Mellissa Harper, who was installed a few weeks ago as the temporary head of the federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), is wasting no time making important and necessary changes to the agency’s infamous Unaccompanied Alien Children program. On Friday, the agency released new guidance that will make it more difficult for members of transnational criminal organizations and pimps to “sponsor” teenage migrants and then traffic them for sex or labor. The problem grew significantly under the Biden administration, with three times more victims applying for government benefits under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act during the Biden administration.
The most significant change is that all potential sponsors must be fingerprinted, and the fingerprints must be sent to the FBI to check for criminal records. No child will be released to a sponsor until their fingerprints are recorded in the unaccompanied child’s file. In addition, all identification documents must be legible and unexpired.
Critics of the Trump administration’s immigration policy complain that cumbersome fingerprinting and identification rules could delay the vetting of sponsors, leading to a backlog and overcrowding in shelters that house unaccompanied children. They also fear that under Harper, who has been an official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement since 2007, ORR will share information about the sponsors, most of whom are illegal immigrants themselves, with ICE, making it easier to arrest and deport them. But Harper was unapologetic in an email to the ORR staff. “The pervasive fraud in the sponsor process is undeniable,’ she wrote.
She’s right.
Last October, The Free Press published an exposé about the explosion of labor and sex trafficking by transnational criminal organizations operating in the U.S.—trafficking enabled in no small part by the Biden administration’s open border policies. Gang members and others who were essentially pimps took advantage of the system by claiming to be “sponsors” of unaccompanied teens who were being housed temporarily in shelters run by federally contracted NGOs.
With record numbers of unaccompanied teens crossing the border (over 149,000 in fiscal year 2022 alone), the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) was eager to move them out of the shelters to make room for the next influx—and to do that, they were willing to cut corners at the expense of the migrant children’s safety.
Although regulations promulgated by ORR called for potential sponsors, under certain circumstances, to be fingerprinted, some children were released to sponsors while the results were still pending, as a government watchdog agency reported in February 2024. And potential sponsors, knowing that no one at these NGO shelters was looking too closely, often submitted documents and signatures that were blurry or illegible. In fact, toward the tail end of the Biden administration, the ORR had proposed new regulations that would make fingerprinting and several other provisions meant to safeguard unaccompanied migrants “optional.”
Tara Rodas, a whistleblower who has documented that fraud, told The Free Press, “We can’t continue to prioritize the anonymity of the sponsors over the safety of the children.” Rodas, 56, a federal employee, was shocked by the problems she witnessed while volunteering at an ORR-run shelter for unaccompanied children in 2021. “These new changes are basic, commonsense things and are the bare minimum for a program wrought with fraud.”
According to another whistleblower, Mayra Moreno, 44, who worked as a case manager for a federal contractor in 2021 to help unite unaccompanied children with sponsors, potential sponsors often sent grainy and fraudulent-looking photos of identification documents via WhatsApp as proof of identity. The new system requires potential sponsors to show up in person for their fingerprinting appointment with original, unexpired identification documents in hand.
“There are criticisms that these new rules will discourage sponsors from coming forward to claim unaccompanied children, but frankly, these children might be better off in government custody than with some of these so-called sponsors,” Florida prosecutor Rich Mantei told The Free Press. “I applaud this small step toward making it much safer for these children. It’s good, it’s positive, but it’s not enough, in my opinion.”
