The Biden administration failed to properly check the caregivers of illegal immigrant children who crossed into the United States alone for criminal histories as it scrambled to handle the influx at the border, according to a new federal watchdog report.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) only conducted 176 of the 256 required visits between September 2021 and August 2024 to check conditions at unlicensed facilities in Texas and Florida, according to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General’s report released Wednesday. Due to the oversight failures, “new staff may have had access to children before the care provider could verify that the staff member did not have a criminal history or a history indicating a risk to unaccompanied alien children.”
“As a result, the health and safety of unaccompanied alien children may have been at risk,” the audit found.
The Biden administration hastily used the unlicensed facilities, which didn’t meet the normal requirements, to handle the overwhelming flow of roughly half a million migrant children who arrived in the United States alone.
When Border Patrol agents encounter unaccompanied migrant children at the border, they transfer them to the department’s ORR, which places them in shelters, foster care, or secure facilities. Some of those children eventually end up with sponsors in the United States, which include family members.
ORR is required to check on the facilities during its first three months of taking in migrant children and on a quarterly basis thereafter, according to the report. There is also a requirement to conduct checks no less than once every two years.
When conducting visits at the facility, ORR officials spend a week checking on conditions by reviewing case files and other documents, including staff files for background check information, and interviewing staff, children, and stakeholders.
In some cases, ORR found that facilities failed to conduct or document some FBI fingerprint-based background checks or let them expire. They also discovered that the care providers didn’t conduct Child Protective Services (CPS) clearances or conducted them after employees were already hired.
In March 2023, ORR officials inspected one of its largest care providers’ 17 facilities in Texas for the first time since it was delicensed in August 2021, according to the report. During the audit, the federal inspectors found that the provider failed to conduct FBI background checks and only ran names through state criminal databases of more than 3,000 employees since their delicensing.
Four of the employees who failed risk evaluations were ultimately terminated, the report noted.
ORR said monitoring visits were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, when they stopped conducting in-person visits and ran checks virtually, and an “influx of unaccompanied alien children through the southern border.”
The agency also said they didn’t have the resources or staffing to conduct timely checks “due to a hiring freeze and difficulty securing monitoring contractors.”
The Biden administration has also received intense scrutiny of its vetting of the sponsors of some of the children, who were released from their care. An earlier government watchdog report found that the Biden administration lost track of roughly 320,000 unaccompanied migrant kids, some of whom ended up in the hands of traffickers, gang members, and predators.
