Nick Shirley’s New Investigation: Taxpayer Dollars, NGOs, and Hundreds of Thousands of Unaccounted-for Migrant Children
Independent journalist Nick Shirley released a 43-minute investigation this week examining what happened to hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children processed under the Biden administration. The video, posted on X, is titled “Inside the Largest Government-Funded Human Trafficking Ring in History.” Shirley argues that federal agencies lost track of large numbers of these children while nonprofits received hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding to handle their placement and related services.
Shirley breaks down government contracts, interviews former Border Patrol agents and a GSA contract specialist, and confronts NGOs involved in the process. He highlights cases in which one organization reportedly received $895 million, and others took in more than $100 million each. Funding for some of these groups in places such as Tucson, Arizona, dropped sharply once border encounters declined. The video also includes accounts of children released to sponsors with weak or incomplete vetting, some of whom later faced forced labor or abuse.
Official Numbers and Tracking Failures
These claims rest on documented problems identified by government watchdogs. An August 2024 Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report found that ICE transferred roughly 448,000 unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services between October 2018 and September 2023. Of those:
More than 32,000 failed to appear for scheduled immigration court hearings.
Approximately 291,000 had not been served notices to appear in court as of May 2024.
The inspector general noted that children who do not appear in court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor. ICE lacked reliable systems to consistently monitor their locations after release from HHS custody. A separate HHS Office of Inspector General review found gaps in sponsor screening, including missing documentation for required safety checks in a significant share of sampled case files and delayed or undocumented follow-up calls.
HHS data released later showed that from January 2021 through January 2025 the agency placed 11,488 migrant children with sponsors who were not a parent or legal guardian and who had not been fingerprinted or given a full background check. It also failed to conduct home studies for 79,143 children under age 12. Earlier New York Times reporting indicated that HHS could not reach more than 85,000 children on post-release follow-up calls over a two-year period. Trump administration officials have since stated that roughly 146,000 of the children have been located, while approximately 300,000 remain unaccounted for by federal agencies.
HHS cared for 468,736 unaccompanied children from October 2020 through September 2024. During the Biden years, the volume of arrivals forced the rapid expansion of emergency intake sites and heavy reliance on nonprofit contractors.
Large Contracts and Oversight Gaps
Taxpayer funding for these operations was substantial. In 2021, HHS’s Administration for Children and Families awarded a $529 million sole-source contract (later modified higher) to Family Endeavors to operate an emergency intake site. An HHS Office of Inspector General audit later found the award was made without proper competition, price analysis, or determination that the contractor was responsible; the price was more than double the agency’s own cost estimate. Other contracts for transportation and services reached into the hundreds of millions. Shirley’s reporting focuses on how some of these funds flowed to organizations involved in moving and placing the children.
Xavier Becerra’s Role
Xavier Becerra served as HHS Secretary from 2021 to 2025 and oversaw the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which assumes custody of unaccompanied children from DHS and is responsible for their care until placement with a sponsor. Federal law limits HHS’s formal authority once a child is released, but the agency still controls the speed and thoroughness of vetting and placement decisions.
Becerra faced repeated congressional scrutiny on these issues. In a July 2022 staff meeting, he told employees, “If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants, he would have never become famous and rich. This is not the way you do an assembly line,” while pressing for faster discharges from shelters. The comment, first reported by the New York Times, drew criticism because it came amid internal concerns that the system rewarded speed over safety and as reports of child labor trafficking were rising. Becerra later said the remark was about operational efficiency, not treating children as products, and that the Biden White House retained confidence in him.
Under his leadership, some earlier background-check requirements for household members and alternate caregivers were scaled back. Sen. Chuck Grassley and House Judiciary Committee members documented cases in which required sex-offender and criminal checks were skipped, post-release monitoring was incomplete, and children were released to addresses that could not be verified. Becerra testified that no child was released without “full vetting,” yet inspector general findings and data releases showed otherwise in thousands of cases. HHS repeatedly stated that its responsibility ended at placement, leaving limited mechanisms to track outcomes once children left federal custody.
Shirley’s video places these documented failures in a larger narrative of a government-funded system that moved large numbers of children quickly into private hands with insufficient safeguards. Whether one accepts the strongest framing of a coordinated “trafficking ring,” the underlying data from DHS and HHS inspectors general, congressional oversight, and the sheer scale of unaccounted-for cases raise serious questions about accountability for the officials and contractors who ran the program.
Where are the children? This haunting question remains largely unanswered.
