Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified on Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Biden administration paid child traffickers to sponsor unaccompanied minors.

Moments after Noem was sworn in to testify, a masked protester against immigration enforcement interrupted the hearing by shouting for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The hearing was interrupted a second time by another protester, who yelled out claims that ICE had killed Americans, shouting, “Black lives matter!”

'We’re not going to stop until we find every single one.'

During Noem’s opening statement, she accused Democrats of holding the DHS hostage by leading a government shutdown of the agency, which she called “reckless” and “unnecessary.”

“As a result, critical national security missions, including border security, immigration enforcement, aviation security, disaster response, cybersecurity, and the protection of critical infrastructure, are all being strained. Our ability to provide for a safe and successful World Cup is being hindered as well,” Noem explained.

She noted that over 100,000 DHS employees are “again being asked to work without pay for the third time in just five months.”

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Photo by HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images

Noem explained that during the Biden administration’s open-border crisis, unaccompanied minors were "lost" and "not tracked."

She said that it has been “challenging” because the Department of Health and Human Services, under the Biden administration’s leadership, paid sponsors to host the unaccompanied minors.

“And those sponsors, many times, we found instances where they trafficked these children themselves,” Noem continued. “So under that administration, we not only had children that were in this country as a part of a program, the government was paying individuals that were knowingly trafficking them and abusing them.”

She declared that under the Trump administration, these practices have ended, and federal law enforcement agents have found many of these children and attempted to reunite them with their families.

Noem reported that the current administration has located 145,000 of the 450,000 children whom the previous White House was not tracking.

“We’re not going to stop until we find every single one,” Noem declared.

RELATED: ICE exposes Biden's biggest border failure: Kids handed to sex abusers and criminals

Photo by HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) addressed the rise in child abuse material online, noting that in 2023, there were an estimated 104 million images and videos of suspected child sexual abuse reported in the United States.

“With all of these images of kids online, I was shocked to learn recently that hundreds of thousands of children in these images are unidentified,” Hawley told Noem. “The Interpol database alone, 90,000 kids are completely unidentified. In the U.K.’s database, it’s over 200,000.”

“Would it be helpful to you if Congress said, ‘You know what, we’re going to create more analysts, more child abuse expert positions, more forensic analysts, and more prosecutors to give to you to look at these images, figure out who these kids are, and go after their abusers?'” Hawley asked.

“Yes, it’d be incredibly helpful," Noem responded, adding that providing more resources to Homeland Security Investigations would allow the agency to "free more kids from that life of victimhood."

Hawley pledged to introduce legislation to provide the DHS with additional funding to rescue children from trafficking.

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