From Operation Pedro Pan to the multibillion-dollar migration system that lost the chain of responsibility.
From fiscal years 2019 through 2023, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied minors to the Department of Health and Human Services, most of whom were later released to sponsors. A March 2025 inspector-general audit found more than 31,000 release addresses that were blank, undeliverable, or incomplete. As of January 2025, ICE had not served Notices to Appear on more than 233,000 children, and more than 43,000 who had been served had failed to appear for scheduled hearings as of October 2024. The same federal system that received, sheltered, transported, and released children on a historic scale allowed the addresses, legal notices, court supervision, and post-release records needed to follow them to fracture across agencies.[1]
A System Built to Lose Track of Children
The machinery documented apprehensions, purchased shelter beds, reimbursed providers, arranged flights, and closed custody files. After release, ICE owned an immigration case it often could not serve. HHS had closed the custody file at the door. The sponsor’s address was frequently the only surviving link between the child and the government that had taken custody of him. The DHS inspector general warned that incomplete information and ineffective monitoring increased children’s exposure to trafficking, forced labor, and exploitation, giving predators room to operate inside the uncertainty surrounding a child’s location and status.
The earlier chain was smaller, visible, and preserved in paper files. In 1961, a Cuban child could step off an airplane in Miami carrying a suitcase packed by parents who believed the separation might last only weeks. Federal officials had authorized the entry; Father Bryan Walsh and the Catholic Welfare Bureau received the child; Florida authorities supervised the placement; federal welfare funds sustained the care; and a foster family, Catholic school, camp, convent, or diocesan institution carried the decision into daily life. The Cuban airlift and the modern border system arose from different laws and dangers, but each joined public authority, private custody, and public money around a child separated from parents.
Operation Pedro Pan: Rescue Built on Public Machinery
Operation Pedro Pan has been preserved as a story of courage, sacrifice, faith, and rescue, and it was all of those things. More than 14,000 Cuban minors left the island without their parents between December 1960 and October 1962. James Baker, headmaster of Ruston Academy in Havana, helped establish the departure channel. Father Walsh and the Catholic Welfare Bureau received children who had no relatives immediately able to care for them. Families, schools, camps, religious orders, and dioceses absorbed the burden.[2]
Pedro Pan lives in public memory through the courage of parents who made an unbearable calculation. They sought to place their children beyond the reach of a revolutionary state claiming schools, churches, property, and family authority. The modern unaccompanied-minor system receives children who often crossed several countries through family networks, smugglers, shelters, and government processing. The common thread lies in the machinery that received the child once American authority took hold.
Property was being nationalized and political opposition narrowed. On June 6, 1961, the Council of Ministers enacted the Ley de Nacionalización General y Gratuita de la Enseñanza, published in the Gaceta Oficial the following day; its second article adjudicated every privately operated teaching center, and the assets of each, to the state.[3] The alleged patria potestad decree, a rumor that the state would assume parental authority itself, circulated through a society that had just watched the government take the schools. Many parents believed Castro would fall, American pressure would succeed, or permission to leave would soon follow. The suitcase was packed for an interruption. History turned it into exile.
The rescue could not have operated through charity alone. The children entered because the United States permitted them to enter, and private institutions assumed custody within a federal and state framework for admission, payment, placement, and supervision. Father Walsh was the visible figure at the airport; behind him stood the authority of the American state.
Washington’s Hand Behind the Catholic Welfare Bureau
That division of labor began before John F. Kennedy took office. In November 1960, Tracy Voorhees met senior State Department officials after being asked to assist President Dwight Eisenhower’s government with the growing Cuban refugee problem. Their discussion was not confined to food, shelter, or beds. The State Department understood that the condition of people fleeing Castro would carry political meaning throughout the Cold War. Cuban exiles could not be allowed to appear abandoned and destitute in Miami, but State did not want to become the domestic welfare administrator. Immigration, Labor, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare could manage the federal work while Florida and private organizations handled much of the response on the ground.[4]
Kennedy enlarged the program under HEW Secretary Abraham Ribicoff and directed that private services be used as fully as possible. The National Archives confirms that the Children’s Bureau maintained dedicated Cuban Children’s Refugee Program files, budgets, and broader administrative records. A January 25, 1963 memorandum concerning the future of Brigade 2506 listed the benefits then available to needy Cuban refugees in Miami: grants of up to $100 a month for a family and $60 for an individual, medical care, surplus food, employment counseling, resettlement assistance, foster care for unaccompanied children, university loans, language and vocational training, and HEW support covering 50 percent of Dade County’s cost of educating Cuban refugee children. Although the memorandum concerned the Brigade, its inventory shows how much public capacity stood behind the private face of relief.[5] The record placed child welfare inside the Children’s Bureau, broader refugee administration inside the Cuban Refugee Program, financial support inside the Assistance Payments Administration, and daily care inside Florida and the Catholic Welfare Bureau. The child experienced one system even as the paper trail divided among several offices.
The departure ledger remains unfinished: individual airline tickets, donor money, and any reimbursements after arrival. The surviving record points toward a sequence in which private money secured flights, intermediaries moved papers, federal officials authorized admission, the Catholic Welfare Bureau received children, and HEW and Florida financed and supervised placement. Airline station files, travel-agency accounts, and correspondence among Baker, Walsh and HEW may still establish where private financing ended, public support began, and the two became interdependent.
Welfare, Intelligence, and Politics Converge in Miami
At Opa-locka, intelligence officers screened Cuban arrivals carrying information about Castro’s military and security apparatus. HEW encountered refugees requiring assistance, the State Department read political meaning in the exodus, the CIA evaluated intelligence and operational value, and Catholic organizations received people requiring protection. In Torres v. CIA, the Agency reported roughly 600 staff hours spent searching millions of records, and the judge reviewed approximately 800 pages in camera before accepting the adequacy of the search and the CIA’s formal denial of direct operational control over Pedro Pan.[6]
On December 6, 1961, a CIA officer spent three hours monitoring an open hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees, convened to consider the concentration of Cuban refugees in Miami. He would confine his memorandum, he wrote, to points of possible interest in connection with Agency operations. What interested him was resettlement. José Miró Cardona, president of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, testified against dispersing the exiles, arguing that scattering them across the country would deal a terrible blow to their morale and work against a united anti-Castro effort. Before the hearing he had told a Colonel Johnson that he could not object to men of fighting age being moved out of the area without raising the sensitive subject of plans for military action. Welfare officials sought relief for an overburdened city; exile leaders and intelligence personnel saw strategic value in a concentrated population capable of political organization and military recruitment. The same exile community had become a welfare population, a foreign-policy symbol, and an intelligence resource.[7]
Bishop Coleman Carroll of Miami testified at that same hearing, and his written statement described the arrangement without embarrassment. Under a heading reading Unaccompanied Cuban Children, Carroll recorded that the work had been included in the federal Cuban Refugee Program from the very beginning and that without federal funds it would be impossible to provide for them. He called the program run by the Catholic Welfare Bureau, together with the parallel Protestant and Jewish programs, an example of what could be achieved when federal, state and voluntary agencies worked together. His diocese had rendered $561,243.81 in services to Cuban refugees between March 1 and October 31, 1961. Fourteen thousand Cuban children were then enrolled in Dade County schools. Every visa waiver requested for a child under eighteen had been granted. The bishop was describing a public-private custody system to a Senate subcommittee in December 1961, and describing it as a success.[7]
From Cold War Rescue to Permanent Bureaucracy
The flights ended during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the obligations continued. Parents remained in Cuba, placements lengthened, and a rescue conceived around the expectation that Castro might soon fall became a long-term welfare and resettlement system. Congress gave the method a wider statutory foundation through the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 later allowed eligible arrivals to seek permanent residence, the Indochina evacuation repeated the public-private model on a much larger scale, and the Refugee Act of 1980 established the Office of Refugee Resettlement as the permanent administrative home of the function.[8]
The decisive legal bridge to the modern child-custody system arrived in Section 235 of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008. With limited exceptions for children from contiguous countries, Congress placed the care and custody of unaccompanied minors with HHS, required their transfer from border agencies within 72 hours absent exceptional circumstances, directed placement in the least restrictive setting consistent with the child’s interests, and expressly authorized grants and contracts with voluntary agencies. The statute was enacted to protect children from trafficking and exploitation. It also established the federal custody-and-provider machinery before the 2014 surge arrived.[9]
The 2014 Surge Turns Migration Into Regional Diplomacy
Large numbers of children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras soon tested the structure Congress had created. Federal officials traced the movement through violence, poverty, and changing expectations about American policy. Once the diagnosis reached employment, policing and corruption, migration policy moved beyond the border and into the governing systems of the countries from which children departed.[10]
On July 23, 2014, the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States adopted a declaration on unaccompanied child migrants from Central America that carried the response into economic development, social inclusion, employment, and citizen security. Six months later, the OAS, the International Organization for Migration, and the United Nations refugee agency convened migration officials, justice ministries and civil-society participants through an eight-country Mesoamerican program. The child-custody emergency at the American border had opened a regional field of diplomacy, law enforcement, development assistance, and nongovernmental execution.[11][12] The sequence is visible in the calendar. The OAS declaration came in July 2014, after the surge had become a national crisis. The Mesoamerican program followed in January 2015, carrying the issue into a standing regional forum before the emergency at the border had receded from public attention.
The Alliance for Prosperity gave that regional field a financial structure. El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras advanced the plan; Vice President Joe Biden became its leading American advocate; and the Inter-American Development Bank served as technical secretariat, turning political commitments into projects, investment, and institutional reform. The Northern Triangle governments committed billions of their own resources, the United States approved hundreds of millions more, and the IDB brought a multibillion-dollar lending history to the undertaking.[13]
American officials were now asking how entire societies might be altered so fewer children would leave, drawing development banks, foundations, and lenders into a field once centered on immigration and child welfare. The Catholic Welfare Bureau had possessed the network required to place Cuban children. The IDB possessed the capital and technical authority to organize governments, lenders, investors, and projects around migration pressure.
Billions in Funds, Hundreds of Missed Inspections
When Biden entered the White House in 2021, the root-causes framework and many of its institutional relationships were already in place. Executive Order 14010, signed February 2, 2021, directed both a root-causes strategy and a collaborative migration management strategy. The two were released together on July 29, 2021, presented as separate documents produced under a single order.[14] The new surge moved children through the domestic side of the same architecture: DHS apprehended them, HHS assumed custody, ORR placed them with private providers, contractors moved them across the country, and sponsors received them while their immigration cases remained unresolved.
Congress appropriated $1.3 billion for ORR’s Unaccompanied Children Program in fiscal year 2021. The program spent multiples of that. By mid-May, HHS had redirected roughly $2.1 billion that Congress had allocated to other health purposes, including $850 million to rebuild the Strategic National Stockpile and another $850 million to expand coronavirus testing. Four House Republicans wrote to Secretary Xavier Becerra on June 4, 2021, noting that the diverted sum by itself exceeded the entire annual budget of the unaccompanied-children program in each of the two preceding years.[15] The money purchased beds, medicine, legal assistance and transportation. It also sustained payrolls, nonprofit grantees and contractors whose continued operations depended upon recurring federal awards.
ORR’s statutory role centered on care and placement, while ICE remained responsible for immigration proceedings after release. Providers closed custody files when children left their facilities, sponsors assumed daily responsibility, and local schools or child-welfare offices often entered the story without access to the federal record. A child could pass successfully through each institutional handoff while becoming harder to follow across custody, immigration enforcement and local policing.
A June 2026 HHS inspector-general audit found that ORR completed only 176 of 256 required monitoring visits at unlicensed facilities in Texas and Florida. Eighty abbreviated visits were missed, and 43 of 58 comprehensive reviews were late, reducing the opportunity to identify deficiencies in employee background checks before staff gained access to children.[16]
A separate audit followed the emergency-intake contract awarded to Endeavors. The Administration for Children and Families issued a $529 million sole-source contract three days after receiving an unsolicited proposal, although its later price analysis estimated the work at approximately $244.8 million, or about $335 per child per day, against a contract cost of roughly $831. Fifteen modifications drove the value to $795.4 million, with recorded expenditures reaching $713.9 million by February 3, 2025. ORR’s own capacity trackers had forecast the bed shortage months before the award, and the inspector general identified six points between October 2020 and March 2021 when competitive procurement should have begun. Predictable need had been treated as a sudden emergency inside a system responsible for children.[17]
Corporate Cash Joins the Custody Pipeline
At the same time, Vice President Kamala Harris took charge of the Central American portfolio and named private investment as the instrument for reducing future migration. Her Call to Action, launched May 27, 2021 and administered through the Partnership for Central America, an independent nonprofit working alongside State and USAID, reported more than $1.2 billion in corporate commitments by December 2021, $3.2 billion by June 2022, and $4.2 billion from roughly forty-seven companies by February 2023.[18] A child arriving at the border now activated spending at both ends of the route: custody, shelter and sponsor placement inside the United States, joined to foreign assistance, development finance and institutional reform abroad.
Federal custody funds paid for shelters, legal assistance, transportation, and sponsor release inside the United States. State and USAID awards, development banks, and private companies supported programs in countries of origin and transit. USAID’s localization agenda moved appropriations through missions, prime recipients, subrecipients, and evaluators before the announced project reached the public. Each layer carried a distinct legal purpose, but together they formed a route of public authority and private execution from the community of origin to the sponsor’s door.
Programs in origin countries sought to influence departure; international agencies and NGOs operated through transit and reception systems; federal contractors and grantees received children after apprehension; sponsors completed the movement into the American interior. Nongovernmental institutions had become operating components of government policy through statutes, grants and regional frameworks built to endure changes in administration.
The Foundations and Advocacy Groups That Built the Pipeline
Private philanthropy had been building this surrounding field for years. In 2005, Open Society Institute executive Gara LaMarche described nearly a decade of foundation work on immigrant rights and immigrant communities and claimed a leading role among American philanthropies.[19] Open Society grants sustained legal organizations, civic networks and communications capacity across electoral cycles, preserving institutions that later appeared in consultation, litigation, public debate, and government-funded work.
By 2014, national foundations, legal organizations and immigrant-rights groups had accumulated years of shared work. Organizations moved among advocacy, litigation and implementation, carrying access and professional relationships into the policy response that followed the child-migration crisis.
The Center for American Progress supplied another layer, publishing arguments for executive action, humanitarian parole, Temporary Protected Status and root-causes investment. Its legal rationale, economic case, implementation models, and moral vocabulary later appeared throughout the Biden administration’s program as ready-made policy options.[20]
The Los Angeles Declaration Formalizes the Network
In 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken gathered the regional systems into the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. The Alliance for Prosperity had joined migration to development; the OAS had moved child migration into regional diplomacy; IOM and UNHCR operated along the route; MIRPS maintained national plans across Central America and Mexico; R4V organized the Venezuelan response; and ORR received children after arrival. The declaration placed these existing systems inside a common diplomatic frame.[21]
Participating governments divided the work among lawful pathways, enforcement, asylum, regularization, return, integration, development, and support for host countries. Colombia led regularization, Canada asylum-system work, Mexico labor mobility, Guatemala return and reintegration, and the United States counter-smuggling, allowing cooperation to continue even when governments differed over other portions of the framework.
Liz Sherwood-Randall led the White House process, and Jake Sullivan convened senior officials. Katie Tobin arrived with experience at a border shelter, DHS, the Senate Judiciary Committee, UNHCR, and the National Security Council. Julieta Valls Noyes ran State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration from March 2022 to October 2024, with Marta Costanzo Youth as her deputy and later acting successor. Emily Mendrala came from a Western Hemisphere nonprofit to a deputy assistant secretaryship at State and then to the White House as senior advisor for migration. Marcela Escobari, twice confirmed to run USAID’s Latin America bureau, moved to the National Security Council as coordinator for the declaration in 2024, two years after the summit that produced it. Serena Hoy served as assistant secretary for international affairs at the Department of Homeland Security from May 2021 to June 2023.[22] These careers mattered because the declaration required more than a summit communiqué. It required officials who understood border processing, refugee law and the organizations already working along the route.
Hoy’s next appointment shows how the machinery retains what governments lose. She had arrived at Homeland Security from INTERPOL’s legal division, after service as senior counselor to two homeland security secretaries and chief counsel to the Senate majority leader. She left it to become special envoy to the Director General of the International Organization for Migration, one of the bodies operating along the route the declaration was written to manage. The official who converted diplomatic commitments into processing and enforcement went to work for an organization executing them.
R4V published the wider network across 17 countries, naming governments, United Nations agencies, migrant-led organizations, faith institutions, and private companies. Its categories of residents, migrants in transit, pendular migrants, returnees, and affected host communities determined who would be counted, which needs entered the plan, and which organizations could seek support for shelter, health, education and economic integration.
By 2024, the response extended far beyond emergency shelter. R4V plans reached education, health, documentation and the public systems of receiving countries. Venezuelan displacement had moved from the humanitarian ledger into schools, labor markets and national development plans financed by governments and multilateral institutions.
MIRPS carried the regional work across Central America and Mexico through an OAS-UNHCR technical secretariat that maintained documents, indicators, calendars and working groups after presidents and ministers left office. It had been launched at the first Global Refugee Forum in December 2019. Its support platform drew in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, the European Union, France, Spain, Switzerland, Uruguay and the United States, alongside the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank Group, CABEI and ECLAC. The OAS Permanent Council approved its fund on May 27, 2020.[23] In September 2024, the Biden State Department selected the Pan American Development Foundation and the OAS to operate an outside technical secretariat for the Los Angeles Declaration. PADF had been created by the OAS in 1962, during the same Kennedy-era expansion of public-private and inter-American institutions that surrounded the Cuban refugee response.[24] Sixty-two years separated the two assignments; the institution had preserved the capacity to serve both. The choice of PADF returned the investigation to the Kennedy era through an institution whose corporate life had outlasted the officials, crises, and administrations surrounding its creation. The organization founded during the first Cuban refugee emergency now held a preservation role inside a hemispheric migration framework built for the twenty-first century.
Trump Cuts the Federal Switch, the Network Survives
The January 2025 transfer of presidential power exposed the boundaries of electoral control. President Donald Trump suspended the United States Refugee Admissions Program, ended the use of CBP One as a parole channel, ordered the termination of categorical parole programs inconsistent with the new administration’s policy, and paused foreign-development obligations pending review. Executive Order 14163, signed January 20 and effective January 27, 2025, revoked in its fifth section the order of February 4, 2021 under which the refugee program had been rebuilt.[25] American admissions, parole, awards, and diplomatic participation changed immediately. The OAS, PADF, IOM, UNHCR and the development banks continued under other laws, other boards and other sources of money.
An elected president still controlled the American center of the system, but decades of databases, professional networks, foreign agencies and donor relationships remained distributed across jurisdictions. Authority could change hands in Washington while institutional memory and execution survived elsewhere.
Who Governs the Child?
So who governs the child? Congress writes the custody rule. An agency holds the legal duty. A contractor performs the care. A sponsor takes the child home. Every expansion of that chain drew its moral authority from children who required safety, medical care and legal protection. The institutions built around those needs received money, access, responsibility, and permanence. A government that takes custody of a child assumes a duty that cannot be dissolved by an agency boundary, a contractor’s statement of work, a completed transportation voucher, or a sponsor’s disconnected telephone number.
The archive remains open. The Pedro Pan ticketing and donor ledger requires reconstruction; the Children’s Bureau, Catholic Welfare Bureau, Florida, and intelligence files await deeper examination; modern grant and subrecipient ledgers remain dispersed; and the internal drafting history of the Los Angeles Declaration has yet to be obtained. Those records will reveal the remaining lines of authority, financing, influence, and institutional benefit.
Somewhere in the National Archives sits the paper trail that followed one frightened Cuban child from Havana into America. Somewhere else, in federal databases, contractor files, shelter records, immigration dockets, and sponsor addresses, are the records of another child who entered during the largest modern movement of unaccompanied minors across the southern border. Between those two files lie more than six decades of statutes, appropriations, and emergency contracts.
A republic may delegate the work of custody, transportation, shelter, and placement. Responsibility remains with the government that claimed authority over the child. Every page of this investigation returns to the same measure: whether that child was protected after the press conference, after the appropriation, after the grant, and after the door closed behind the sponsor.
Sources and Notes
1. DHS Office of Inspector General, ICE Cannot Effectively Monitor the Location and Status of All Unaccompanied Alien Children After Federal Custody, OIG-25-21, March 25, 2025, Report Highlights and PDF pp. 2-9 (transfers to HHS, deficient release addresses, unserved Notices to Appear, and failures to appear). https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2025-03/OIG-25-21-Mar25.pdf
2. National Archives, ‘Cuban Refugee Program,’ and Record Group 363, Records of the Social and Rehabilitation Service, including Cuban Children’s Refugee Program files, 1961-1967. https://www.archives.gov/research/immigration/cuban-refugee-program ; https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/363.html
3. Ley de Nacionalización General y Gratuita de la Enseñanza, Council of Ministers, June 6, 1961; Gaceta Oficial, June 7, 1961, pp. 10657-10658, art. 2. Precursor: Ley de Reforma Integral de la Enseñanza, December 1959.
4. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Cuba, document 603, memorandum of the Voorhees-Dillon-Hanes conversation, November 1, 1960. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06/d603
5. U.S. Department of State, FRUS, 1961-1963, Volumes X/XI/XII, Microfiche Supplement, document 603, memorandum from Sterling J. Cottrell, Coordinator of Cuban Affairs, to the NSC Executive Committee, January 25, 1963. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10-12mSupp/d603
6. Torres v. Central Intelligence Agency, 39 F. Supp. 2d 960 (N.D. Ill. 1999). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/39/960/2286302/
7. CIA memorandum, ‘Open Hearing of Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees to Consider Problem of Concentration of Cuban Refugees in the Miami Area,’ December 1961, document C00347212, released in full under the CIA Historical Review Program, with the attached December 6, 1961 statement of Bishop Coleman F. Carroll, Diocese of Miami. Released to John Greenewald, Jr. in response to FOIA request F-2017-01849; the CIA’s final response of October 31, 2017 located two previously released documents totaling 17 pages and issued a Glomar denial as to any classified association. https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/peterpan-cia1.pdf
8. Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962; Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966; Refugee Act of 1980. https://www.congress.gov/bill/87th-congress/house-bill/8291/text ; https://www.congress.gov/bill/96th-congress/senate-bill/643
9. William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, sec. 235, codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1232. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:8%20section:1232%20edition:prelim)
10. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Central America: Information on Migration of Unaccompanied Children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, GAO-15-362, February 2015. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-15-362
11. Organization of American States, Permanent Council declaration on Central American unaccompanied child migrants, July 23, 2014. https://www.oas.org/en/media_center/press_release.asp?sCodigo=S-008/14
12. Organization of American States, IOM, and UNHCR Mesoamerican irregular-migration program announcement, January 2015. https://www.oas.org/en/media_center/press_release.asp?sCodigo=AVI-010/15
13. Inter-American Development Bank, Northern Triangle Alliance for Prosperity materials and technical-secretariat role. https://www.iadb.org/en/news/presidents-el-salvador-guatemala-and-honduras-outline-plan-promote-peace-and-prosperity-their-region
14. Executive Order 14010, ‘Creating a Comprehensive Regional Framework to Address the Causes of Migration,’ February 2, 2021; White House, U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America and U.S. Strategy for Managing Migration, both released July 29, 2021.
15. HHS, Administration for Children and Families, Fiscal Year 2022 Justification of Estimates for Appropriations Committees (FY2021 appropriation of $1.3 billion for the Unaccompanied Children program); letter from Reps. Kevin Brady, James Comer, Mike Kelly, and Jackie Walorski to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, June 4, 2021 (approximately $2.1 billion redirected, including $850 million from the Strategic National Stockpile and $850 million from coronavirus testing). https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/olab/fy_2022_congressional_justification.pdf ; https://waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/2021.06.04-Brady-Comer-Kelly-Walorski-Ltr-to-HHS-re-UAC3.pdf
16. HHS Office of Inspector General, The Office of Refugee Resettlement Needs To Improve Its Monitoring of Unlicensed Unaccompanied Alien Children Program Care Providers’ Compliance With Background Check Requirements, A-06-24-07001, June 5, 2026, Report Highlights, PDF p. 2, and findings at report pp. 8-11. https://oig.hhs.gov/documents/audit/11689/A-06-24-07001.pdf
17. HHS Office of Inspector General, ACF’s $529 Million Sole Source Contract Award for Unaccompanied Alien Children Services Was Based on an Unsolicited Proposal, Double the Cost Estimate, and Noncompliant With Pre-Award Requirements, A-03-22-00353, February 2026, report pp. 4 and 7-12. https://oig.hhs.gov/documents/audit/11469/A-03-22-00353.pdf
18. White House, Call to Action launch, May 27, 2021; Partnership for Central America commitment announcements of December 2021, June 2022, and February 6, 2023.
19. Gara LaMarche, Open Society Institute, remarks on immigrant communities and philanthropy, February 2005. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/immigrant-communities-crossfire
20. Center for American Progress, immigration and executive-action materials, 2021-2023. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-biden-administrations-use-of-immigration-parole-authority-is-both-lawful-and-smart/
21. White House and State Department, Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection materials, 2022-2024; OAS-UNHCR MIRPS materials; R4V response plans. https://2021-2025.state.gov/los-angeles-declaration-on-migration-and-protection/ ; https://www.oas.org/ext/en/human-rights/mirps-oas-unhcr-joint-unit ; https://rmrp.r4v.info/
22. Katie Tobin, ‘The Los Angeles Declaration Continues to Shape the Regional and Global Migration Response,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 2024. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/09/americas-migration-los-angeles-declaration-north-south
23. UNHCR and OAS, MIRPS materials: launch at the first Global Refugee Forum, December 2019; MIRPS Support Platform membership; MIRPS Fund approved by the OAS Permanent Council, May 27, 2020.
24. Pan American Development Foundation and OAS announcement of the Los Angeles Declaration technical secretariat, September 25, 2024. https://www.padf.org/padf-and-oas-technical-secretariat-los-angeles-declaration-on-migration/
25. White House, Executive Order 14163, ‘Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program’; ‘Securing Our Borders’; and ‘Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,’ January 20, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/realigning-the-united-states-refugee-admissions-program/ ; https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/securing-our-borders/ ; https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reevaluating-and-realigning-united-states-foreign-aid/
Mel K is a writer, host, and producer focused on news, analysis & geopolitical forces shaping our world. She is the host of The Mel K Show, author of Americans Anonymous and her new book Infiltration Instead of Invasion, America Betrayed 1944-1954.
Any views expressed within the following article are solely those of the author and are not a direct reflection of any official stance of the organization, its publishers, or its affiliates.
