An illegal immigrant who gamed the lax immigration system under President Biden, coaxing a young teen migrant to come to the U.S. and be placed in his care, then sexually abusing her, has just been sentenced to federal prison for his smuggling crimes.
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Juan Tiul Xi is a worst-case horror story among the hundreds of thousands of migrant children that flooded the U.S. then got “lost” in the system under the last administration.
Now Xi, already serving an 8-year sentence for two sexual battery convictions in state court in Ohio stemming from abuse of the migrant girl, will get an extra 26 months in a federal penitentiary, thanks to Judge Solomon Oliver Jr.’s latest ruling last week.
Xi admitted in court that he convinced the family of a 14-year-old Guatemalan girl to send her north with smugglers, to cross the border illegally, then to pose as his sister so the Biden administration would short-circuit the usual background checks and turn the girl over to Xi to act as her sponsor.
In reality, the Biden administration delivered a victim to an abuser.
Xi, a Guatemalan himself, demanded she work to repay the smugglers, threatened her with deportation if she objected, forced her to have sex with him as part of the payment, impregnated her, then pressed her to have an abortion, prosecutors told the court.
Even as Xi was abusing the 14-year-old girl, he had applied to the Office of Refugee Resettlement to sponsor at least four other migrant children, known in government-speak as Unaccompanied Alien Children or UACs.
He was approved in at least one of those cases, though court documents don’t reveal that child’s fate.
Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, said Xi’s case highlighted just how easy it was to scam the immigration system — with awful outcomes.
“This is another sickening case that illustrates the Biden administration’s shamefully negligent policies for handling UACs, and the harm to children that results,” she said.
“This offender had no trouble whatsoever in arranging for the illegal entry of a 14-year-old girl and then duping authorities from giving him custody of her for the purpose of sexual abuse,” Ms. Vaughan added.
The girl, who was not identified by name in court documents, was one of about 100,000 UACs, or unaccompanied alien children, to surge into the U.S. in 20024 — and roughly a half-million across the entire Biden administration.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the government agency that was supposed to protect the kids, lost track of hundreds of thousands of them.
The children are the shame of the Biden administration, matching and, by many measures, exceeding the family separations scandal of the first Trump term. Both have their root in the same policy: The government’s lenient treatment of migrant minors.
When they are here without parents, as long as they are from countries other than Mexico or Canada, they are required to be quickly turned over to ORR, which searches for sponsors to care for them.
The numbers during the Biden era were so overwhelming that the administration slashed the procedural checks that were implemented in the first Trump term to try to prevent children from ending up in dangerous situations.
The new Trump administration has launched an effort to check in with hundreds of thousands of the children to ascertain their whereabouts and safety. As of last month Homeland Security had located 145,000.
In addition to Xi’s sentencing, the Justice Department last week announced charges against other illegal immigrants from Guatemala who are accused of submitting fraudulent sponsorship applications to gain custody of UACs.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the defendants were taking advantage of “a mismanaged government program guided by reckless policy direction.”
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“Instead of protecting children, these defendants and others allegedly took advantage of the program and used it to entice the illegal smuggling of unaccompanied children to the United States,” he said.
Ms. Vaughan said the law itself, in pushing for release of the children, acts as a “huge temptation for naive parents” to send their children on the dangerous journey to the U.S.
But she said the Biden administration also bore responsibility.
“The Biden policies absolutely facilitated the abuse of this girl, and thousands of others,” she said. “It’s downright shameful that so many officials and contractors were indifferent to the abuse of so many kids for so long.”
The Trump administration has taken major steps to solve the root problem. It’s nearly plugged the flow of UACs, going from more than 10,000 a month at points during the Biden administration to just 658 in March.
And it has reimposed stiffer checks on would-be sponsors.
The result is that children are spending far more time in ORR’s custody awaiting a decision on sponsors — an average of 117 days in 2025, compared to less than a month during the Biden administration. The result is that when they are released, they are going to safer conditions, ORR said.
“Thorough sponsor vetting is, at its core, a child safety tool,” ORR told The Washington Times in a statement. “As ORR strengthens its sponsor verification procedures, we are confident that we are avoiding many of the breaks in the vetting process that have put children in harm’s way.”
Immigrant rights groups have challenged the slower process but have met with defeat in the courts, including a case where a federal judge declined to order faster releases for a group of UACs who’d been in and out of custody.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee to the court in Washington, said the law demands competing priorities: prompt release of the children, but care to place them in the best possible setting.
He said the law contains enough room to encompass ORR’s current policy.
“While perhaps a more burdensome process than plaintiffs would like, that process complies with the agency’s directive to ‘assess the nature and extent of the potential sponsor’s previous and current relationship with the unaccompanied child,’” he wrote.
In Xi’s case, he had the girl use a copy of his own sister’s birth certificate to fool authorities. There is no indication in court documents that DNA testing was done to confirm the relationship.
Prosecutors said Xi tried to force the girl into an abortion through “medication.”
In his defense, Xi blamed an impoverished upbringing in Guatemala, where he left school at age 13 to work full time to help his parents and 10 siblings.
His sentencing had been scheduled for early in May but he refused to come to court, forcing the judge to sign an order allowing U.S. Marshals to extract him from his cell by force.
Then in court he said he no longer felt he understood Spanish sufficiently to proceed in that language.
The sentencing was postponed to find an interpreter who spoke K’ekchi, a Mayan dialect.
In court papers Xi also revealed that his four children and their mother, back in Guatemala, were struck by a truck in their hometown.
Two of the children suffered broken bones and another had a brain injury that required emergency surgery to relieve the swelling.
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