Cornyn Grills Ex-HHS Official on Failures in Vetting Sponsors for Unaccompanied Alien Children 

Sen. John Cornyn pressed a former Department of Health and Human Services official on why the department failed to vet all members of a household before placing an unaccompanied alien child in that home.  

“Senator, first of all, many of the allegations about improper vetting … actually occurred before I got to HHS,” Mary Giovagnoli, former ombudsman for unaccompanied children at the HHS, told Cornyn at a Senate committee hearing.  

“I’m talking about on your watch,” the Texas Republican interjected. “Did you see children placed with sponsors in households where the other members of the household were unvetted?” 

“Sir, my job was to receive reports from all stakeholders, and investigate those reports,” she said, adding that she was not involved in the vetting. Giovagnoli lost her job at HHS earlier this year during the Trump administration’s reduction of the federal workforce. 

“Well,” Cornyn said, “don’t you think it would be a good idea to vet the other members of the household to see if maybe, let’s say, one of them is not a sex offender?”  

Vetting of sponsors has improved, Giovagnoli responded, contending that calling the home where a child is placed and receiving no answer is only one data point and not cause for immediate concern.  

Calling the home of a sponsor and receiving no answer means “you don’t know about the welfare of that child,” Cornyn. 

“No, it doesn’t, not at all,” Giovagnoli shot back, adding that the child welfare system would place multiple calls.  

“So, you think losing … ” Cornyn began before Giovagnoli interrupted him and said children in homes where sponsors do not answer the phone are not lost.  

“How do you know what’s happened to them? Nobody’s answering the phone,” the senator asked.  

The terse exchanges came Wednesday during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration hearing, “Another Biden Blunder: Missing Unaccompanied Alien Children and Criminal Sponsors.”  

Between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, more than 448,000 unaccompanied alien children were transferred from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody to the custody of HHS. Most of those children were placed in the care of a sponsor.  

Among the 448,000 minors to enter the U.S. in recent years, ICE failed to issue more than 233,000 notices to appear in immigration court and more than 43,000 migrant children who were given a notice to appear in immigration court failed to do so, Joseph Cuffari, DHS inspector general, told members of Congress in July.  

The vetting of sponsors applying to host unaccompanied alien children has been “abysmal” in recent years, according to Chris Clem, a retired chief patrol agent at the U.S. Border Patrol in Yuma, Ariz. 

Clem, also a former senior adviser to HHS, says he recalls an instance in which a home visit was conducted of a potential sponsor for an unaccompanied migrant child. The woman was found to have a gang affiliation, and the home was determined a “general unsafe environment,” but the decision was overruled, and a 17-year-old migrant child was placed with the woman. 

The minor was “found dead a few months later with his pants down with an adult male who was unconscious in the back seat of a car,” Clem said. 

In another instance, he said, a 14-year-old migrant child was placed in the care of a 30-year-old male who claimed to be the girl’s brother, but no verification was done to ensure a family connection. The girl was raped, according to Clem, and became pregnant.  

President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice “refused to prosecute the case, but fortunately, the state of Ohio detained this individual,” Clem said. “The current Department of Justice filed federal charges and received an indictment by the grand jury,” he added.  

Ali Hopper, president and co-founder of the organization GUARD Against Trafficking, told members of Congress during the hearing that her research of the crisis along the southern border “exposed an assembly line of exploitation.”  

In recent years, “children moved through cartel-controlled routes carrying slips of paper naming the sponsors they were instructed to request. We saw those slips ourselves,” Hopper said. “Border Patrol processed them, HHS released them, [nongovernmental organizations] received them, government contractors transported them, step by step,” she said. 

Many of the children who entered the U.S. alone during the Biden administration remain missing, but the Trump administration is working to find them and has already located more than 13,000.  

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