[BB] Tarek “Joey” Kadourah, who worked as a site supervisor for the contractor MVM during the Biden administration, described the operation in an interview posted on Logan’s show Going Rogue. He said he oversaw around 60 agents transporting unaccompanied migrant children out of a San Diego site starting around March 2021.
Kadourah said he took the job believing the children were being reunited with relatives. Within a week, he said, that story fell apart.
“I was led to believe that I was actually saving trafficked children. That’s the way they described it to me,” he said. “However, when I showed up within the first week, it was obvious that that’s not what was happening.”
Agents reported that the adults picking up children often weren’t family, he said. Some kids told them so directly. Kadourah said paperwork sometimes looked forged, and that some people collecting children had visible gang tattoos.
One veteran agent flagged a pickup to him, he recalled: “There’s two guys with prison tattoos picking up a kid from us. What’s going on, Joey?”
When he brought those concerns to his supervisor, Kadourah said, he was shut down. “They’ve been vetted. Everything’s okay. Keep your mouth shut. Just keep doing the job,” he said he was told.
He described roughly 1,500 children held indoors for months at an emptied-out San Diego stadium, staff made to sign non-disclosure agreements, and a rule barring workers from going to local law enforcement. He said agents reported children crying and trying to run when transport vans stopped for gas. He was marked ineligible for rehire after months on the job, he said, and has faced what he described as intimidation since speaking out.
Kadourah told the same account on the record to the Daily Signal in September, which reported that children were driven to adults they did not recognize and that agents were told not to bring them back.
The interview follows Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem’s launch of the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) Safety Verification Initiative, an operation to locate children placed with unvetted sponsors. DHS has said the Biden administration lost or placed roughly 450,000 unaccompanied children with unvetted sponsors and that it has located more than 24,400 in person. Kadourah characterized a related MVM welfare-check contract as a cover-up, DHS has presented the verification effort as a rescue operation.
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