It looks like i may have gotten it working
It looks like the cron environment outside of shell is limited and the cron job isn't able to find the path needed. I modified it to this line in the cron file and it seems to be working now.This ensures that the cron job has access to the necessary system paths.
"* * * * * www-data PATH=/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin /usr/bin/php /var/www/portal.helixsolutions.co/scripts/cron_mail_queue.php"
For others that may experience this issue, I added "PATH=/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"