The Trump administration on Friday toughened the security requirements for sponsors of migrant children, a move that could make it more difficult for minors who cross the border alone to be released from federal custody and united with family members in the United States.
The policy is similar to one imposed during the first Trump administration, which sought to tighten the vetting process for those living with migrant children.
Immigration activists have argued that onerous requirements helped fuel overcrowding in federal shelters and detention facilities along the border. But reports of security lapses in the way the federal government protects migrant children have also drawn widespread criticism and new scrutiny of the system.
In a memo published on Friday, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the care of migrant children, said it would now require that all adult members of a household where a child is to live in the United States must be fingerprinted before the minor can be released by a shelter.
The restriction is similar to one imposed in 2018, which also involved sharing the data with immigration authorities and prompted legal challenges. Advocates for immigrants said the rule discouraged immigrant adults in the United States from coming forward to claim the minors out of a fear they could expose themselves to deportation.
Often, sponsors are undocumented themselves, and therefore wary of any increased risk of deportation associated with claiming sponsorship of a child.
At that time, the policy helped significantly drive up the time children and teenagers spent in shelters managed by the Department of Health and Human Services and detention facilities designed by the Border Patrol, prompting widespread backlash over squalid conditions for migrant children in federal custody.
The Trump administration later eased that policy. By the end of his first term, Mr. Trump only required the fingerprints for limited kinds of cases, including those involving distant relatives. The Biden administration maintained that policy. All potential sponsors must undergo a background check for any potential criminal history.
In an email sent on Thursday to officials in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, Mellissa B. Harper, the acting director of the agency, said the new fingerprint requirements were part of an effort to change “both practice and culture within the sponsorship process.” Before running the agency, Ms. Harper was a lead official with ICE, running operations for the New Orleans field office.
“I also am aware that there are internal and external stakeholders that subscribe to the belief that some fraud is necessary because they are opposed to the overall immigration system of the U.S. or just fail to recognize that their own actions are possibly contributing to the victimization of children,” Ms. Harper wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.
“The pervasive fraud in the sponsor process is undeniable,” she added.
Ms. Harper referred a request for comment to the Department of Health and Human Services. The department and the White House did not return requests for comment.
When a migrant child crosses the border alone and is apprehended by a border agent, they are initially taken to a facility managed by the Border Patrol and supposed to be moved to a shelter within 72 hours. But when the shelters managed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement reach capacity — as they did when Mr. Trump was last in office — the minors are often held in the cramped cells of the Border Patrol facilities.
There is currently a low risk of such overcrowding. Illegal crossings at the border are the lowest they have been in years, and the number of minors in the federal government’s shelter system is well below capacity. Still, illegal border crossings have historically risen quickly for a variety of factors.
Immigration activists said they were worried the additional vetting could once again create a chilling effect for potential sponsors, especially given Mr. Trump’s plans for mass deportations. Mr. Trump’s advisers have indicated they want to access data about immigrant minors from the Department of Health and Human Services.
“It’s clear this policy isn’t about child safety — it’s aimed to have a chilling effect on sponsors, which will inevitably lead to thousands of children remaining in government custody even longer,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, head of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “It’s a policy that is going to unnecessarily cost taxpayers while lengthening traumatic family separations for the very children they claim they are trying to protect.”
The reimposition of the fingerprint policy comes after Mr. Trump and his allies accused the Biden administration of failing to provide proper oversight of migrant children.
An independent government watchdog last year found serious lapses at the Department of Health and Human Services in its processes for ensuring the protection of children who journey to the United States on their own.
That echoed reporting by The New York Times, which found that the screening of sponsors and other safeguards for migrant children broke down during the first years of the Biden administration as hundreds of thousands of children crossed the border amid a pandemic-era economic collapse in parts of Central America.
The Times reported in 2023 that the federal government was unable to reach about 85,000 of the children during routine phone calls, an indication that they were susceptible to exploitative and illegal working conditions.
Former Biden administration officials have said fingerprinting requirements would not have helped in most of those cases; they had more to do with lapses in follow-up check-ins with sponsors.
“The government must do proper due diligence about potential sponsors, but there’s a balance that must be struck because we don’t want these children languishing in detention if family members are too scared to come forward,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, who has challenged the Trump administration’s immigration policies in court.
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