A former contractor who worked with the Department of Health and Human Services during the 2021 surge of unaccompanied migrant children says he witnessed serious problems with the way children were released to adult sponsors, including cases in which frightened minors allegedly insisted they did not know the people receiving them.
Tarek Kadourah, who said he worked as a site supervisor for government contractor MVM during the summer of 2021, described his experience in a newly released interview publicized by Republican California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton. Kadourah alleged that weaknesses in the sponsor-verification process under then-Biden HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, the Democrats’ nominee for governor, left thousands of children vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation.
MVM was contracted by the federal government to help transport unaccompanied children from government facilities to sponsors across the country. Federal contracting records confirm that the company received hundreds of millions of dollars for transportation and related services involving migrant children. Kadourah said his job placed him between HHS officials and the transportation teams responsible for moving children to their sponsors.
“I was the middleman,” he said, describing himself as an on-site liaison. Kadourah claimed the children frequently appeared frightened and uncomfortable even though they were supposed to have reached a safer stage of the immigration process. “To me, those kids looked like, there’s no other way to say it, they were still being trafficked,” he said.
According to Kadourah, transportation personnel began reporting troubling encounters at drop-off locations. He said some children would cry or refuse to enter vehicles with the adults listed as their sponsors, telling workers they did not recognize the people who had arrived to collect them.
“He was telling me every time he was dropping off some of those kids, they would immediately cry and refuse to get in a van or the vehicle of that sponsor at the drop-off site,” he added. “So I asked him, ‘Why? Did you ask the kids why?’ and they said they didn’t know who those people were.”
“And when I said the agents had paperwork from HHS saying that … this person was somehow related to that child — uncle, aunt, sister, whatever, right? None of it was verified,” Kadourah said. “So Health and Human Services was giving us paperwork that was not fricking verified.”
“All they were doing was picking up phone calls and saying, ‘Oh, okay. You’re so-and-so’s uncle whatever?’ and then stamping it and moving it forward,” he went on. “They were treating it just like Becerra said: like assembly line. That’s exactly how it ran.”
Kadourah continued, “At this point, they were noticing a pattern. When it’s not just one or two children crying, refusing to get in a vehicle with strangers, but it’s like 20, 30 of them crying, saying, ‘We don’t know who these people are,’ ‘That’s not my aunt and uncle.’ That raised a lot of red flags and I think that’s when they completely shut me out.”
Kadourah alleged that the paperwork supplied by HHS identified those adults as relatives even though, in his view, the relationships had not been adequately verified. He said the incidents were not isolated and claimed workers eventually began noticing a recurring pattern involving numerous children. Kadourah further alleged that concerns raised about the process were not adequately addressed and that he eventually found himself excluded after questioning what was happening.
His account has not been independently proven, and Becerra has denied broader allegations from Hilton that his management of HHS knowingly endangered migrant children. But then, he would deny it, wouldn’t he?
Becerra’s campaign has previously accused Hilton of politicizing the issue and has pointed to immigration and family-separation policies under President Donald Trump when responding to attacks over his record, though such policies have been in effect since the days of Barack Obama.
The allegations nevertheless come against a documented backdrop of shortcomings in the federal system responsible for placing and tracking unaccompanied migrant children. A 2024 report from the HHS Office of Inspector General found gaps in sponsor screening during the 2021 migrant surge.
Auditors found that 16% of the child case files they reviewed lacked documentation showing that at least one required sponsor safety check had been performed. In another 19% of cases in which children were released while certain FBI fingerprint or child-abuse-registry checks were still pending, case files were never updated with the final results.
A separate Department of Homeland Security inspector general investigation later found serious problems with the federal government’s ability to track children after they left federal custody. Between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied children to HHS, most of whom were later placed with sponsors.
Auditors found that more than 31,000 release addresses were incomplete or unusable. As of January 2025, ICE had also not issued formal immigration court notices to more than 233,000 children, while more than 43,000 who had received notices had failed to appear for scheduled court hearings.
Earlier this summer, Hilton highlighted accounts from former migrant children and other whistleblowers who alleged that weaknesses in the sponsor system exposed minors to sexual abuse, forced labor or other exploitation. Becerra served as HHS secretary from March 2021 until January 2025 and oversaw the Office of Refugee Resettlement during a period when record numbers of unaccompanied minors crossed the southern border.
