The Trump administration has found a staggering number of cases of fraud while auditing the sponsors of migrant children who crossed the border alone, according to an internal memo obtained by The Daily Wire.
Under the Biden administration, more than 450,000 migrant children crossed the border as unaccompanied minors and were placed into the care of the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is tasked with vetting their sponsors before their release.
At the time, federal officials relaxed vetting standards and expedited the release process. Between October 2023 and September 2024, the Biden administration approved roughly 99% of sponsor applications, according to HHS.
John Fabbricatore, a senior administration official at ORR, said officials “knew” some children ended up with traffickers and others who exploited and abused them.
“They recklessly released children to unknown and potentially dangerous sponsors,” Fabbricatore, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official, said.
“The push was to get children out the door like an assembly line. It was all about: the faster the better for them,” he added.
When President Donald Trump returned to the White House, administration officials began digging into potential fraud cases.
In March 2025, ORR discovered a backlog of 65,000 reports of potential sponsor fraud that went “unanswered.” Some of those reports came from the migrant minors themselves.
They discovered that between October 1, 2023, and October 31, 2024, ORR received roughly 1,669 reports of fraud related to the sponsors of migrant children.
“ORR’s tracking of fraud trends shows that the average rate of intentional document or information fraud, regardless of the number of children assisted per month, remains at approximately 77% of reported Child Level Events (CLE),” the HHS memo noted. “Similarly, approximately 85% of the cases OGC [the Office of the General Counsel] reviewed involved intentional document fraud.”
Sponsors submitted fraudulent IDs, photographs, fingerprints, and addresses, according to HHS.
Some also failed to disclose all household members. Additionally, many of the supposed unaccompanied children lied about their ages and were actually adults.
In one case, federal officials in August 2023 released a 15-year-old girl to a sponsor who claimed to be her biological brother. As part of the vetting process, officials did not ask the sponsor for his fingerprints or DNA.
In October 2023, authorities discovered that the sponsor was not the child’s relative and that he raped and impregnated her, resulting in state charges.
The Biden administration also released a 17-year-old migrant boy to a sponsor who claimed she was his stepsister.
The woman provided Venezuelan documents that authorities could not verify. In October 2024, the child was found dead in the back seat of a car with his genitalia exposed, along with a 30-year-old man.
“Heightened scrutiny and better vetting practices could have prevented the fraud that led to the violent abuse of these minors. 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,” Fabbricatore said.
A 2024 inspector general’s report found that 291,000 migrant children were released before they were given court dates, while another 32,000 migrant children who were scheduled for future court dates never showed up. The report tracked cases from October 2018 to September 2023.
The findings sparked the Trump administration’s search for the roughly 290,000 missing migrant minors.
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