A former federal contractor is going on the record by name, and what he says happened to migrant children at a San Diego emergency shelter should trouble every American. He says children cried that the adults waiting for them were strangers, and they were released anyway.
Tariq “Joey” Khodoura was a site supervisor for MVM, the private contractor paid to transport unaccompanied children out of the San Diego Convention Center and to their sponsors. He told The California Courier he spent 18 years in the Army, law enforcement, and federal contracting, and he worked as a DHS contractor from 2020 to 2024.
He says he realized something was wrong within days of arriving. The paperwork described the adults as uncles, aunts, and sisters, he said, while the children were crying and insisting they did not know them.
By his account, asking questions did not help. He says agents were told not to bring the children back. The allegations are his, and the contractor and the officials involved have not been shown to have responded in detail, but they fit a documented pattern of failure.
The San Diego site was one of the emergency shelters opened in March 2021 as the surge of unaccompanied minors overwhelmed licensed facilities. The city announced roughly 1,450 beds for a 90-day plan. Officials later said more than 2,400 children were released by the time it closed in July 2021.
Khodoura says the White House wanted the building cleared in about three months, and that more than 1,500 children moved through during his time there. He says most were young girls, many between 7 and 14. He claims the pace left no room for the hard questions.
A second whistleblower, a DHS intelligence official who asked not to be named, says he saw the other end of the pipeline. Assigned to a unit that tracked transnational crime and the gang watchlist, he says an MS-13 member’s fingerprints hit the list in February 2021. The reason was an application to sponsor a child.
He says he spent days calling around the government and could not find anyone who would take responsibility. By his count, he eventually identified about a dozen sponsors with gang ties, mostly from groups like MS-13 and 18th Street. He says he could not even find a working channel to alert the refugee office.
Behind those accounts sits a paper trail of policy changes. In March 2021, HHS and DHS terminated a 2018 agreement that required the Office of Refugee Resettlement to share sponsor information with ICE and Border Patrol. The Biden administration said the agreement had a chilling effect, arguing relatives would not come forward if they feared arrest.
That same month, the refugee office issued Field Guidance 10 and 11. They sped up releases to parents and close relatives and relaxed background and identification checks for other adults in the home. Xavier Becerra, now the Democratic candidate for California governor, was sworn in as HHS secretary that month.
A senior adviser at the refugee office, speaking on behalf of the agency, confirmed the broad outline. Sponsor vetting during those years was either waived or not required, the adviser said, including universal fingerprinting. The office often took sponsors at their word, did not require DNA tests, and did not verify income.
Federal watchdogs back up the larger concern. An HHS inspector general found that 16 percent of sampled 2021 case files lacked documentation of at least one required safety check. A DHS inspector general found that more than 291,000 unaccompanied children transferred to HHS had never been served a notice to appear in immigration court.
Senator Chuck Grassley has warned about this for years. A DHS inspector general report he highlighted found HHS released more than 24,100 children in fiscal years 2023 and 2024 to unrelated sponsors or distant relatives, a group law enforcement says faces the highest trafficking risk. ICE officials at one field office noted 34 children were released to two addresses that did not exist.
A new HHS memo released in early October adds to the pile. It says the refugee office denied fewer than one percent of sponsorship applications in fiscal year 2024, and that about 479,000 unaccompanied children were referred between 2021 and 2024.
The memo describes cases that are hard to read. In August 2023, a 15-year-old girl was released after 14 days to a man claiming to be her brother. HHS says no fingerprints or DNA were requested, and that he raped her and she became pregnant.
Becerra has said the department was not built to track children after placement and that once a sponsor took custody, the child was no longer in HHS care. Critics note the agency did have the authority to run post-release services and could have checked on every child.
The Trump administration says the cleanup is far from over. The refugee office adviser says roughly 80,000 children remain a concern, and that thousands of sponsor addresses from the period have not checked out. A DHS spokesperson says more than 145,000 of these children have been located, and ICE has been running welfare checks with local partners since November 2025.
