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Home – California Politics & News – Whistleblowers Say HHS Under Becerra Released Migrant Children After Staff Flagged Unsafe Sponsors

Whistleblowers Say HHS Under Becerra Released Migrant Children After Staff Flagged Unsafe Sponsors

A former contractor who says he helped move more than 1,500 unaccompanied children out of a San Diego emergency site is speaking on the record by name for the first time, and he says the government kept releasing kids to adults they did not know.

Between 2021 and 2024, nearly half a million unaccompanied alien children entered the U.S under former President Joe Biden’s administration, with thousands vanishing from federal view. Two people who were inside that system sat down with The California Courier to speak about what they saw from different parts of the process.

“The paperwork was saying that these people were family members, uncles, aunts, sisters, and the kids were crying, freaking out, ‘Hey, we don’t know those people.’ It raised a lot of red flags for me,” Tariq Khodoura, a former site supervisor for the contractor that transported the children, told The California Courier. “That’s when I started asking questions.”

One was a contractor in San Diego who said children were driven to adults they did not recognize and that agents were told not to bring them back. The other worked in Department of Homeland Security intelligence and said watch-listed gang members were applying to sponsor children as early as February 2021. 

Their accounts, told separately, describe the same failure: Warnings about trafficking and unsafe placements moved up the chain, and the releases still continued.

When it came to the border during Biden’s 2020 campaign, the former president ran on unwinding President Donald Trump’s first-term immigration system. And some of those promises did not just stay on the campaign site.

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By February 2021, the administration began to make formal changes to the way the federal government handled unaccompanied alien children.

Unaccompanied alien children would no longer be expelled under Title 42, the COVID-19-era public-health rule Trump had used to expel migrants without a normal immigration case. Adults and many families could still be turned back, but children who arrived alone generally could not.

That change left Title 8 and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act to govern what happened next. 

Typical standards state that Border Patrol is supposed to hold an unaccompanied child for about 72 hours. Custody then moves to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, which shelters the child and vets a sponsor.

In March 2021, HHS and DHS terminated a 2018 agreement that had required the Office of Refugee Resettlement to share biographic and biometric information on sponsors and other adults in the household with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.

The Biden administration said the 2018 agreement had a “chilling effect,” and that relatives would not come forward if they believed ICE would use the paperwork to arrest them. The replacement memo narrowed what HHS had to send to DHS.

That same month, the Office of Refugee Resettlement issued Field Guidance 10 and Field Guidance 11. The memos were not new........

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