EXCLUSIVE — Government employees and contractors who cared for unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody after they crossed the southern border flagged more than 65,000 instances of concern that went unaddressed by the Biden administration, according to newly released materials.

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) documents obtained by Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and shared exclusively with the Washington Examiner revealed that the Trump administration identified a backlog of 65,000 reports filed by workers about children in custody or their sponsors who warranted concern.

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Those concerns were not investigated by the Biden administration, as the HHS prioritized the expeditious release of children to sponsors amid the influx of children arriving daily at the border over four years.

The 65,000 flagged cases were not addressed before children were released to adults in the United States between 2021 and 2024, an issue that Grassley is pushing the Trump administration to investigate thoroughly.

“Not a single child should continue to suffer because of the previous administration’s failures,” Grassley wrote in a letter sent to Trump’s HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on Tuesday.

More than 500,000 children crossed the U.S.-Mexico border unaccompanied under the Biden administration, far exceeding any other previous administration’s totals.

Children were initially encountered at the border by Border Patrol agents, then turned over to HHS, which maintains care settings more suitable for children. HHS is also responsible for finding an adult in the U.S. to release the child to.

As they interviewed children and looked into applications of adult sponsors, HHS workers and contractors flagged countless cases as being of concern.

Of those 65,000, 56,591 cases were flagged as warranting concern, 7,346 on human trafficking suspicions, and 1,688 instances of suspected fraud in terms of an adult posing as a related family member, according to Grassley.

Thus far, 528 leads have been referred by HHS to federal law enforcement for formal investigation. The U.S. Attorney’s office has accepted 36 cases for prosecution, indicted seven people, arrested 11, and convicted three on various federal charges.

“This is a great first step in protecting these children, although HHS reports it has 46,311 backlogged cases still to work through,” Grassley wrote.

Grassley has led Senate investigations into the abuse and neglect of immigrant children who crossed the border for the past decade, starting with the 2014 unaccompanied minor crisis that unfolded during the Obama administration.

Last year, Grassley drew attention to HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement’s poor vetting of sponsors who applied to take in children who had come over the border without their parents.

Grassley’s office reviewed leaked HHS contractor records that revealed children were being placed with suspicious sponsors, such as situations that suggested they were being trafficked, smuggled, and exploited. Those records were then forwarded to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations to investigate.

“[W]histleblowers have confirmed the issues my oversight identified in these records were present at other HHS facilities, raising the specter that thousands of children may have been placed in harm’s way nationwide by the Biden administration,” Grassley wrote in the letter.

Grassley grew frustrated with the Biden administration for not complying with his oversight efforts and subpoenas for information from HHS, citing that two-thirds of the subpoenas issued were ignored.

“After I made this urgent inquiry, HHS under Secretary [Xavier] 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,” Grassley wrote.

The Trump administration has taken steps to remedy the situation and work its way through the tens of thousands of reports to determine which ones warrant further attention.

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It launched an initiative across multiple federal agencies in February to review the flagged concerns and pursue criminal investigative leads.

Grassley pushed HHS in his letter to provide frequent updates on the Trump administration’s efforts to work through the 65,000 flagged cases, as well as HHS’s involvement in and awareness of any government effort to identify and stop human trafficking networks targeting children.