Federal Watchdog: Biden Administration Did Not Vet Adults Housing Illegal Immigrant Children

A federal watchdog found that the Biden administration did not vet the adults who volunteered to take in unaccompanied minors who illegally cross the southern border. I will take a beat here and let that sink in. 

If that finding doesn’t send a chill up your spine, I don’t know what will. In 2021, the Biden administration was unable to properly vet and monitor homes where they placed a surge of illegal alien children who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border. 

The HHS Office of Inspector General found that HHS failed to run basic safety checks.

The Department of Health and Human Services is required to screen adults who volunteer to take in children arriving in the country without parents. But the analysis concluded that the department failed to prove it ran basic safety checks — like address or criminal background checks — on some adults who took in children. In about a third of the cases reviewed by the federal watchdog, the agency did not have legible documentation for the adults on file.

“We found that children’s case files and sponsor records were not always updated with important documentation and information,” said Haley Lubeck, an analyst for the HHS Office of Inspector General, which conducted the review.

The federal health agency responded to the report by saying it has improved the process and the report only shows a limited window into how the agency handled cases “during an unprecedented influx.” HHS said it has also added new training for its employees handling migrant children.

It’s bad enough that the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t track illegal aliens released across our country, but this is worse. This is shuffling children off to anyone who will take them, no questions asked. 

There are procedures in place to protect minors in what amounts to foster care for those who show up at the border without a parent or guardian. HHS is supposed to obtain IDs for the adult sponsors who take the children. That seems like a bare minimum. Yet, the federal watchdog, the HHS Office of Inspector General, found that in more than a third of the cases analyzed, illegible IDs were submitted. Some of the documents may have been forged – they had missing holograms or blurry images. 

In about 16% of the cases, there was no proof that background checks or address checks had been made. Those are considered basic safety checks. For every five cases, HHS failed to follow up to check in on the children it placed. Sometimes no one checked on them for months.

HHS is supposed to have a follow up call with every child and their sponsor between 30 to 37 days after placement. But in cases where the agency failed to follow up with the children, it took on average about 122 days for a caseworker to reach out, the OIG’s analysis found.

The OIG’s investigations have previously found that the administration rushed to respond to the migrant surge in 2021, failing to adequately train staff dealing with the cases of children.

This is unconscionable. This is what human trafficking and child slavery look like. Who knows what was happening to those children? It sure wasn’t the Biden administration. 

An NBC News report in 2023 found that 344 unaccompanied minors were released in 2021 by the Biden administration to live with nonfamily sponsors hosting three or more unaccompanied minors. An HHS Department audit raised questions that some minors are being sponsored by strangers who could exploit them for child labor. Duh. 

The audit, conducted by the agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the care and release of unaccompanied minors, also showed that the number who were placed with distant relatives or nonfamily sponsors increased from 2021 to 2022, both in real terms and as a percentage of all unaccompanied minors.

“We see in our own work that some kids are placed into settings where they may not know the person and they are treated as a second-class citizen in the family and under pressure to work,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, who advocates for unaccompanied migrant children.

When unaccompanied minors arrive in the U.S., they are processed by HHS and released into the interior of our country. They must be transferred into the custody of an approved sponsor. That person is usually a family member. 

The total number of unaccompanied migrant children released by ORR since 2012 is more than 600,000, with more than a third released under the Biden administration, according to HHS figures.

In calendar year 2021, the government released 138,917 unaccompanied minors. Of those, 11.8%, or 16,456, were released to distant relatives or nonfamily sponsors.

When there are floods of illegal immigrants pouring over the southern border, the youngest are the most vulnerable. They are not to blame, it is the adults in their lives who exploit them, whether it is a parent looking to sell their child, a human trafficker making money off desperate families in poor countries, or sex traffickers looking to exploit defenseless children. 

The numbers above are from 2012 until 2021. That period spans the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Obama, to his credit, secured the border to the best of his ability. Progressives labeled him the Deporter-in-Chief. When waves of illegal immigrants crossed the southern border during the Trump administration, he closed the border as best as he could, too. Biden has treated the southern border differently from day one of his administration. If the administration is not tracking adult illegal aliens, you know it is not tracking children, either. 

There is nothing humanitarian about an open border. It invites human exploitation and misery. The only way this tragedy changes is when a new president – a Republican president – gets into office. Let’s hope that happens with the November presidential election.