Last Wednesday, the House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing to assess the influence and involvement of NGOs in the Biden-era border crisis. The committee examined the trafficking and abuse of unaccompanied alien children (UACs), highlighting the Biden administration’s lack of sufficient oversight in placing these minors and in monitoring federally funded NGOs. The title of the hearing was, “An Inside Job: How NGOs facilitated the Biden Border Crisis.”
By far, the most dramatic testimony from the hearing came during an exchange between Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) and witness Ali Hopper, the president and co-founder of GUARD Against Trafficking. Crane asked Hopper what, if any, guardrails did the Biden administration put in place to monitor the well-being of UACs after they were placed with sponsors.
Hopper replied that the government conducted post-placement welfare checks, which consisted of two phone calls to the sponsor. “If the sponsor didn’t answer, the case was no longer followed up on.”
Additionally, she said that the Biden administration had set up a hotline that UACs could call to report abuse or any other issues they needed help with. She added that because only one employee was available to answer the calls from “August 2023 to January 2025, 65,000 calls went unanswered.”
One of the missed calls, according to Hopper, was from a child who reported that “grown men were coming into his room at night and touching him. Nothing happened with that call. That call went unanswered until this administration [the Trump administration] took office, went through those 65,000 calls, made follow-ups, conducted a welfare check, and now that child has been rescued and that sponsor has been arrested.”
She told Crane, “These are the safeguards that were put in place, but accountability was not had.”
In the clip below, Crane asks Hopper, “So you’re telling this committee that the Biden administration, while they were letting all of these unaccompanied minors into the country—and as we’ve talked about today, they weren’t keeping track of them—they issued these kids a hotline that they could call if they had trouble with the sponsor family that they were put with, and you’re saying that 65,000 calls to this hotline, designated to protect these kids, went unanswered. Is that what you’re telling this committee?”
Hopper replied, “Yes, sir.”
“Wow,” Crane said. “Unbelievable, just unbelievable.”
ABSOLUTELY INSANE
The Biden Admin setup a hotline so that unaccompanied minors could call if they had trouble with the strangers they were being placed with
65,000 calls to this hotline WENT UNANSWERED
“So you’re telling this committee that the Biden administration, while they… pic.twitter.com/4gUJWlj37c
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) July 22, 2025
Hopper’s opening remarks were illuminating. [A full transcript can be viewed here.] She described the systemic neglect of these children by not only the Biden administration, but by the NGOs who were receiving huge paydays from the federal government for their services. Both were failing to deliver for the UACs.
Hopper told the Committee:
Across the country, NGOs became waystations— processing points in a steady flow of children. Federal contracts incentivized output over outcomes, prioritizing speed over safety.
And the cartels took full advantage. They studied every gap and exploited them, sending children into a system they knew would fast-track them to cartel-controlled sponsors – without meaningful background checks, with addresses verified through postal databases, and IDs often accepted via WhatsApp or text with no facial match to the sender. This is how 70% of sponsor data became falsified or fraudulent.
In interviews with cartel members incarcerated for human trafficking, they explained how weak sponsor verification incentivized trafficking by enabling cartels to control children’s placement by supplying children with exact sponsor information, allowing control over their destination.
According to an internal audit conducted by Health and Human Services (HHS), approximately 70% of sponsor applications examined were found to be fraudulent, making child traceability and safety assurances nearly impossible.
Hopper claimed it was easier for a sponsor to take custody of an unaccompanied alien child than it is to adopt a dog. This broken process is the reason why more than 300,000 migrant children are currently unaccounted for.
Democrats have loudly condemned the Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants even though most of the individuals who have been deported have criminal records. But their outrage rings hollow when contrasted with the Biden administration’s handling of unaccompanied alien children (UACs). These vulnerable minors were subjected to a system plagued by greed, neglect, mismanagement, and lack of oversight.
It’s impossible to know how many young lives have been ruined by Biden’s reckless open border policy.
Yet the silence from those who claim to champion human rights is deafening. What unfolded under Biden’s watch was not just a policy failure—it was unconscionable.
The full exchange can be viewed below.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
“Hello. You have reached the Biden/Harris Administration unaccompanied minor hotline. For instructions in English, press 1. For instructions en Espanol, also press 1. If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. To make a contribution to the Biden/Harris 2024 campaign please stay on the line for the next available representative. Thank you!”
Your call is impotent to us!
It will be ignored in the order in which it was received.
Sickening. The vile Dhimmi-crat apparatchiks are pure evil. Incompetence, plus willful indifference and callousness.
I keep the ringer off on my phone too. It cuts way down on junk calls. The phone is for calling out.
Good intention follow through isn’t a leftist strength. You already got the virtue display from creating the phone number.
Transactional sex is good so long as it’s with brown people anyway. Not with Weinstein, is all.
Are you sure you’re responding on the right thread, or even the right blog?
He’s not even on the right planet.
I follow this one. The last paragraph is a sarcastic criticism of D values.
Agreed on the last paragraph, but in true Hardin fashion he got there completely by accident.
His comment is directly on point. He’s explaining why this happened. Answering phones is annoying, that’s not what phones are for, and having already signaled virtue by establishing the hotline there’s no advantage to be gained by actually answering it. No additional virtue will be signaled by that. After all, what’s the worst that can happen if we turn off the ringer and ignore the phone?
In a more just world, the MSM would be pressing Dem officeholders about this in the same way they press Pub officeholders when some Pub stupidity comes to light. That the MSM won’t do this is why we no longer trust the MSM.
msm:
the reason that 65k calls went unanswered is because trump ,,yes even before he was 47 potus,,was cutting the cord
again
lefty doesnt debate
I’d like to help you son, but you’re too young to vote.
If only these children had any political capital then Democrats would love them.
As it is, they were merely pawns in the Democrats grab to hang on to eternal power.
Would political capital mean pedophiles who financially supported the DNC and needed a refill of unmolested children?
Moving millions of people to the southern US border requires a lot of money.
No one is going to put up that money unless it pays off for them.
Drugs and human trafficking generate a revenue stream, which is the payoff for the logistics to move illegals into the US.
Interfering with human trafficking threatens that revenue stream. So what can be done to make it look like the Biden administration is addressing a problem while at the same time not interfering with the mission?
You have to understand that to the Left, the unaccompanied minors being brought into the country is not a human tragedy to be corrected. It is importing raw materials.
Subotai Bahadur
And the ones that get absconded somewhere along the way are just “shrinkage.”
Rumors I’ve heard are are an order of magnitude worse than this. Families paying coyotes to get across the border and having their kids disappear overnight en route, never to be seen again. The kids are trafficked, potentially internationally, and the parents are abandoned by the coyotes in Mexico.
I want to talk to two people: the one person tasked with answering and that persons supervisor.
To the person tasked with the job: Who did you tell to try and get help? We want all their names,
To the supervisor: Who did you tell to get help, but why didn’t you find a way to set up a second line to also answer these children’s cry for help!?
How could you ignore this?
Many of these undocumented ‘lost’ children can probably be found in the basement of Biden’s Delaware home, right next to Hunter’s crack stash……..has anyone checked there?