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Around the year 1212, a boy preached to children in France that they should take up the cross and follow him to the Holy Land. Thousands did. None reached Jerusalem. Most gave up before leaving Europe. Others were shipwrecked or sold into slavery in the Islamic caliphate of Tunisia.
Centuries later, the Biden administration’s facilitation of mass illegal entry by unaccompanied alien children (UACs) and releasing them into the hands of unvetted adults has caused misery on an even larger scale.
The seed was planted years earlier. As Lora Ries, a former official with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, wrote, a 2008 law called the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) created incentives to “entice parents to send their children across the border unaccompanied to receive immigration benefits and gain a foothold in the U.S. so their families could hopefully later follow.”
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In the early 2000s, between 4,800 and 8,200 UACs were encountered at the border per year. After the TVPRA, numbers rose, hitting 68,000 in 2014.
Under Biden, federal agencies became the last leg in an international smuggling business that brought millions of inadmissible aliens to the U.S. from around the world, including 550,000 minors. As expert witness Tara Rodas testified to the House Homeland Security Committee in November 2024, “Criminal sponsors are defrauding the U.S. government by using this government program as a logistical chain in their trafficking operation.”
While illegal alien parents and labor-exploiting employers paid for UACs to get to the U.S. border, it was often our tax dollars that brought them inside the country and delivered them into the hands of barely vetted adult sponsors.
Inadmissible UACs from further than Mexico who try to enter the U.S. illegally become the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
Under Biden, children were released to putative sponsors in a matter of days. Verification of the sponsors’ identities was inexcusably lax. HHS released children to sponsors with whom they had no blood relation and allowed adult sponsors to send photos of identification documents rather than come in personally. There was little follow-up to check on the children’s welfare after placement with the sponsors.
A February 2024 HHS inspector general’s report looked at 342 of 16,790 UACs they had released to parents or sponsors in March and April of 2021. In 16% of cases, there was no evidence that required sponsor safety checks had been done. Almost one in five UACs were “released to sponsors with pending FBI fingerprint or State child abuse and neglect registry checks” – and when those results came in, the files were never updated. In a third of the cases, the identification documents the sponsors submitted “contained legibility concerns” – a nice way of saying ORR couldn’t read them properly to confirm they were valid.
What if the sponsors weren’t caring for the children or were exploiting them? No one knew. ORR’s follow-up was in most cases only a phone call.
In 22% of cases HHS examined, “ORR did not conduct timely Safety and Well-Being Follow Up Calls,” and in another 18% of cases they didn’t document those calls in the case files. That was in early 2021 – and the UAC numbers got worse later in the Biden years. As this chart shows, every year from 2021 – 2024 saw more than 100,000 UACs apprehended entering illegally – nearly all of whom would have been released into the U.S.
Under our immigration laws, UACs should be removed unless they are given asylum or other protection. But incredibly, ICE failed to issue Notices to Appear in immigration court to over 291,000 UACs they released between 2019 and 2024, according to the DHS Inspector General. And when they did, more than 43,000 of them never showed up for a hearing.
The New York Times reported that “[m]igrant children have ended up working dangerous industrial jobs in violation of child labor laws across the country — in slaughterhouses, factories, construction sites and elsewhere… Some have been gravely injured or killed.”
Having ended Biden’s catch-and-release at the border, the Trump administration is now repairing the damage done over four years of recklessness and negligence. This means not only arresting, detaining, and deporting adult illegal aliens, but also finding thousands of UACs whom HHS has lost track of. The aim is to return as many children as possible to their parents, ideally back in their home countries. So far, the Trump administration has found 13,000 of the UACs who dropped off the radar.
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Today, ORR is requiring proper identification, with fingerprints, photos, DNA samples, as well as background checks and financial records before they release children. Alien adults in the U.S. who have pending asylum claims – even bogus or fraudulent ones that will ultimately fail – can still pick up their children from ORR and keep custody pending the family’s immigration process. Many don’t, because they aren’t really relatives. Or they fear due process because they are here illegally and haven’t taken even basic steps to try and legalize their status.
Now that ORR is strictly verifying parent and sponsor identities, the average time children remain in ORR custody has grown from a few weeks to months. That is testament to how weak the vetting standards for sponsors have been for the last four years. Many teens who came to work here leaving their parents abroad are opting to go home rather than stay longer in ORR custody.
Federal law requires the government to “ensure that unaccompanied alien children in the United States are safely repatriated to their country of nationality.” That should be the priority now. Then, Congress needs to close the UAC loopholes in immigration law and return custody responsibility from HHS back to DHS, so that never again will so many children be at risk of serious harm and fall through the cracks of an immigration system spread among too many federal agencies.
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