The Biden administration placed some illegal immigrant children with sponsors who got them pregnant, the Homeland Security Department said Thursday.
In other cases, Unaccompanied Alien Children — minors who showed up at the border without parents — were sent to live with adults who possessed child pornography, had serious criminal records, or forced the children into labor.
Hundreds of thousands of UACs surged into the U.S. as part of the Biden border breakdown, and the previous administration struggled to process them. Facing overcrowded and dangerous conditions, it cut corners to push the children out as quickly as possible, leaving some in unsafe placements, the government now says.
“Children’s safety and security is non-negotiable,” said Laszlo Baksay, a spokesperson at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “The previous administration’s failure to implement meaningful safeguards has allowed vulnerable kids to fall into the hands of criminals.”
Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE, has spent the last few months trying to check up on the children in their current placements, and Thursday’s findings grew out of that effort.
Some of the children were living in what ICE described as “neglect,” while others were with sponsors who had criminal records that included assault, drug trafficking, prostitution and attempted murder.
In what the agency called the “most disturbing cases,” girls were pregnant with children fathered by their “alleged sponsors.”
UACs have long been among the toughest of immigration cases, creating difficulties for all involved.
The children face horrific dangers en route to the U.S., and once in custody here are supposed to be placed with sponsors who can look after them while they fight for a permanent legal status.
The sheer numbers during the Biden administration, which in some early months topped 18,000, made it impossible for the government to vet sponsors properly under the rules inherited from the previous Trump administration.
The Health and Human Services Department loosened the requirements, but the result, analysts said, was more dangerous placements.
Federal watchdogs have previously said the government has lost track of tens of thousands of children and failed to keep tabs on hundreds of thousands more.
The Trump administration vowed to try to track down the ones it could. But the welfare checks have proven to be tricky work.
Jarrod Sadulski, a child trafficking expert who has testified to Congress on these issues, said out of 100,000 attempts investigators located only about 5,000 children, or a rate of just 5%.
They identified more than two dozen cases that showed signs of trafficking,
Mr. Sadulski said HHS also ignored more than 65,000 calls to its UAC abuse hotline.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, said last week that 7,300 of those calls involved accusations of trafficking and nearly 1,700 alleged fraud.
Mr. Sadulski said people were able to sign up as sponsors and prove their identity with as little as a texted photo of a driver’s license.
That meant people with no connection to the UACs were able to pose as parents or other relatives and claim custody.
In one criminal case brought earlier this year, authorities charged an illegal immigrant from Guatemala with fraudulently obtaining sponsorship of a UAC. He had submitted a badly photoshopped picture of himself and a woman in order to claim he was the child’s father, investigators said.
In a second instance, the man tried to claim sponsorship of another child with an ID that didn’t even belong to him, investigators said.
HHS approved the first application but managed to deny the second one.
Federal prosecutors in New Mexico, meanwhile, brought charges against a 35-year-old man who they say had paid to smuggle a 17-year-old girl to his home in Virginia.
Luis Alonso Argueta-Diaz told federal agents he was paying to have the girl come to a “safe place” and be a nanny for his three children, according to court documents. He admitted to paying $2,000 to the girl’s mother in Honduras. The girl said her total smuggling fee was $20,000, most of which was still outstanding.
Even as the welfare checks unveil troubling cases, immigrant-rights groups complain that they’re scaring migrants themselves.
El Pais reported last month that more than 100 UACs had been displaced because of the checks.
“These welfare checks are planting fear, panic, and confusion among children and family members around the country,” Jason Boyd, vice president of federal policy for Kids in Need of Defense, told the news outlet. “Numerous minors have been subjected to deportation proceedings after such checks, which are by definition a tactic of migratory control.”
ICE, in announcing its findings Thursday, said immigration enforcement isn’t the purpose of the checks but said if agents or officers come across someone here illegally they will take them into custody.
The Trump administration has moved to tighten the rules on sponsorship to protect children. That includes requiring an unexpired authentic identification, which appears to be blocking many illegal immigrants from claiming sponsorship of their own children.
Just 45 minors were released to sponsors in April, down from more than 5,000 each month in late 2024.
A federal judge is currently deciding whether to block the new Trump changes.
