WASHINGTON — The Biden administration failed to investigate more than 7,300 reports of human trafficking involving child migrants and tens of thousands of other concerning leads, startling findings from the Department of Health and Human Services released Thursday show.
HHS is poring over 65,605 backlogged reports from the last administration as part of an interagency probe into cases of unaccompanied migrant kids who may have been abused by sex predators or trafficked by gangs like MS-13.
Since launching the investigation in February, the department has processed 18,868 cases — but still has 1,688 of possibly fraudulent sponsors receiving the kids, 7,346 human trafficking reports and another 46,311 other tips from grantees, staff and unaccompanied minors themselves to vet.
So far that’s led to 528 investigative leads, 36 prosecutions taken up by US attorneys’ offices, 25 arrest warrants, 11 arrests, seven indictments and three convictions — with roughly 28% of the backlog worked through under President Trump.
“This is a systemic failure of the Biden administration. It is children’s lives put at risk,” reps for HHS said in an April 22 statement.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) published the HHS statistics in a letter sent to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday, asking for “an immediate update on governmentwide efforts to find and rescue children who were placed in harm’s way.”
“My oversight exposed the Biden-Harris administration for placing unaccompanied migrant children with dangerous sponsors and actively obstructing law enforcement and Congress’ efforts to rescue vulnerable kids,” Grassley said in a statement.
“I applaud the Trump administration for its swift action to protect unaccompanied migrant children by addressing the concerning reports the Biden-Harris administration shelved. I look forward to working with Secretary Kennedy to ensure justice is served.”
As of May 2024, at least 291,000 were presumed to be in the custody of domestic sponsors — while 32,000 were believed to be missing after failing to show up for immigration court hearings, a report from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found.
Internal documents showed HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) ignored obvious safety risks and prioritized quickly releasing the youths — with then-HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra likening the ideal turnover rate to an “assembly line,” according to The New York Times.
Whistleblowers later came forward to Congress and alleged that many of the kids appear to have fallen into the hands of criminals and sex traffickers.
Grassley’s office has been investigating ORR for more than a decade and also found instances in recent years of sponsors “likely trafficking, smuggling, and exploitation” of migrant children, which he flagged to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the FBI.
HSI later confirmed “over 100 sponsors were suspicious enough to warrant further investigation, from a single HHS emergency intake site.” At least 14 of those sites were set up between March and June 2021, as border crossings surged in the first few months of former President Joe Biden’s term.
Despite receiving subsequent subpoenas from HSI, his HHS Secretary Becerra “failed to fully comply with two-thirds” of requests for further information about “suspicious sponsors,” Grassley told Kennedy in his May 27 letter.
“HSI only found a handful of sponsors and children, in part because of HHS’s failure to provide subpoenaed information to law enforcement,” he said. “This conduct is unacceptable.
“HHS under Secretary Becerra obstructed my investigation and instructed contractors and grantees not to answer, and to instead send my inquiry to the Assistant Secretary for Legislation, who of course also failed to provide any requested information,” he added.
Grassley also asked for an update on the interagency probe’s success in identifying trafficking networks, “Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s failure to issue notices to appear” in court for migrant kids and “copies of all correspondence” with federal grantees who helped house them by June 10.
The largest of those housing providers for unaccompanied minors took $3 billion from Biden’s HHS — and boosted its executives’ six-figure salaries by as much as 139% — between 2021 and 2024, tax filings show.
The Austin, Texas-based nonprofit, Southwest Key Programs, was sued by Biden’s Department of Justice in July 2024 due to the alleged “severe” and “pervasive” rape and sex abuse of the kids by staff or supervisors between 2015 and 2023.
Trump’s DOJ dropped that civil case in March, and HHS announced it would no longer fund Southwest Key, which had received half of its $6 billion in federal monies since 2003 during the Biden years.
