Former President Joe Biden’s policies were the “biggest facilitator for child abuse” in American history, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says.
During a hearing this week, Kennedy told members of Congress that the Biden administration’s policies regarding the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) program — where migrant kids are turned over to HHS for care and resettlement with relatives in the United States — resulted in potentially 500,000 UACs going missing in the U.S.
“The estimate from the Office of Inspector General, and it is considered a very low estimate, is 291,000 children missing. The actual numbers are actually much higher than that; they could go up to half a million,” Kennedy revealed.
As Breitbart News chronicled, former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra reportedly carried out a policy that prioritized the release of UACs to adult sponsors over long-held protocols to protect such children from labor trafficking, sex trafficking, and child abuse.
The result, federal watchdogs have found, is that HHS under Biden lost track of hundreds of thousands of UACs who were resettled with adult sponsors who were not their family members.
“My predecessor was deliberately employing a policy of speed over safety so they waived all of the identification requirements for sponsors,” Kennedy said. “Sponsors were not required to show valid identification, they were never fingerprinted, so we don’t know if there’s a criminal record. There was no DNA testing so the claims that they were taking a family member were … they were dubious.
Under the Biden administration, the Federal Government became the biggest facilitator of child abuse in our country. My predecessor prioritized speed over safety. In stark contrast, this administration is putting a halt to the child trafficking problem. We are fingerprinting… pic.twitter.com/yztx0zEMdq
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) May 14, 2025
Kennedy detailed one case in which a man in Cleveland, Ohio, took custody of a 16-year-old migrant girl who he then raped, impregnated, and put her in his home where he continued to rape her. The man then sought custody of a teenage migrant boy and another two migrant children.
“This was happening again and again. One agency placed 592 children with 120 sponsors. 400 children were shipped to a town with a meatpacking plant in Kansas,” Kennedy said. “… the Biden administration knew about it, they saw the same pictures we did, and they did nothing.”
Kennedy said that under his direction, HHS has launched a criminal task force and has already opened 500 criminal investigations, 80 of which have been brought to court thus far.
“We are going to try to find everything we can, we need DHS to find these children,” Kennedy said. “The federal government under the Biden administration became the biggest facilitator for child abuse, certainly in the history of our country.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has imposed significant reforms to the UAC program, ensuring that adult sponsors seeking UACs are required to hand over fingerprints, undergo DNA testing to prove familial relation to the UAC they are trying to take custody of, and meet income requirements. HHS is also verifying IDs to ensure sponsors are who they say they are.
“Nobody gets a kid without showing that they are a family member,” Kennedy said.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
