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.
In the Beginning
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 statutes.
However, Field Guidance 10 expedited releases to parents and legal guardians and trimmed what caseworkers had to collect in those cases. Field Guidance 11 went further for close relatives.
Background checks and identification requirements for other adults in the home were no longer required as a condition of release unless the child was already flagged as especially vulnerable or a home study was mandatory.
Sponsor-vetting rules in those years were “either waived or simply not required,” including universal fingerprint checks on sponsors and other adults in the home, a senior adviser authorized to speak on behalf of the Office of Refugee Resettlement said. The adviser said the office often took sponsors at their word about their relationship to the child, did not require DNA tests, and did not verify income.
HHS Control
With major changes occurring at HHS in March 2021, Xavier Becerra, now the California Democrat gubernatorial candidate, was sworn in as HHS secretary, with the Office of Refugee Resettlement reporting to him. Due to the influx of unaccompanied alien children, licensed shelters could no longer hold the number, thus forcing HHS to open emergency intake sites throughout the country.
One of them was the San Diego Convention Center, with the city announcing on March 22, 2021, that roughly 1,450 beds would be available for a 90-day plan.
Khodoura, who goes by “Joey,” was the site supervisor on the ground. He told The California Courier that he spent 18 years between the Army, law enforcement, and federal contracting, and that he contracted with DHS from 2020 to 2024, including work with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations and, later, on the intelligence side.
In 2021, he said that background put him at the convention center as a supervisor for MVM, the company paid to move the children off the site and to sponsors. He said he was the liaison between MVM, HHS, and White House staff assigned to the operation.
“It was an HHS contract, but DHS was also aware of it,” Khodoura said. “I was a site supervisor. I got sent in what’s called a TDY, temporary duty assignment, to San Diego, where they were using this stadium in San Diego to house 1,500 trafficked kids. The first week I was there, I already knew something sketchy was going on.”
MVM is a private security and transportation contractor the federal government has long used to escort unaccompanied children. Under the Biden-era surge, that work included emergency intake sites like San Diego, where the job was not long-term custody.
Officials later said more than 2,400 children were released from the San Diego site by the time it closed in July 2021. Khodoura said the White House’s instruction on-site was faster than that: More than 1,500 children, most of them girls, moved in about three months.
“They just wanted to pump those kids out, so to say. As much as I hate to say that, they were treating them like it was a concentration camp. ‘Let’s clear these kids out so everything can go back to normal without asking any damn questions,’” Khodoura said.
“We had a timeline within three months. I asked why three months. They said because that’s what the White House and administration at the time wanted,” Khodoura continued. “It was mostly young girls between 7 and 13, 14. They’re really young girls. A lot of them were trafficked, exploited, all kinds, the worst of the worst. You can tell they’ve been through a lot of trauma.”
The Other End
While Khodoura was watching the children leave the building, a second official, who asked not to be named because of the nature of his work, was watching the names of the adults waiting at the other end.
He told The California Courier that he was assigned to a DHS intelligence unit that handled transnational organized crime and the watchlist used to flag gang members, traffickers, and other national security threats.
In February 2021, he said, an MS-13 member’s fingerprints hit that list. The purpose was to sponsor a child.
So, out of concern, he started calling around the building.
“Everyone was just like, ‘Dude, not us. No worries. We have no idea,’” he told The California Courier. “Kept asking around [to] other agencies as well, because I’ve got friends throughout the government calling [Customs and Border Protection], calling ICE, calling DHS I&A, which is intelligence and analysis.”
“I’m asking them like, ‘Hey, guys, I got this record of an MS-13 member who’s, you know, giving fingerprints to HHS to sponsor a child, like the sponsor of one of these UACs.’ And everyone just said, ‘Nope, not our job. That’s not our mission’,” he added.
Attempting to get ahold of HHS, he stated that he could not get the agency on the phone and that there was no working channel to tell the Office of Refugee Resettlement that a sponsor had hit the watchlist. By his count, he later identified about a dozen sponsors with gang ties, most of them from Central American groups, including MS-13 and 18th Street.
The official reviewed records of those watchlist hits with The California Courier. The DHS intel whistleblower stated that the problem was not that the government never saw the names. It was that seeing them did not stop the placement.
“There’s no attempt to identify it, no attempt to mitigate it, to detect it, to defeat it,” he said. “No worries at all.”
The same senior adviser authorized to speak on behalf of the Office of Refugee Resettlement said that account matches how the 2021 information-sharing break worked.
After HHS and DHS ended the 2018 agreement, “there was no data sharing,” the adviser confirmed. The adviser said the office is again sending ICE a sponsor’s name, address and contact information, plus biographical data on the child—information the adviser said moved before 2021, stopped under the Biden administration, and resumed under Trump.
In addition to the flag, he described what he called a hole in the system after release.
“There’s loopholes within the system which allow you to come off the watchlist,” the official said. “One of those giant loopholes, which I’ve raised it to work in the past as well, is if you are on the watchlist and you do this thing called defensive asylum, you come off of the watchlist.”
If a sponsor who had been removed from the United States later crossed again and claimed asylum, he said that person could be pulled off the watchlist and left in the country while the case was pending, still being able to take custody of an unaccompanied alien child.
“They were all illegal aliens. On top of that, they’d all been previously removed from the country as well. So it’s not like the sponsors were unknown people,” the official added.
The Children
HHS has said its responsibility ends when a child is released to a sponsor. Becerra told Congress the department was not built to track children after placement and that once a sponsor took custody, the child was no longer in HHS care.
Inspectors general later documented the gap both men described. An HHS watchdog found sponsor checks that were skipped and children released before fingerprint results were back. A DHS inspector general found that more than 291,000 unaccompanied children transferred to HHS were never given a notice to appear for immigration court.
Additionally, in 2023, The New York Times reported HHS could not reach tens of thousands of children on the welfare calls the agency said it was making.
A DHS spokesperson, asked for comment, said ICE Homeland Security Investigations is “dedicated to locating the 450,000 unaccompanied children that came in through the border under the Biden administration.” The spokesperson said many of those children “were placed with unvetted sponsors who were actually smugglers and sex traffickers,” and that the Trump administration “has located more than 145,000 of these children.”
In November 2025, the spokesperson said, ICE launched the UAC Safety Verification Initiative with state and local 287(g) partners to conduct welfare checks “to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited.”
The senior adviser authorized to speak on behalf of the Office of Refugee Resettlement said 478,886 unaccompanied children were referred to the office during the Biden administration and that “the vast majority of them were released within 10 days.” Thousands of sponsor addresses from that period have not checked out, the adviser said, and the office is still concerned about roughly 80,000 children, with younger kids first.
Agencies are still finding labor-trafficking cases, the adviser said, including one sponsor tied to more than 40 children that became public this summer.
“We know we’re still coming across these cases,” the adviser said. “That of course is a worry for us.”
The intelligence official said that was not a problem Congress created in 2021; it was how the agencies ran the program they already had.
“[DHS Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas, Becerra specifically—they could have changed anything they wanted to identify the risk at a better rate, they could have done better enforcement side,” the official said.
“They do have an authority to reach out to kids afterwards. This is called post-release services,” he added. “And, hey, guess what? Why don’t you just give post-release services to every single child anyways? If you have the authority, follow up with every single kid.”
Neither MVM nor Beccera’s campaign returned a request for comment by time of publication.
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