The Biden administration’s Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) Program was a fraud-fueled federal “smuggling operation” intent on dumping as many unvetted minors into the homeland as possible, according to an assessment from the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
A memo obtained by The Federalist details six primary forms of fraud used by adult sponsors of UACs and says that intentional fraud made up 77 percent of reported Child Level Events (CLEs). The office also received 1,669 reports of fraud between Oct. 1, 2023, and Oct. 31, 2024. HHS further reviewed a portion of those reports and found 85 percent had intentional document fraud. On a phone call with reporters, ORR Senior Advisor John Fabbricatore said that 479,000 UACs went missing during the Biden administration.
“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 quick as possible,” Fabbricatore said. He added that 70 percent of minors in ORR’s care are males over the age of 15, many of whom do not claim any sponsor in the U.S. and say they are simply here to work and be released into the country.
“The Biden Administration failed in its most basic responsibility: protecting vulnerable children in federal care,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said. “It weakened safeguards and prioritized speed over scrutiny, leaving children exposed to fraud, exploitation, and abuse. Under President Trump, HHS is restoring rigorous oversight, verifying who takes custody of these children, and putting their safety first.”
The six forms of fraud include 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.
Fraud is only part of the problem with how the Biden administration dealt with UACs, according to Fabbricatore, because many of these children were smuggled to the border.
“A 5-year-old does not walk from El Salvador to the border of Mexico to try to get into the United States,” he said, adding that there can be a smuggling chain where a cartel will separate a family, bring the parents across the border, and then the illegal alien parents are in the U.S. in order to request their children from ORR, who were also brought by the cartel. The Biden administration simply let them go without doing any vetting whatsoever into the people who are requesting the children.
“The United States under the Biden administration was actually acting as a part of the smuggling operation by then meeting that child up with its parents who were illegally in the United States,” Fabbricatore said.
But they do not always meet their true “parents,” he added.
Fabbricatore described the case of a 15-year-old girl who was released to a sponsor claiming to be her brother. ORR did not take fingerprints or conduct a DNA test to verify that, and the girl ended up being raped and impregnated. A 17-year-old male was released to a person claiming to be his stepsister, and was later “found dead in the back seat of a car with his genitalia exposed, along with an unconscious 30-year-old male.”
The Trump administration is strengthening vetting protocols, including checking DNA and fingerprints, ensuring identification is valid, vetting everyone in a household that might receive a UAC and ensuring that the household has the means to support them, and maintaining a much higher level of scrutiny for things like photographs and other documents that were a major source of fraud in the past.
“There’s been this narrative that we’re keeping kids in care and we’re not letting them go. That narrative is partially true. We’re not just letting kids go to people that we can’t verify who they are, or that they might be criminals, or that they’re not the actual parents of the children,” he said. “We’re not just going to allow nationals from other countries to come into the United States to people who we can’t verify.”
On the other side of the coin, children are also being returned to their nations of origin, but Fabbricatore explained that the process is much more difficult for UACs than for adults, since they cannot be deported to third-party countries and their parents must be found, working with embassy consulates. Some countries are also recalcitrant in receiving deported aliens.
While preferring to deport entire families together, Fabbricatore said the agency is sometimes put in a position to release the UACs into the U.S.
.jpg){kind=link}