No words are strong enough to convey the atrocities that Joe Biden’s Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program perpetrated against hundreds of thousands of vulnerable migrant children. Calling it a humanitarian crisis doesn’t do it justice. It was a combination of fraud, human trafficking, and human smuggling.
The Democrats’ goal was to flood the states with migrants, not protect the 479,000 unaccompanied minors who went missing under the Biden administration. Those half a million children were supposed to fall under the care of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which are responsible for vetting every sponsor and conducting thorough inspections. However, these children were shuffled through as quickly as possible.
According to The Daily Wire, “Between October 2023 and September 2024, the Biden administration approved roughly 99% of sponsor applications.” Of those applications, 85% involved some form of fraud. Even at the time, Biden officials reported knowing that they were giving these kids away to traffickers, but the push to get them out of detention and into the interior was stronger than the moral obligation to protect them.
The Federalist’s Breccan Thies reports that at least six different types of fraud were perpetrated in these cases. They encompassed “false or fraudulent identity documentation, manipulated photographs, misrepresented or unverifiable addresses, fingerprint fraud, failure to disclose household members, and misrepresentation of age by a UAC.” That last one is simply an adult claiming to be a minor because it was easier to get into the country that way.
According to ORR Senior Advisor John Fabbricatore, “This is fraud that should have been caught by the Biden administration easily, but it was not because there was more of a want to get these kids out the door as quickly as possible.” If government officials had bothered to do their due diligence, they could have prevented a lot of suffering and tragedy.
Take the following two cases.
- A young girl,15, was handed over to her sponsor, who claimed to be her brother. No DNA testing or fingerprint checks confirmed this; instead, there was only fraudulent paperwork. That sponsor not only wasn’t her brother, but he proceeded to rape, abuse, and impregnate the girl before the state got involved and filed criminal charges.
- A “step-sister” claimed a 17-year-old boy. She provided Venezuelan documents that the government couldn’t verify, yet HHS and ORR released him anyway. The boy was later found dead in a car, his genitals exposed and a passed-out 30-year-old male in the vehicle with him. He was likely sex-trafficked, though that has not been publicly declared as the investigation is ongoing.
“Heightened scrutiny and better vetting practices could have prevented the fraud that led to the violent abuse of these minors,” Fabbricatore advised. “All it would’ve taken was a willingness to slow down and follow policies requiring heightened scrutiny and better vetting practices, but that did not happen and the result was tragic.”
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. commented, “The Biden Administration failed in its most basic responsibility: protecting vulnerable children in federal care. It weakened safeguards and prioritized speed over scrutiny, leaving children exposed to fraud, exploitation, and abuse.” He added, “Under President Trump, HHS is restoring rigorous oversight, verifying who takes custody of these children, and putting their safety first.”
This means unaccompanied minors are going to be held in federal custody for a longer period, reducing the likelihood that they are handed off to cartel-infiltrated NGOs or dubious sponsors. President Trump’s HHS also isn’t afraid to send these children back to their countries of origin, though that is a more complicated measure since some of these countries are hostile to our deportation efforts.
All told, this is a much better state of play than four years ago. Unaccompanied minors’ chances of reuniting with their families are high, and their chances of being handed over to human traffickers have shrunk considerably.
