An illegal immigrant who gamed the lax immigration system under President Biden by coaxing a teenage girl to come to the U.S. and be placed in his care and then sexually abusing her has just been sentenced to federal prison for his smuggling crimes.
Juan Tiul Xi is a worst-case horror story among the hundreds of thousands of migrant children who flooded the U.S. and then got “lost” in the system.
Now, Xi, already serving two consecutive four-year sentences 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 ruling last week.
Xi admitted in court that he persuaded the family of a 14-year-old Guatemalan girl to send her north with smugglers, to cross the border illegally and then to pose as his sister so the Biden administration would short-circuit the usual background checks and turn over the girl to Xi to act as her sponsor.
In reality, the Biden administration delivered a victim to an abuser.
Xi, a Guatemalan, demanded that the girl 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 and then pressed her to have an abortion, prosecutors told the court.
Even as Xi was abusing the girl, he applied to the Office of Refugee Resettlement to sponsor at least four other migrant children, known in government as unaccompanied alien children, or UACs.
He was approved in at least one of those cases, though court documents do not 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 said.
The girl, who was not identified by name in court documents, was one of roughly 100,000 unaccompanied alien children to surge into the U.S. in fiscal year 2024 — and roughly a half-million across the entire Biden administration.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government agency that was supposed to protect the children, 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 roots in the same policy: the government’s lenient treatment of migrant minors.
When the migrant children are in the U.S. without parents, as long as they are from countries other than Mexico or Canada, they must be quickly turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 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 current Trump administration has launched an effort to check in with hundreds of thousands of children to ascertain their whereabouts and safety. As of last month, the Homeland Security Department had located 145,000.
The Justice Department last week announced charges against illegal immigrants from Guatemala who are accused of submitting fraudulent sponsorship applications to gain custody of unaccompanied alien children.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the defendants were taking advantage of “a mismanaged government program guided by reckless policy direction.”
“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 the release of the children, acts as a “huge temptation for naive parents” to send their children on the dangerous journey to the U.S.
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 has nearly plugged the flow of unaccompanied alien children, going from more than 10,000 a month at points during the Biden administration to just 658 in March.
It has also reimposed stricter checks on would-be sponsors.
The result is that children are spending far more time in the Office of Refugee Resettlement custody awaiting decisions on sponsors — an average of 117 days in 2025, compared with less than a month during the Biden administration. Yet once released, they are placed in safer conditions, the agency said.
“Thorough sponsor vetting is, at its core, a child safety tool,” the Office of Refugee Resettlement 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 in a case where a federal judge declined to order faster releases for a group of unaccompanied alien children who had been in and out of custody.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee to the court in the District of Columbia, said the law demands competing priorities: the prompt release of the children, but also the care to place them in the best setting.
He said the law contains enough room to encompass the Office of Refugee Resettlement’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.
Xi had the girl use a copy of his own sister’s birth certificate to fool authorities. Court documents show no indication that DNA testing was conducted 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 was scheduled for early May, but he refused to appear in court. The judge signed an order allowing U.S. Marshals to extract him from his cell by force.
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 Q’eqchi’, a Mayan language.
In court papers, Xi revealed that his four children and their mother 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.
