EXCLUSIVE — House Republicans are pushing the Biden administration for information on the number of potentially dangerous adults in the United States who applied to take custody of unaccompanied migrant children in government custody after crossing the southern border alone.

Senior Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee sent the Department of Health and Human Services a letter late Monday that requested data from its Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for caring for the more than 430,000 children in federal custody at the border and screening the adult sponsors the child is placed to live with, the Washington Examiner has learned.

“The humanitarian crisis caused by the Biden-Harris administration’s open-borders policies have placed hundreds of thousands of innocent children in danger,” House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) said in a statement.

“It is now apparent that once unaccompanied children arrive here, HHS is failing to sufficiently vet ‘sponsors’ to whom they are releasing these vulnerable children to. Allowing this heartbreaking abuse to continue is unconscionable,” Green said. “My Committee is demanding answers on the administration’s failure to protect the most vulnerable among us and end the crisis that has put them in harm’s way to begin with.”

Green, alongside Reps. Clay Higgins (R-LA) and Dan Bishop (R-NC), wrote in the letter to HHS Deputy Assistant Secretary Robin Dunn Marcos that their oversight of the HHS was warranted given the committee’s jurisdiction over border matters and the Biden administration’s well-documented failures to manage children in custody.

A February 2024 audit by the HHS Office of Inspector General found the agency failed to conduct timely well-being follow-up calls for 22% of children placed with sponsors; 16% of case files lacked proof that sponsors underwent safety checks; and 19% of children were released to adults before FBI fingerprint and state child abuse registries shared results with the government about the sponsors.

Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, more than 500,000 unaccompanied children have crossed the southern border — a figure no other administration has come close to hitting.

Of that figure, 430,000 children were released to adults within the U.S. Roughly 15% of children were returned to their countries of origin.

In early 2023, the New York Times reported that more than 85,000 children who had been released in the first two years of the Biden administration were unable to be contacted when the HHS attempted to follow-up with the children and their sponsors.

The New York Times report stated that countless children had been forced into working, even trafficked into sex work and forced labor by the adults who HHS placed them with.

The three Republicans asked HHS to disclose the number of adults who applied to take custody of a child and were found not to be a good fit and ultimately not approved since January 2021.

HHS is also to provide lawmakers with the number of sponsor applicants who, upon undergoing background checks, were determined to have been charged or convicted for any crime, as well as investigated for the physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, or abandonment of a child.

Oversight Republicans have requested documents that show the monthly number of children who were placed with sponsors that HHS later lost contact with during follow-up attempts post-placement and the number of applicants who provided false information in an attempt to obtain a child.

Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, children who arrive at the border without a parent or guardian are to be protected from immediate removal from the country on the basis that they may be victims of human trafficking.

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Children from all countries except for Canada and Mexico are typically exempt from automatic removal under the TVPRA though the Biden administration has flown back thousands of children from some Central American countries. Children who arrive at the southern border with a parent are not separated except in rare cases where the adult may be wanted in the U.S.

The HHS did not respond to a request for comment.