After four years of chaos under the Biden administration, President Donald Trump and his allies are moving to end the child trafficking crisis at the nation’s southern border. According to The New York Times, former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official Mellissa B. Harper, who now heads the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) division tasked with handling “unaccompanied migrant children,” has introduced more stringent security measures to ensure that children are not released to predators or traffickers, only to family members and established guardians.

Under Harper’s direction, the ORR released a memo Friday requiring fingerprinting for all applicants to sponsor or claim unaccompanied migrant children. The memo says that in order to “enhance the safety of releases to sponsors, prevent fraud, and combat trafficking,” the ORR will require “fingerprinting of all adult sponsors and their adult household members aged 18 and over, and adult caregivers identified in a Sponsor Care Plan.” Up until now, fingerprinting has only been required for sponsors in limited circumstances, allowing traffickers, predators, and other adults with no relation to detained migrant children to present themselves as sponsors and gain access to the children.

In addition to mandatory fingerprinting, potential sponsors will also be required to undergo a thorough background and present valid, unexpired identification, which is expected to deter illegal immigrants from bringing their families across the border. Background checks will consist of a public records check, local and state sex offender registry check, child abuse and neglect checks, multiple FBI and police checks, and a name and address-based check through the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) National Sex Offender Public Website to ensure that the sponsor does not live within a one-mile radius of a registered sex offender.

In an email, Harper castigated ORR staff for their prior failures to protect children entrusted to the agency. “The pervasive fraud in the sponsor process is undeniable,” she wrote. Harper added critically that there are some within ORR and the federal government at large who “subscribe to the belief that some fraud is necessary because they are opposed to the overall immigration system of the U.S. or just fail to recognize that their own actions are possibly contributing to the victimization of children.”

Shortly before Harper introduced the new security measures, ICE agents were given access to ORR databases related to potential sponsors applying to collect unaccompanied migrant children. During Trump’s first term, after ICE arrested 170 “sponsors” who were illegal immigrants, many of whom were suspected of being involved with trafficking or child predation, then-Senator Kamala Harris led a congressional effort to block ICE from accessing ORR and other HHS databases, preventing immigration officials from checking to ensure that children were not being released to known criminals.

Under the Biden administration, known instances of child sex trafficking at the southern border more than tripled over the course of less than four years. In addition to ORR, HHS operates the Office on Trafficking in Persons (OTP), which offers assistance and resources to immigrant children who have been victims of trafficking. Prior to Joe Biden taking office in 2021, OTP dealt with an annual average of 625 immigrant children who had escaped sex trafficking; that number nearly doubled to 1,143 during the first year of Biden’s presidency and eventually reached an annual average of at least 1,839, although numbers for the final months of Biden’s presidency have not yet been made public.

Trump’s border czar and former ICE chief Tom Homan estimated that at least 300,000 immigrant children have gone missing at the border over the past four years, predicting that many have been released to traffickers and pedophiles. He has recounted working with migrant children who have been victims of gang rape, forced prostitution, and other forms of sex trafficking.

In multiple interviews, Homan has explained that Trump has given him three responsibilities: secure the southern border, enact mass deportations of illegal immigrants, and find and rescue the over 300,000 children who have gone missing. “[We’ve] gotta save these kids, a lot of them are living a life of hell every day,” the border czar has said. “We’re gonna find some of them living with pedophiles, living in sex slavery, some are gonna be dead, but we gotta find these children,” he has insisted. “When you lose the border, trafficking and sex trafficking’s gonna skyrocket, child deaths will skyrocket, migrant deaths will skyrocket, American deaths will skyrocket,” Homan emphasized. He continued, “I love this country. I want to save some lives. Secure borders save lives.”