Senator Chuck Grassley, the Senate’s most experienced and tenacious investigator, finally has the attention of the corporations that took more than $9 billion from taxpayers to house illegal immigrant children in the United States.
During the Biden administration, the contractors refused to answer Congress’s questions even as hundreds of thousands of “unaccompanied minors” disappeared. In some cases, children were allegedly sexually abused by contractor staff. In other cases, contractors dropped them off to live with unvetted sponsors who refused to answer the government’s calls afterward.
Grassley said the missing children must be located — and that contractors will no longer get away with taking taxpayer money while snubbing oversight. Now that Republicans control the White House and Congress, the Iowa Republican sent document demands to 23 contractors, according to copies of the <a href="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/2025-03-10-Grassley-to-Asset-Protection-Security-Services-LP-Contractors-and-Grantees-Follow-Up.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">letters</a> obtained by The Daily Wire. The letters largely reissued the same demands he sent a year ago, which he says were met with stonewalling.
“It’s unacceptable for recipients of taxpayer funding to refuse to provide information to Congress about the use of those funds. And it’s beyond unacceptable for these federally-funded entities to refuse to answer questions designed to determine whether they protected children,” he said in letters to companies such as Cherokee Federal, Southwest Key Programs, and Asset Protection &amp; Security Services LP.
The letters ask questions like “what actions, if any, did you take to ensure that no children would be sponsored or placed in potential situations where there may be signs of criminal activity, including human trafficking? … Where questions require entire case files or contracts to answer, those case files and contracts must be provided.”
In what could be one of the largest scandals in American history, the “unaccompanied alien children” (UAC) program allowed illegal immigrant children to cross the border and remain in the United States as long as they came without their parents.
That created a class of people who were exceedingly vulnerable to exploitation by labor or sex traffickers: They didn’t speak English, they were helpless children, they had a desperate need to make money to repay coyotes who brought them here. And local and state authorities didn’t know they existed, meaning they could be killed, abused, or disappeared, and no one would know.
Children were held in centers then transported by contractors to live with “sponsors,” who were often other illegal immigrants who did not have to be relatives, and who the government did not have to see in person before handing off the children.
The program was administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is not a law enforcement agency and had no authority to check documents of sponsors, arrest criminals, or take children back from abusers. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Grassley that he will ensure “radical transparency” around the missing children, and White House border czar Tom Homan has pledged to mount a rescue operation for them.
“Shockingly, children were placed by HHS and one of its contractors even where they were notified of likely MS-13 gang affiliation in the household,” Grassley wrote. Grassley sent a detailed criminal referral to the FBI in January 2024 that provided leads on 100 possible human traffickers.
This week’s letters ordered 23 contractors and grantees to provide all contracts with the government, along with documents showing the process for identifying and vetting sponsors, how often and what sort of background checks or home visits were conducted, and cases where individuals sought to sponsor a large number of children.
They also must provide a list of all instances where minors disclosed physical or sexual abuse, and all records where contractors found evidence of possible human trafficking.
Grassley sent letters to the following contractors or grantees:
<ol>
<li>Asset Protection &amp; Security Services LP</li>
<li>BCFS Health and Human Services</li>
<li>Bethany Christian Services</li>
<li>Cayuga Centers</li>
<li>Center for Family Services</li>
<li>Cherokee Federal</li>
<li>Compass Connections</li>
<li>Endeavors</li>
<li>General Dynamics Information Technology, Inc.</li>
<li>Global Refuge</li>
<li>Heartland Human Care</li>
<li>Holy Family Institute</li>
<li>Morrison Child Family Services</li>
<li>Rapid Deployment Inc</li>
<li>Southwest Key programs</li>
<li>Sunny Glen Children&#8217;s Home</li>
<li>The Providencia Group LLC</li>
<li>US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants Inc.</li>
<li>VisionQuest National Ltd</li>
<li>A Greater Love Foster Family Agency, Inc.</li>
<li>A New Leaf, Inc.</li>
<li>Alba Care Services Inc.</li>
<li>National Youth Advocate Program, Inc.</li>
</ol>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/unaccompanied-migrant-children-were-raped-by-federal-contractors-doj-says" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Southwest Key Partners is being sued</a> by the Department of Justice after it said children were subject to “pervasive” sexual abuse at the hands of its employees. In one case an “eight-year-old girl disclosed that the Youth Care Worker repeatedly entered their bedrooms in the middle of the night to touch their ‘private area,’ and he threatened to kill their families if they disclosed the abuse.” <a href="https://www.axios.com/2021/04/14/texas-nonprofit-border-contract-biden-official" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Family Endeavors</a> won a half-billion dollar contract after hiring a former Biden official. <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/whistleblowers-detail-how-85000-unaccompanied-minors-went-missing-after-biden-admin-dropped-them-off-with-sponsors" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cherokee Federal</a>, a whistleblower said, was staffed by “frankly dangerous people who had access to vulnerable children.”
A 2023 series in The New York Times unearthed internal government data that showed that in a third of placements, “sponsors” could not or would not tell the government where the child was 30 days later. At the time, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-kamalas-kids-in-cages-lie-paved-the-way-for-a-child-trafficking-crisis" target="_blank" rel="noopener">85,000 children</a> were unaccounted for.
In August, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general said the department did not know the location of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/dhs-made-no-effort-to-locate-missing-unaccompanied-alien-children-auditor-says-in-urgent-alert" target="_blank" rel="noopener">300,000 minors</a>, and “Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
Biden Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he was “aware of reports of children being trafficked,” but that stopping trafficking was “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/mayorkas-says-stopping-trafficking-of-alien-children-is-outside-the-responsibility-of-dhs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">outside the responsibility</a> of the Department of Homeland Security.”
About <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/guatemalan-traffickers-exploit-bidens-unaccompanied-alien-children-program-records-suggest" target="_blank" rel="noopener">70% of unaccompanied minors come from Guatemala</a>, a percentage that is wildly inconsistent with overall migration patterns, and suggests that cartels in that country are exploiting the program, essentially using the United States government as last-mile delivery.
The “unaccompanied minor” policy was essentially a loophole that created an open border for children, leading to a surge so vast that federal employees from unrelated agencies had to be detailed to temporary stints as border workers. Lindsey Friend was one such federal employee who served a stint at a processing facility in April 2021. She said it was so emotionally devastating that it was difficult to talk about.
“This was the most backwards way of doing things,” Friend told The Daily Wire. “A whole bunch of feds build a bunch of temporary tent cities, process them as fast as possible, with a U.S. background check and then no follow up. That&#8217;s just not a good idea.”
“Saying that unaccompanied minors can stay, that induced the family separation. The kids separated from their parents” as a result, she said.
“They were not unaccompanied. Their entire journey, they were accompanied by a coyote who left them at the border. Then they sought out a border patrol agent and had their birth certificate to show that they were a minor. So this was all deliberate.”
She said background checks were a farce, because “you&#8217;re just typing in a name, right? There&#8217;s no Social Security numbers because they&#8217;re undocumented and their name is something common.” The background check was a public website that checked only U.S. records, even though sponsors often just came to the United States recently.
Even though the government claimed the children were required to go to school, all the children said their plan was to work, she said. It would be impossible for state-run Child Protective Services or truancy officers to intervene.
“We did not notify any state or local agency that we were sending these kids there,&#8221; she said. &#8220;We did not contact the local school district.”
Some of the children wished they could be back in Guatemala with their parents. “I should not have come,” they cried. “I just want to come home.”

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Grassley Probes Contractors Who Made Billions On Disastrous ‘Unaccompanied Alien Children’ Program

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Grassley Probes Contractors Who Made Billions On Disastrous ‘Unaccompanied Alien Children’ Program