Audit finds US refugee agency missed 80 of 198 required visits to child migrant shelters

The United States Department of Health and Human Services told its own auditors in 2023 that it would start checking staff vetting during routine visits to the shelters holding unaccompanied migrant children. On 5 June 2026 those auditors reported that the visits themselves were often not happening.

The audit, numbered A-06-24-07001 and issued by the HHS Office of Inspector General, examined 58 unlicensed care provider facilities in Texas and Florida used by the Office of Refugee Resettlement between September 2021 and August 2024. Of 256 monitoring visits required over that period, ORR completed 176. It did not conduct 80 of 198 required quarterly abbreviated visits, and 43 of 58 required biennial comprehensive visits were not conducted on time.

Inside that gap the auditors found the sort of thing monitoring exists to catch. One unlicensed provider had not run the national Federal Bureau of Investigation fingerprint based criminal history checks required for staff who work with children, substituting state level screening instead. The consequence, in the OIG's own phrasing, was that new staff may have had access to children before the care provider could verify that the staff member did not have a criminal history.

Unlicensed facilities matter here because they sit outside the state child welfare licensing regimes that would otherwise inspect them. Where a state does not license a shelter, ORR's own monitoring is the only routine external check on who is employed there. The OIG made two recommendations: that ORR conduct abbreviated monitoring visits at unlicensed facilities every 90 days, and that it establish mechanisms to verify all required background checks have been completed. The Administration for Children and Families, which houses ORR, partially concurred with the first and concurred with the second. Both recommendations remain open and unimplemented, with an update due on 4 December 2026.

This is not the first finding of its kind. In audit A-06-21-07003, issued on 2 May 2023, the OIG reviewed background checks for 259 employees at one influx care facility and ten emergency intake sites opened during the 2021 arrivals surge, and found checks that were not conducted, not documented, or not completed before staff began work. One of its recommendations was to include background check compliance in routine monitoring visits. All seven recommendations from that audit were closed as implemented by November 2023. The audit published this June covers a period running to August 2024.

The pattern extends to the other end of the system, where children leave federal custody. In evaluation OEI-07-21-00250, published on 8 February 2024, the OIG examined case files for children released to sponsors in March and April 2021 and found that 16 per cent lacked documentation that one or more required sponsor safety checks had been done, that 19 per cent were released while background checks were still pending with no record of completion, that 35 per cent of sponsor identity documents had legibility problems, and that 22 per cent of cases received no timely follow up safety call.

ORR is now moving on the sponsor side. A proposed rule published in the Federal Register on 26 June 2026, with comments closing on 25 August 2026, would restrict acceptable proof of sponsor identity to government issued documents carrying security features, require income documentation, and require fingerprint based national criminal history checks for sponsors and every adult in the household. Justifying the rule, the agency described cases identified by its integrity team, including one in which a sponsor and a partner attempted to sponsor 15 children over five years using multiple aliases, discovered, the agency said, only when the sponsor was fingerprinted.

Two figures in that rule bear directly on the facility findings. ORR reported that the average length of care rose from 49 days in February 2025 to 189 days following policy changes made on 7 March 2025, and that the federal cost was 557 dollars per child per day as of November 2025. Children staying almost four times as long are exposed for longer to whatever a shelter is or is not doing.

A separate ORR notice published on 5 August 2026 proposes nine new monitoring instruments, among them a quarterly reporting form covering incidents and allegations of sexual abuse, and would lift comprehensive site visits to licensed providers from once every two years to annually. On its face it does not answer the OIG's request for 90 day visits to unlicensed sites.

Financial oversight of the same programme has drawn similar verdicts. On 3 September 2025 the OIG reported that ACF awarded 62 contracts worth 4.8 billion dollars without competition in 2021, and that all five it examined, worth more than 2.8 billion dollars, failed the requirement to plan for full and open competition. On 10 February 2026 it reported a 529 million dollar sole source award made three days after an unsolicited proposal, at double the agency's own 245 million dollar estimate. A March 2025 evaluation found only 8 per cent of unaccompanied children received ORR funded foster care, averaging 15 days, leaving congregate facilities the norm.

What the June audit does not say is how many staff were affected by the missing fingerprint checks, whether any of them had criminal records, or whether any child came to harm. Nor is it clear what ACF's partial concurrence means in practice, or whether a 90 day cycle will be adopted at all. That answer is due on 4 December 2026.