Migrant children trafficked into sex, labor under Biden admin program that approved 99% of sponsors: HHS

The Department of Health and Human Services revealed Thursday that fraud in the Biden administration’s Unaccompanied Alien Children program from sponsors contributed to children being placed in dangerous situations where they were sexually abused, trafficked for labor, and in some cases ended up dead.  

The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) said the fraud included fraudulent identity documents, manipulated photographs, address fraud, fingerprint fraud, sponsors failing to disclose household members, and migrants misrepresenting their ages. 

An underlying ORR memorandum states that approximately 479,000 unaccompanied alien children were referred to ORR between 2021 and 2024. In a memo from HHS cited by the New York Post, the Biden administration approved 99 percent of all sponsor applications despite there being the signs of fraud. The agency said a surge beginning in 2021 was accompanied by relaxed sponsor-vetting policies and expedited releases. 

Those policies did not require fingerprints for every category of sponsor, permitted expired identification, did not universally mandate background checks for adult household members, and allowed more lenient address verification, according to the memo. In fiscal year 2024, ORR denied fewer than one percent of sponsorship applications. 

The report documented several cases in which children were allegedly harmed after being released. This comes after there have been extensive reports that children were trafficked to work brutal jobs in the US under the program.  

In August 2023, ORR released a 15-year-old girl to a man claiming to be her biological brother without requesting fingerprints or DNA to establish the relationship. Authorities later determined the man was not related to her and that she was living with several adult men who had not been disclosed on the sponsorship application. According to ORR, the purported sponsor raped the girl and impregnated her. The man was subsequently charged, and the case has been investigated by Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI and Justice Department. ORR said the same man had previously sponsored three other unaccompanied minors. 

Another 17-year-old boy was released in July 2024 to a purported stepsister who supplied Venezuelan documents the federal government could not verify. ORR again did not request fingerprints or DNA. Three months later, the teenager was found dead in the back seat of a vehicle with his genitalia exposed next to an unconscious 30-year-old man, according to the memo. 

The memorandum disclosed another case involving a male migrant who told officials that he had been initiated into MS-13 at age 12. His prospective sponsor, his mother, had several gang tattoos, while the boy accumulated 26 incidents of disruptive, aggressive or abusive behavior while in federal custody and injured a female migrant and a shelter employee. ORR nevertheless released him to his mother in August 2024. One week later, he died after unrelated adult men allegedly gave him seven marijuana joints. 

The review also described a 9-year-old girl who told officials that her 13-year-old brother had sexually abused her in her home country. A home study found her mother planned to have the girl sleep in the same room as the brother. Another inspection found unknown people living in the home, the odor of marijuana and feces, broken glass on the floor, and an address previously cited in a Child Protective Services report. ORR nevertheless approved the girl's release to the household. The memorandum states that her current status is unknown. 

“The Biden Administration failed in its most basic responsibility: protecting vulnerable children in federal care,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Thursday. Kennedy accused the previous administration of weakening safeguards and “prioritiz[ing] speed over scrutiny.” 

The review was conducted by HHS's Office of General Counsel in March and April 2025 and examined a subset of reported Child Level Events involving fraud, rather than all children released by the program. ORR received 1,669 reports of fraud from Oct. 1, 2023, through Oct. 31, 2024. Approximately 85 percent of the cases OGC reviewed involved intentional document fraud. ORR's broader tracking data found intentional document or information fraud accounted for approximately 77 percent of reported Child Level Events categorized as fraud-related events, regardless of the number of children involved. 

The memo said approximately 37 percent of reported fraud events involved intentional document or information fraud by sponsors. Another 40 percent of reported fraud events were attributed to a UAC or an individual in the child's country of origin. In some cases, ORR said adults falsely claimed to be minors before being placed in facilities alongside children. 

The findings come after a separate DHS Office of Inspector General investigation found that, as of May 2024, ICE had not served Notices to Appear on more than 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children released from HHS custody, meaning they did not yet have immigration court dates. More than 32,000 other children failed to appear for scheduled immigration hearings during fiscal years 2019 through 2023. 

ORR concluded that fraud uncovered in its latest review “might have been prevented” through stricter scrutiny and more effective verification of the identities of both children and their proposed sponsors. The agency said the fraud “can, and in some of the instances reviewed affirmatively did, result in releasing UAC into dangerous or harmful situations.” 

Beginning in February 2025, ORR updated many of the policies identified in the report to close some of the vetting gaps.