 when he ran for Congress in the Colorado district that includes Aurora – the city Trump falsely claimed had been “taken over” by Tren de Aragua.
One highlight from that campaign came in an interview with a conservative talk show host who asked Fabbricatore about his past competition in mixed martial arts. The candidate boasted that he was once disqualified from a match for kicking his opponent in the face after the man had dropped to his knees. More importantly, Fabbricatore campaigned on the lie that Biden had lost hundreds of thousands of children. He also said that all asylum seekers should be deported, including children, and that we should end birthright citizenship.
This is the man Trump decided to put in charge of the agency that’s supposed to demonstrate our kindness and decency to refugees – and who Rowley has cast as a heroic savior of children.
What The Free Press left out
As is often the case with The Free Press, its coverage is just as misleading for what it leaves out.
Despite the best efforts by Rowley and The Free Press to portray Trump as child-rescuing heroes, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that his administration just doesn’t give a damn about these kids. The most charitable thing you could say is the well-being of child migrants takes a backseat to higher-priority objectives like mass deportations, mass cuts to government, and punishing the NGOs and advocates that Trump and his aides see as the enemy.
Going back to Trump’s first term, advocates for migrant kids and trafficking victims have been issuing dire warnings about how funding and staff cuts, the coddling of MAGA-friendly creeps accused of sex crimes, and the prioritization of deportations above all else has created an environment ripe for trafficking and exploitation.
The evidence is far too voluminous for an exhaustive list. But here are some highlights:
Funding cuts
During his first term, Trump officials put severe restrictions on aid to trafficking victims, including barring any help to victims with criminal records. That’s a problem, because trafficking victims often have records for crimes like prostitution that stem directly from having been trafficked.
The Biden administration pushed through $90 million to DHS specifically for investigating and prosecuting sex trafficking and providing aid to victims. Trump’s DOJ has refused to spend it. Groups that previously received funding to assist victims say they were abruptly cut off from that funding last October.
Trump has also repeatedly tried cut off legal aid to unaccompanied minors. Removing that funding would require kids to navigate the immigration courts alone. For many, it would result in deportation. It’s also illegal – the government is required to provide legal aid for minors who request asylum. That’s why Trump’s efforts have encountered resistance from federal courts.
The USAID program once funded a multitude of anti-trafficking organizations around the world, along with groups that monitor trafficking. That ended when Trump dissolved the agency. And finally, DOGE also terminated hundreds of research grants to study and monitor human trafficking, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Lawfare
In the last couple months, the administration has started threatening to criminally investigate nonprofits who represent migrant kids. (Rowley has cheered on these efforts on X.) The government claims that lawyers are making false claims of persecution or trafficking on behalf of their minor clients, and that this is a form of fraud. It’s pretty clearly an effort to criminalize legal representation of minor migrants, and to intimidate people who provide it. Trump is also continuing his efforts to nullify the Flores settlement.
Diverting resources to deportations
Trump has diverted DHS, FBI, and other federal law enforcement agents who previously investigated human trafficking, assigning them to assist with mass deportations instead. The New York Times found that, in the first few months of Trump’s second term, DHS spent fewer hours investigating sex trafficking than over any three-month period in the last decade. One former law enforcement official told the paper that when he tried to report alleged sex trafficking, he was told there were no agents to investigate because they were all working on maximizing deportations.
“DEI” restrictions
The administration’s crusade against “DEI” has prompted many anti-trafficking groups to stop working with – or at least stop advertising their work with – marginalized groups so they don’t cross the administration and put their federal funding at risk. One advocate framed the stark possible repercussions: “People will die.”
The administration has also taken down government web pages directing trafficking victims to programs that provide advice and assistance and removed LGTBQ+ people from the government’s annual report on international human trafficking.
Deportations
Under federal law, DHS agents are required to ask immigrants if they have any children in the U.S. before detaining and deporting them. This is to make sure that no kids are abandoned and left to fend for themselves. The Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickerson has reported that Trump’s DHS isn’t doing that. There are now reports of kids who were traumatized when their parents suddenly went missing, only to learn later that they’d been deported. One Honduran woman was recently arrested and deported without her toddler. DHS then placed the toddler with the estranged husband of the woman’s sister, who beat, sexually assaulted, and eventually murdered the boy.
Last year, the administration tried to hurriedly deport hundreds of Guatemalan children in the middle of the night before a federal court could stop them. DOJ officials told the court that they had arranged with the children’s parents to accept them upon arrival, and that the parents approved of their removal. That was a lie. They just planned to dump the kids in Guatemala. Advocates for the kids were just able to get into court in time to stop the flight.
ProPublica recently reported that federal agents are also giving kids a document that “warns them that if they do not choose to leave the country within 72 hours” they will “be detained in the custody of the United States Government, for a prolonged period of time.” The document also “warned that if the person who sought to sponsor the minors was undocumented, they would be ‘subject to arrest and removal’ or to criminal penalties for ‘aiding your illegal entry.’” They are trying to scare the kids into giving up their rights before they’ve spoken to an attorney.
Even kids who have provable claims of sex trafficking face long odds. The New Yorker has reported that Trump is pressuring immigration court judges to reflexively rule in favor of the administration’s demands to deport children, often without even considering their claims. Judges who resist have been fired. DHS has also been keeping many newly arrived migrant kids in detention even when their actual parents are available to care for them.
Trump personal attorney and failed nominee for U.S. attorney Alina Habba gushes over accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate
Waste and abuse
In addition to the Biden administration, Rowley has been sharply critical of the NGOs who take care of migrant kids, accusing them of wasting taxpayer money. But her aim is often misdirected.
Take, for example, Rowley’s criticism of Southwest Key, an NGO that operated shelters for migrant kids. Criticism of that group is certainly justified. Southwest Key raked in hundreds of millions in contracts, its executives were overpaid, and its finances set off all sorts of red flags. Worse, attorneys for migrant kids have made credible accusations of appalling sexual abuse and harassment at its facilities, including by employees, which were ignored.
But those accusations date back to 2015, which means they were ongoing throughout Trump’s first term. It was actually the Biden administration that took legal action against Southwest Key. But in March 2025, just months into Trump’s second term, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced that the administration was dropping the government’s lawsuit.
Why would the self-declared champion of trafficked kids drop litigation against an NGO accused of ignoring child sexual abuse? According to Bloomberg Law, the decision came after well-connected Southwest Key attorney Lisa Blatt argued that if the lawsuit was successful, it could impose new requirements on the detention of child migrants, complicating the administration’s mass deportation agenda.
If The Free Press were truly interested in waste, fraud, and abuse, the second Trump administration has presented a multitude of leads for an enterprising journalist to investigate. There’s the Trump administration’s $38 billion budget to purchase warehouses where they planned to stack immigrants like Amazon inventory – or how the government offered three, four, and five times the market value for those facilities.
An intrepid reporter might look into the cash private prison companies like CoreCivic and GeoGroup have shoveled into Trump’s inauguration, family businesses, and Republican coffers before winning contracts to run more immigration jails. They might look into why Trump just named a former GeoGroup executive as the new head of ICE.
One could also look into the the billions in no-bid contracts the administration has given to a tent company to set up outdoor detention camps, or the tiny company with no previous experience in corrections (or even a functioning website) that got a $1 billion contract to operate an ICE detention facility.
They might report on how Stephen Miller owns between $100,000 and $250,000 of stock in Palantir, the company whose tech is driving Trump’s mass deportations, or the literal millions of dollars in trades Trump himself has made in Palantir stock over the last year while publicly praising the company and as his administration granted it massive federal contracts. They might report on how Palantir CEO Joel Karp and former executive Jacob Helberg gave nearly $4 million to Trump-aligned PACs and Trump’s inauguration – or how Helberg now works for the administration.
But this is probably expecting too much. The Free Press after all, was started in part with funding from billionaire venture capitalists David Sacks and Marc Andreesen, both of whom endorsed Trump in 2024 and have been advisors in his second term. Weiss herself is co-founder of the University of Austin, the unaccredited, “anti-woke” college started with funding from, among others, conservative megadonor and Clarence Thomas patron Harlan Crow, and Bill Ackman, another billionaire Trump supporter who also proudly donated $10,000 to a GoFundMe started for Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renee Good. Weiss’s co-founder of the University of Austin is Joe Lonsdale . . . who also happens to be a co-founder of Palantir.
Covering for sex traffickers
Finally, there’s Trump’s own protection of known sex traffickers. He and his administration have famously resisted demands to release the full, unredacted Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump and Epstein were longtime friends, and other senior members of his administration had extensive ties to him. Both Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have also lied about those ties.
The administration also intervened or obstructed multiple criminal investigations of brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, the manosphere celebrities who are close with Trump’s sons Baron and Donald, Jr. The New Yorker recently published a long, meticulously reported exposé on the sex trafficking allegations against the Tates, and how the Trump administration thwarted efforts to hold them accountable, both here and abroad. It’s one of the most disturbing pieces of journalism I’ve read in awhile.
When it comes to Epstein and the Tates at least, The Free Press has been critical of Trump, though even that criticism has been tempered with occasional bouts of its knee-jerk contrarianism. But that makes it all the more dishonest to portray Trump as a hero to sex trafficking victims.
In the end, this isn’t so much about Rowley or The Free Press as it is about what will become of CBS News and CNN — two pillars of American journalism — under Weiss. Immigration, refugees, and the safety and well-being of child migrants aren’t just profoundly consequential issues — they are moral ones, and they cut to the core of our national identity. The reporter Weiss hired to cover those issues ran interference for an aggressively anti-immigration administration. She valorized cruel policies that prioritize deportations over all else and tried to spin the caging, separation, and deportation of children as policies that are good for them, actually. This doesn’t bode well.
It would be one thing if Weiss and The Free Press were open about their biases. But Weiss’s conceit, and the conceit she brings to her publications and projects, is that she’s unburdened by the legacy media’s prejudices. She’s just someone who sees things as they are — a teller of hard truths. That sort of arrogance isn’t just dishonest (no matter what Weiss calls her podcast), it results in a particularly manipulative sort of journalism in which her publications use her self-created image of fearless truth-telling as a cloak for their deceit.
Still, Weiss has managed to lure a number of disaffected, longtime journalists into the fold. In a column published in December 2024, Free Press editor — and former NY Times journalist — Joe Nocera wrote that editing Rowley’s reporting had prompted him, a “card-carrying liberal,” to change his mind about border security. “One important reason Free Press stories are persuasive is because we do the on-the-ground reporting, which means our stories aren’t skewed in one direction or the other,” Nocera wrote. “They are simply, you know, the facts.”
Bari is a creature of neurosis, entitlement, privilege, self-pity and spectacular resentment, with a track record for failing upward.
After an intensely privileged girlhood, she went to Columbia University, where she made quite a stink (and some headlines) by claiming that the people there were mean to her. She left a plum job at the Wall Street Journal, claiming that people there were mean to her. She left another plum job at the New York Times, claiming that people there were mean to her.
Her attacks on journalism and her claims of victimhood made her a pet for the worst of the billionaire class--democracy-haters and journalism-haters like David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, who bankrolled the Free Press; subsequently the shadowy billionaire Jeffrey Yass, another ardent democracy-hater, who (along with Clarence Thomas's sugar daddy Harlan Crow, among others) bankrolled her weird little University of Austin.
These men saw in Bari what the Ellisons would subsequently see: a boundless hunger for publicity, a flair for propaganda and revisionism, and an impulse to see herself as they saw themselves--as a martyr, a victim of liberal democracy and "wokeness," a Lone Truthteller in a World Of Liars, someone who wasn't afraid to rip the mask off democracy and persuade the world that what it really wanted was a stern, ordered authoritarian state controlled by billionaires.
Once Colbert left the air, I refuse to watch anything on CBS. It started early. Colbert was the only exception. Now that he's gone, so am I.