HHS Memo: Biden-Era Agency Denied Under 1% of Migrant Child Sponsor Applications While Fraud Rate Hit 77%

The Department of Health and Human Services released a memo on October 1, 2026, detailing six categories of fraud that infected the Unaccompanied Alien Children program under the Biden administration, according to HHS's Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

From 2021 to 2024, roughly 479,000 unaccompanied migrant children were referred to ORR custody, HHS said. In fiscal year 2024, ORR denied less than 1% of applications from people seeking to take custody of those kids, according to the memo and reporting from the New York Post.

That near-automatic approval rate came even as ORR's own data showed the average rate of intentional documentation fraud sat at approximately 77% of reported Child-Level Events, the incident reports ORR uses to track problems affecting a child's health or safety. Between October 1, 2023, and October 31, 2024, ORR received 1,669 such reports.

HHS's Office of General Counsel reviewed a subset of those cases and found that roughly 85% of the sponsorship applicants examined had engaged in intentional document fraud, the New York Post reported, citing the memo. Fraud tactics included fake IDs, manipulated photos, unverifiable addresses, fingerprint fraud, and lies about who lived in the sponsor's household or how old the child actually was.

The consequences were not abstract. The memo describes a 15-year-old girl who was released to a man she believed was her biological brother. He was not related to her at all. He went on to rape and impregnate her in the fall of 2023. That same man had already sponsored three other unaccompanied children before HHS caught the fraud, according to the memo. He has since been charged by state authorities, and the case is now under investigation by Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI, and the Department of Justice.

"The Biden Administration failed in its most basic responsibility: protecting vulnerable children in federal care," HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement accompanying the memo. "It weakened safeguards and prioritized speed over scrutiny, leaving children exposed to fraud, exploitation, and abuse."

HHS says investigators are now working through a backlog of more than 65,000 flagged Child-Level Event reports that built up under the previous administration, and that the agency is "restoring rigorous oversight" of who takes custody of migrant children.

The Other Side of the Surge

HHS's memo attributes the relaxed vetting to a "sharp increase in UAC referrals" starting in 2021. That increase was real: hundreds of thousands of children crossed the border during that period, overwhelming a system built for far smaller numbers. Advocates for faster placement have long argued that keeping children in detention-like shelters for extended periods causes its own documented harm, a concern that predates any single administration. The memo does not quantify how many additional months of custody stricter vetting might have required, or weigh that against the fraud outcomes it documents. Both tradeoffs are real, and the memo focuses only on one side of the ledger.

Still, a 77% fraud rate among flagged cases paired with a sub-1% denial rate reveals a significant gap. An agency catching fraud at that scale after the fact wasn't catching it beforehand.

A Parallel Shift: Paying Countries to Take Deportees Who Aren't Theirs

Separately, the Trump administration has built out a different immigration enforcement tool that has nothing to do with the ORR memo. The Washington Post reported that a new State Department unit called the Office of Remigration, led by career diplomat Christian Ehrhardt, has negotiated deals with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, to accept deportation flights of migrants who are not their own citizens.

Internal government records reviewed by the Post show the administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million for these arrangements as of the end of June, including $81 million in direct payments to 13 foreign governments. Deportation flights have already sent migrants from China, Russia, Iran, and Afghanistan to Costa Rica, and migrants from Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and Jamaica to Eswatini, according to the Post.

The Post reports the deals are driven by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who current and former officials say has pushed State Department appointments to clear the way for more deportations, sometimes overriding other foreign policy priorities. Ehrhardt is treated as "a White House envoy" in meetings with foreign leaders, a U.S. official told the Post, despite formally holding a State Department title.

The two developments, the ORR fraud memo and the third-country deportation network, are not connected by any shared case or policy mechanism in the available records. Together they show an administration reworking immigration enforcement on two fronts at once: auditing who was let into the country as a minor, and funding new routes to remove adults who are already here illegally.

No figures from the Biden administration were quoted in the HHS release or in the Post's reporting responding to either story. Congress has not announced hearings on the ORR fraud findings as of this writing, and it remains unclear how many of the 65,000 backlogged Child-Level Event reports HHS has resolved.