The Biden administration cut corners in its rush to get migrant kids out of government shelters, failing to complete full checks on the sponsors who came forward to collect the children, a federal inspector general reported Thursday, warning that kids may have ended up placed in unsafe environments.
Some kids were released to sponsors still awaiting an FBI fingerprint check or state child abuse records check, and in nearly 20% of those cases the government still can’t say whether the checks were completed.
Other kids were released to sponsors who gave vacant houses or nonresidential addresses as their homes, and in some instances, caseworkers failed to do sex registry checks before releasing the children, said the Health and Human Services inspector general.
“When case files do not contain any documentation indicating that required address checks were conducted, case managers may miss information that could reveal unsafe placements,” said Inspector General Christi A. Grimm.
The report covers March and April of 2021, during the early stages of the border surge, when migrants the government calls unaccompanied alien children, or UACs, flooded into the country after President Biden exempted them from the Title 42 pandemic expulsion policy.
Under the law, children arriving without parents are supposed to be quickly processed by Homeland Security and turned over to HHS, which holds them in government-contracted shelters until sponsors are found, or until they turn 18 years of age.
But the sheer numbers left HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement struggling, and it rewrote rules to try to speed up sponsor approval.
The Office of Inspector General looked at 342 cases. It found 15 of them lacked one of the background checks, including one that lacked a sex registry check, one that lacked a public criminal records search and 13 others that didn’t show any indication that the address a sponsor gave was run through the sex registry.
Fifty-five of the cases were also missing at least one type of address check.
In 189 of the cases, HHS was required to do an FBI fingerprint or state child abuse records check. Under the administration’s rules, it released kids in those cases before the checks were complete, though it was supposed to enter the results in files later.
In nearly 20% of cases the files were never updated with the results.
HHS later provided data indicating that all but three of the checks were completed.
On the plus side, the department did perform post-release check-ins with all sponsors, though many came late and sometimes the calls were not recorded in the case files.
The report is another snapshot of one of the administration’s most visible failures. The New York Times has reported that many of the children ended up used in illegal labor.
Issues with child migrants are not new, with both the Obama and Trump teams struggling to handle surges and figure out ways to safely place kids. The Trump administration in particular tried to impose new rules on sponsors, but the Biden team scrapped many of those changes as it sought to speed up placements amid the 2021 surge.
HHS, in its official reply to Thursday’s report, insisted it’s still focused on safety.
“As ORR worked quickly to respond to this unprecedented emergency, and with limited resources, it prioritized the safety and well-being of children at every step,” said Jeff Hild, acting assistant secretary at HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, which oversees ORR.
Mr. Hild agreed to all six of the inspector general’s recommendations for changes, saying it’s already taken steps to ensure all checks are done and recorded properly in case files.
He said the department has also created new training for case managers to help them better identify a sponsor’s true identity.