ORR reports 6 types of UAC fraud and a weakened vetting process

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

The first time, the sponsor used his own identity, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement released a 15-year-old girl to him.

Then he came back under two different aliases, with two different identities. ORR released more children to him, and he applied for others.

He sexually assaulted the 15-year-old and is now incarcerated, according to ORR.

Authorities have not been able to locate a boy he sponsored under a false name.

His case appears in the findings of a memorandum ORR published Oct. 1, written for John Fabbricatore, ORR’s senior advisor and the former head of ICE’s Denver field office. The document lays out six forms of fraud in the Unaccompanied Alien Children program, and it names the vetting policies that created the gaps.

What the review found

The six categories are fraudulent identity documents, manipulated photographs, address fraud, fingerprint fraud, sponsors failing to disclose everyone living in the household, and children misrepresenting their age.

Between Oct. 1, 2023 and Oct. 31, 2024, ORR received 1,669 reports of fraud. The HHS Office of the General Counsel reviewed a portion of those cases in March and April 2025, along with cases from earlier reviews and incident reports sent to the HHS Office on Trafficking in Persons.

ORR’s own tracking puts the average rate of intentional document or information fraud at roughly 77 percent of reported Child Level Events (CLE). That figure covers fraud by sponsors, by the minors and alleged minors in federal custody, and by people in the country of origin. About 85 percent of the cases the general counsel reviewed involved intentional document fraud.

The agency’s public announcement describes all 1,669 as reports of sponsor-related fraud. The memorandum’s own footnote is narrower, stating the reports covered fraud by sponsors and by people in ORR custody alike.

Not all of them were children

The report is clear that minors and their families back home committed fraud too. ORR’s trend data attributes 40 percent of reported fraud events to the person in its custody or to someone in the country of origin.

Fabbricatore said the public picture of who came through the program is wrong.

“Eighty something percent of them are 16 and 17 year olds,” he said. “We believe many of them were in their 20s claiming to be 17 so that they could get out in a month or two from our care and right into the United States.”

He drew a line between those cases and the youngest children in the system.

“But a five-year-old is not committing fraud,” he said. “It’s the older teenagers that we see more of the fraud with.”

He said there have been hundreds of documented cases of age fraud. Many of them, he said, crossed with no identification at all, gave Border Patrol one name, and later had their real documents mailed up from home.

Those packages are part of how the government caught it.

“That’s how we were able to find a lot of this stuff, through some intercepts that were able to be done and finding documents that were going across the border to be delivered to some of these people that had already entered,” he said.

“And then you start to find out, oh wow, this guy’s 25, not actually 17.”

ORR’s findings record the same pattern, and the consequence. Adults posing as minors were referred into ORR care and placed in close quarters with actual children.

In a video posted by HHS, Fabbricatore said ORR has located 157,000 of these children over the past year and a half and is still searching for more than 85,000. He said more than 300,000 are no longer children.

🚨NEW: The Trump Administration has uncovered 6 forms of fraud in the Unaccompanied Alien Children Program that occurred during the Biden Administration. Between October 2023 and October 2024, the Office of Refugee Resettlement received 1,669 reports of sponsor-related fraud within the UAC Program. ORR reviewed these cases and found that the average rate of intentional document or information fraud exceeded 75%. So far, ORR has identified fraud in the previous administrations UAC Program in the forms of: ❌Fraudulent documentation of identity ❌Manipulated photographs ❌Address fraud ❌Fingerprint fraud ❌Failure by potential sponsors to fully disclose household members ❌And unaccompanied children misrepresenting their age Learn more about what the investigation uncovered: https://t.co/Z1t0heqNtf

— HHS Rapid Response (@HHSResponse) October 1, 2026

What was not required

Referrals climbed sharply starting in 2021. The memorandum says ORR relaxed sponsor vetting and sped up releases, often through field guidance rather than formal policy.

During that period the agency did not require fingerprints for every category of sponsor. It accepted expired identification. It did not require background checks on every adult in the household. Address verification was looser.

In fiscal year 2024, ORR denied less than 1 percent of sponsorship applications. ORR says that figure suggests unscrupulous sponsors faced little deterrence.

From 2021 through 2024, roughly 479,000 unaccompanied children were referred to the agency.

Identity fraud by sponsors turned out to be the most common kind. More than half the cases the general counsel reviewed involved fraudulent identity documents, most often country-of-origin identification cards, driver’s licenses, passports or birth certificates. ORR’s trend data attributes about 37 percent of all reported fraud events to document or information fraud by sponsors.

Birth certificates were a weak point of their own.

Case managers sometimes contacted a consulate to verify one and sometimes did not, and the practice was not consistent across the cases reviewed. Even when a consulate confirmed a certificate was accurate, it frequently added that it could not verify the identity of the person presenting it.

Some sponsors got a second try. Potential sponsors were in some cases allowed to amend or modify information on birth certificates, or to submit different proof of relationship, and the child was released to them, according to the report.

What changed

Fabbricatore described the current requirements when RMV reached him Saturday.

“We changed a lot of the vetting process,” he said. “The vetting process is the biggest change. DNA was taken, fingerprints were taken, financials were being given, and there was inspection of the home before children went there.”

He compared the program to domestic foster care, where prospective homes are inspected and parents are screened well before a child is ever placed.

“A person just can’t walk into a foster home and say I want that child and that child is out of that foster care in nine days,” he said. “Why would not the rules be as stringent to release of a child born from another country?”

The memorandum also documents what happened under those earlier procedures, and not every failure in it involved fraud.

In February 2024, ORR took custody of a nine-year-old girl who said her 13-year-old brother had inappropriately touched her back home. The first home study of her mother’s household found the mother planned to have the girl sleep in the same room as that brother. A second found unknown individuals living in the home. One room carried a strong odor of marijuana, another of feces. Broken glass lay under a broken window. The address had also turned up in a prior child protective services report.

ORR released her there anyway. Her current status is unknown.

Colorado went the other way

ORR does not break its fraud data out by state. It does publish placement counts, and the Colorado numbers run against the national trend.

Nationally, ORR’s figures show placements peaked in fiscal 2022 at 127,497. They fell the next year, and the year after that, down to 99,321 by fiscal 2024.

Colorado never had a down year in that stretch.

Placements here went from 1,089 in fiscal 2021 to 1,425, then 1,611, then 1,733 in fiscal 2024. Measured from the national peak forward, the country dropped 22 percent while Colorado climbed 22 percent.

Bar chart showing unaccompanied children released to sponsors in Colorado by fiscal year: 1,089 in fiscal 2021, 1,425 in 2022, 1,611 in 2023, and 1,733 in 2024.

Colorado’s share of the national total rose from 1.01 percent to 1.74 percent across those four years. The state took in 5,858 children over that stretch.

County figures put most of them on the Front Range. Arapahoe County led every year, with 432 in fiscal 2024, followed by Denver at 336 and Adams at 210.

A backlog of 65,000

In March 2025, ORR found 65,000 unanswered CLE reports sitting in the system. Those came in through the call center, through email, and from the children themselves.

Fabbricatore told RMV the backlog is gone.

“That’s been cleared,” he said. “I think we cleared that out within the first eight months of the administration.”

He said those reports were the first priority because of what they were.

“For most of those calls, those were actually kids calling out for help,” he said.

He could not say how many involved children placed in Colorado. He said releasing the fraud data by state is something the agency should look at, and that he would want to see how sanctuary jurisdictions fall out in it.

ORR has not published the number of cases its lawyers reviewed, the state breakdown, or its current denial rate. Asked for that rate, Fabbricatore said he would put it “in the 90 percentile” but did not know the current figure.