The Biden administration left behind a backlog of more than 65,000 reports about the welfare of illegal immigrant children, including more than 7,300 reports on human trafficking, which the Trump administration is now working to address.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) revealed details about the migrant case backlog in a letter sent last week to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laying out the dire situation and asking for further updates on the Trump administration’s progress.
“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.”
The Trump administration has made immigration enforcement a top priority and is attempting to pull off the largest mass deportation program in American history. Shortly after President Trump took office, his border czar, Tom Homan, vowed to find some 300,000 children who entered the country illegally and went missing under Biden.
Top administration officials have also promised to crack down on sex trafficking as part of their effort to reduce illegal immigration and the power of gangs and cartels. In February, the ORR released new guidance on the background check and identity verification process for sponsors to ensure gang members and sex traffickers are not exploiting the system to sponsor unaccompanied minors.
HHS said on X in April that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) was “digging through” 65,000 reports related to undocumented minors. An ORR interagency summary attached to Grassley’s letter shows the backlog featured 6,591 notifications of concern, 7,346 reports of human trafficking and 1,688 fraud leads.
Grassley requested data from HHS on its work to reduce the case backlog since the Trump administration took over. HHS has processed 28 percent of the backlog, leading to 528 investigative leads, 36 investigations accepted for federal prosecution, seven indictments, 25 arrest warrants, eleven arrests and three convictions. The current administration still has 46,311 cases to work through and Grassley recommended using data analytics to more quickly sort them out.
As the backlog formed during the last administration, HHS spent $22.6 billion on assistance to illegal immigrants, with the majority of the taxpayer funds distributed through ORR, a government watchdog discovered. Over half the funding, $12.6 billion went to the ORR’s program for resettling migrants, despite its failures in tracking children and protecting them from abusive situations.
For more than a decade, Grassley has conducted extensive oversight of programs involving unaccompanied alien children to mitigate exploitation and abuse. A report from the Department of Homeland Security’s office of inspector general earlier this year found the Biden administration lost track of hundreds of thousands of migrant children and failed to vet tens of thousands of sponsors for the children.
The DHS OIG report confirmed Grassley’s concerns about the previous administration’s handling of unaccompanied minors in the U.S. illegally. Grassley is now asking Kennedy for more agency records pertaining to his oversight of the ORR’s unaccompanied alien children program and updates on HHS’s steps to fix the problems the watchdog report identified.
As part of his oversight efforts, Grassley is requesting an update from HHS on any government wide or interagency efforts to combat trafficking networks and find individuals who may be exploiting the sponsorship process for unaccompanied children.
Last year, a congressional investigation from the House Judiciary Committee found that the Biden administration was not adequately vetting the unaccompanied minor children for potential criminal histories. Under former President Biden, the U.S. let in record numbers of illegal immigrants and took a soft approach to immigration enforcement.