Investigations

Retired agents said Border Patrol skipped biometrics on migrant minors

A YouTube investigation traced federal shelter grants in Tucson and interviewed a National Border Patrol Council vice president.

In southern Arizona, retired U.S. Border Patrol agents said the agency took minors at their word when families arrived without documents and often skipped fingerprints and photos at initial contact. YouTuber Nick Shirley filmed along the border fence and at Tucson shelters that hold unaccompanied children for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, posting the report on Nov. 2, 2026.

Health and Human Services places unaccompanied minors with sponsors after short stays in licensed shelters. During the 2021 surge, contractors moved children by bus, van, and commercial flights while the General Services Administration ran a national transportation contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars for ORR.

One retired agent who worked the Tucson corridor said contractor buses sometimes carried 60 people at a time to sector headquarters while stacks of migrants waited along the wall with as few as one or two agents on scene. She said supervisors shifted agents to easier crossing points when crowds grew and that she received a gag order after asking her congressman for help, though lawyers later got CBP to rescind it.

Another retired agent said children as young as six crossed alone and that juveniles under 14 were difficult to fingerprint under initial-contact rules meant to protect minors. He said agents could not verify whether adults traveling with children were relatives and that some groups reused the same child because repeat crossings left no biometric trail.

Art Delguetto, a retired Tucson sector agent who is vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, walked Shirley through the Casa Alitas intake center. Delguetto said staff often handed children to sponsors who claimed to be relatives without a full immigration status check, including sponsors who were themselves in the country without legal status. He described apprehending a man with a 12-year-old who fingerprinted to a Michigan warrant for child endangerment; supervisors released the pair toward asylum processing because the man had no conviction, Delguetto said.

Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb told Shirley that NGOs met children at the border and that agents later saw the same sponsor addresses written on multiple children's hands. Lamb said flights out of Tucson and Phoenix sometimes carried five or ten unaccompanied minors a day during the peak.

Shirley and his crew went to VisionQuest National Ltd. on North Swan Road, which federal payment records show received millions for shelter and transitional foster care for unaccompanied children. An employee refused them entry, declined to answer where children went, and said the crew would call 911 because the property was private.

At Jewish Family and Children's Service of Southern Arizona and Catholic Community Services, receptionists said they could not discuss verification steps or release practices. One Catholic Community Services employee who had worked there three years told Shirley she had no idea what happened to unaccompanied minors during 2024.

Federal watchdogs have separately documented gaps in the same pipeline. In February 2024 the HHS inspector general reported missing documentation for required sponsor safety checks in 16 percent of sampled case files from early 2021 and late follow-up calls in 22 percent of cases. In August 2024 the DHS inspector general said ICE could not account for the location of every child ORR released and that more than 291,000 unaccompanied minors lacked removal court notices after leaving HHS custody from fiscal 2019 through 2023.

In March 2024 the Government Accountability Office sustained a protest over the General Services Administration's award of an $895,839,798 unaccompanied-children transportation contract to Acuity International, citing unreasonable evaluation of key personnel and a flawed responsibility determination.

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