Story by Anna Giaritelli
The findings from a senior Senate Republican’s year-and-a-half investigation into the Biden-Harris administration’s response to an influx of unaccompanied immigrant children at the southern border suggest a multitude of “failures” by the federal government.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the top Republican and soon-to-be chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, released the results of an 18-month search for answers about how the administration cared for minors in government custody after they came over the southern border. The report also examines a sloppy process for finding, matching, and releasing children to live with adults, sometimes strangers.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had the power to prevent the exploitation of children by securing the southern border,” Cassidy said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Democrats treated the border crisis as a messaging issue for their presidential campaign rather than address the humanitarian catastrophe that has resulted from failed Biden-Harris policies.”
The roughly 160-page report was published Tuesday morning. It alleges “top administration officials knew about the dramatic increase in illegal child labor, but took no meaningful steps to prevent its occurrence” and “prioritized speed over safety when releasing [unaccompanied children] to adult sponsors for political gain due to their failed immigration policies and the crisis at the southern border.”
Specifically, Cassidy documented four failures on the part of the Biden-Harris administration. The administration first took actions that resulted in less due diligence in the vetting of adult sponsors for children, which put children at risk. Second, the government increasingly relied on nongovernment entities to vet those sponsors and manage children in custody.
The Department of Labor also did “not work collaboratively” with companies that were outed in media reports for illegally employing children too young to work. Finally, the White House obstructed congressional and state investigations into the matter, including the one led by Cassidy.
Senate HELP Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-VT), soon to be replaced by Cassidy come January, did not respond to a request for comment on why he did not help Cassidy. Without that support, Cassidy did not have the power to subpoena relevant departments and agencies for information.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris failed the American people. President Trump’s victory, along with a Republican sweep of Congress, presents an opportunity to secure our border and roll back the disastrous Democrat policies that put children in harm’s way,” Cassidy said. “I am committed to working with President Trump and my colleagues to get this done.”
Influx of unaccompanied children under Biden-Harris
Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 through March 2024, roughly 500,000 unaccompanied children have crossed the southern border — a figure no other administration has come close to hitting in even two terms in office, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics.
As White House administrations shifted from Trump to Biden in early 2021, border policies changed, and pandemic travel restrictions were lifted in some places globally. Migration subsequently increased around the world, including among children who headed to the U.S.
In February 2021, the Biden administration chose to stop returning children to Mexico, as had been protocol since March 2020. Within weeks, children began arriving at the U.S. southern border at unprecedented rates — from dozens per day to hundreds of unaccompanied children showing up daily.
Under normal circumstances, children without parents are taken into Border Patrol custody after they walk across the border, and they are to be transferred within three days to the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which Congress has tasked with caring for immigrant children, not federal law enforcement.
HHS holds children in its own facilities for an average of one month while it searches for an adult to release the child to live with through court proceedings.
In early 2023, the New York Times reported that more than 85,000 children who had been released in the first two years of the Biden administration were unable to be contacted or followed up with by HHS after being released to live with their sponsors. The report found some children had been trafficked into the U.S. against their will or forced into dangerous jobs instead of being placed in school.
In a campaign rally in October, speaking to tens of thousands of supporters inside Madison Square Garden in New York City, President-elect Donald Trump declared that that figure was now up to “325,000 children” who were now “missing or dead” after coming over the border and being released to sponsors.Cassidy launches investigation
Cassidy’s investigation started out shortly after the report from the newspaper, and it was meant to get answers about how the administration was looking out for children and if it was doing enough.
The influx of children at the border under Biden (roughly 10,000 to 20,000 per month since 2021) had prompted the Biden-Harris administration to take emergency action to release children quickly in order to have space at its shelters to take in the growing number of minors.
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra loosened sponsor vetting requirements despite multiple reports from the HHS Office of Inspector General that found these policies failed to protect children from exploitation.
“The directive to prioritize speed at all costs came from HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, who implored ORR staff to convert the [unaccompanied children] release process into a system modeled after Henry Ford’s assembly line,” Cassidy’s report stated. “ORR complied, issuing two field guidance memos, over the objections of career staff, that dismantled the existing sponsor vetting policies and removed basic safety measures from the sponsor vetting process in an effort to expedite the release of [unaccompanied children].”
Emergency housing facilities erected during the influx had “very poor case management, failed to adequately vet sponsors before releasing [children], and even hired employees without conducting required criminal background and sex offender registry checks,” the report continued.
A February 2024 audit by the HHS Office of Inspector General found that the case files of 16% of children placed with sponsors lacked proof that sponsors underwent safety checks and 19% of children were released to adults before FBI fingerprint and state child abuse registries shared results with the government about the sponsors.
“HHS has repeatedly failed to respond to these requests for months at a time, and sometimes not at all,” Cassidy’s report stated. “The agency’s responses were largely unhelpful and rarely provided the information requested.”HHS outsources sponsor vetting, DOL drops the ball
HHS brought on a nongovernment contractor, The Providencia Group, to carry out screening and vetting of sponsors for children, even though its record of similar past work was “abysmal.” It created a new Sponsor Services Initiative that relied on the group to do all sponsor vetting.
“The contractor selected by ORR, The Providencia Group (TPG), had an abysmal record providing case management services at [emergency intake sites where children were detained] prior to being awarded the contract,” the report stated, adding that at the sites where TPG employees worked, children told the HHS inspector general that they went “weeks” without seeing their case manager and “some were released to sponsors before all vetting requirements were completed.”
The TPG issued a statement to the Washington Examiner prior to the report’s release that it had timely fulfilled all contractual obligations, that it only vetted between 9% and 14% of sponsors, and that it was not involved in the cited instances of deficient sponsor vetting.
“Senator Cassidy’s letter stated that TPG is, in part, responsible for ‘significant gaps in the sponsor vetting process,'” TPG said in an email. “We respectfully pointed out to the Senator that this statement is not correct.”
In incidents where children were trafficked, not allowed to enroll in school, or enslaved in work where they were too young to have part-time jobs, the Department of Labor did not take a proactive approach to intervene, Cassidy concluded.
“Despite the administration knowing about the record level of child labor violations since early 2021, DOL has taken no meaningful action to combat this crisis,” the report summary stated. “DOL focuses only on enforcement after these violations have occurred. Without focusing on steps to prevent this exploitation, child labor violations remain at record highs.”
Information that Cassidy said his team requested from federal contractors was not turned over.
When incidents, such as child deaths in custody, occurred, the HHS and contractors did not allow staff to report those allegations to local and state police to allow secondary investigations to take place.
“HHS ignored subpoenas and refused to produce documents or witnesses to a Florida Grand Jury empaneled to investigate criminal or wrongful activity related to the smuggling and endangerment of [unaccompanied children],” the report stated. “The agency also continues to prevent ORR facility staff from reporting concerns to state law enforcement and child welfare agencies.”
The White House and the HHS did not respond to requests for comment.