#10 Child Marriage Is Still Legal in 34 States
In 34 American states a child can be legally married today. Not a hundred years ago. Today. Four of those states have no minimum age at all. Zero. Any age. With a judge's signature.
This is not happening somewhere else. This is happening here.
Three stories tonight. Child marriage in America. A federal fraud investigation that is moving toward something significant and getting almost no coverage. And 14 weeks into his tenure as FBI director --- what Kash Patel has actually changed and what it means for the country.
Start with a number. 300,000.
That is how many children were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2018. Not in a developing country. Here. 300,000 in 18 years. Roughly 16,000 child marriages per year. Every year. For almost two decades.
86 percent of those children were girls. The vast majority were married to adult men. Not a 17-year-old marrying an 18-year-old. Adult men marrying girls as young as 12 and 13. Legally. With a marriage license issued by the state.
Here is the legal landscape right now.
34 states still allow child marriage under some circumstances. 16 states have banned it completely with no exceptions --- the minimum age is 18, full stop. That means two thirds of American states still have a legal pathway for a minor to be married before their 18th birthday.
Four states have no minimum age at all. California, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma. No floor. A judge can approve a marriage involving a child of any age in those four states if conditions are met.
California. No minimum age for marriage. The same state that leads the country on progressive legislation on virtually every other issue has no minimum age for marriage.
19 states have statutory rape exceptions when the parties are legally married. In those states if two people are married it is not statutory rape even if one of them is a minor and the other is an adult. The marriage license removes the age of consent protection. A 30-year-old man who has sex with a 13-year-old girl commits a crime in most circumstances. In 19 states if he marries her first it becomes legal.
Here is what child marriage does to the children involved.
Girls who marry before 18 are 50 percent more likely to drop out of high school. Four times less likely to finish college. Without education the economic options are severely limited. Without economic independence leaving becomes nearly impossible.
Child brides are at significantly higher risk of domestic violence. The power imbalance between an adult spouse and a minor spouse --- financially, emotionally, physically --- is built into the relationship from day one.
In many states a married minor cannot file for divorce without a parent or guardian's permission. The same parents who consented to the marriage in the first place. If those parents are not on her side she is legally trapped.
A married minor also loses certain child welfare protections. Once she is married she is often treated as an adult by the legal system. She can no longer access some youth shelters. She cannot access some domestic violence services designed for minors. The marriage license ages her out of the protection system before she has aged out of childhood.
Pregnancy is the other reality. Girls who marry young are more likely to become pregnant young. Complications in childbirth are the leading cause of death for girls aged 15 to 19 worldwide. This is not only a problem in developing countries. It happens here.
Here is the argument made by those who oppose banning it entirely.
Parental rights. Parents should have authority to make decisions for their minor children including decisions about marriage. If a family and their faith tradition support a young marriage and the parents consent the state should not override it.
The second argument involves specific circumstances. A teenage couple expecting a child who want to marry before the baby arrives. Supporters of exceptions argue that a total ban would prevent these situations even when both parties and their families want the marriage.
Those arguments exist and they deserve to be stated accurately.
A minor cannot enter into a contract. A minor cannot vote. A minor cannot buy alcohol. A minor cannot join the military without parental consent. The law recognizes in dozens of ways that children do not have the same capacity for fully informed consent that adults do. Parental consent does not protect the child. It protects the parent's decision. The 13-year-old girl whose parents decide she should marry a 35-year-old man has not consented to anything. Her parents consented on her behalf. That is not the same thing.
Here is the international context.
The United Nations defines child marriage as a marriage where at least one party is under 18. The UN calls it a human rights violation. The United States government funds programs in other countries to help end child marriage.
At the same time American states are issuing marriage licenses to minors.
The country funding anti-child-marriage programs abroad has not eliminated child marriage at home.
16 states have banned it completely. They did it through their state legislatures. No federal mandate. No constitutional amendment. State legislators looked at the data and made a decision. The process is available to the remaining 34 states. Some are moving. Some are not.
Most people, if you stopped them on the street and asked whether child marriage is legal in America, would say no. They would be wrong in 34 states.
The organizations working on this are Equality Now and Unchained At Last. They are pushing state by state. They could use the attention.
Here is the state-by-state breakdown that tells the real story.
Delaware banned child marriage in 2018. New Jersey banned it in 2018. Pennsylvania in 2020. Rhode Island in 2021. Massachusetts in 2022. Nevada in 2023. These are not conservative states. These are states that looked at the data and acted.
The states that still allow it include both red and blue states. This is not a partisan issue. Texas allows it with parental and judicial approval. So does New York. So does Florida. So does Illinois. The holdouts are spread across every region and every political leaning.
The average age of girls who are married young in the United States is 16. But cases involving girls as young as 10 and 11 have been documented in recent decades. These are not ancient historical records. These are cases that happened within living memory with marriage licenses issued by American state governments.
The men they married were on average in their late 20s or early 30s. In some documented cases significantly older. These are not young couples making an impulsive decision. These are situations where an adult sought and obtained a legal marriage to a child.
In most states the judge who approves a child marriage has no legal obligation to interview the child privately. No obligation to ask whether she wants the marriage. No obligation to assess whether she is being coerced. The judge looks at the paperwork, sees the parental consent, and signs. The child's own voice is often not part of the process.
Here is another reality most people don't know.
Child marriage in America is not concentrated in one religion or one community. It crosses every faith tradition. Christian communities. Muslim communities. Jewish communities. Hindu communities. Secular families. The data does not show one group disproportionately responsible. It is distributed across demographics and geographies in ways that make it impossible to point at a single community and call it their problem.
That also makes it harder to fight politically. It does not fit neatly into any existing political coalition's narrative. It is not a left issue or a right issue. It is not a religious issue or a secular issue. Every time a state legislature tries to pass a ban some coalition forms to oppose it --- sometimes religious conservatives who want parental authority preserved, sometimes civil libertarians who don't want government in family decisions, sometimes legislators who simply don't want to touch anything that might upset any constituency.
The result is that 34 states still allow it in 2026 while 16 have ended it. The 16 that ended it did so through determined advocacy --- organizations that brought survivors to testify, that made the data public, that kept the pressure on year after year until the votes were there. Unchained At Last was founded by Fraidy Reiss who was herself forced into a marriage at 19 and spent years fighting to get out. She started the organization specifically because she could not find anyone else doing this work.
These organizations are small. They are outspent and outnumbered. They work state by state because federal action has not come. The story rarely makes national news. Most Americans have no idea this is a live legal issue in the country they live in.
March 27, 2026. Vice President JD Vance convened the first meeting of the administration's anti-fraud task force.
Half the cabinet was in the room. Scott Brady --- the federal prosecutor who handled the Hunter Biden investigation --- is leading it. The mandate is specific. Find the fraud. Document it. Prosecute it. Not audit it. Prosecute it.
Start with Minnesota.
Minnesota had approximately 9 billion dollars in fraud across 14 federal programs. Not 9 million. 9 billion. Programs hit include child nutrition services, autism support services, housing assistance and Medicaid.
The child nutrition fraud became a national story when investigators found organizations billing the federal government for meals served to tens of thousands of children who did not exist. One organization claimed to be feeding 5,000 children a day. The actual number was close to zero. The money went to foreign bank accounts.
Dr. Mehmet Oz runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He went on national television and described what investigators found. In Los Angeles alone 221 fraudulent hospice centers were shut down in 10 weeks. The previous California governor had shut down four in four years. 221 in 10 weeks.
Oz also said there are approximately 1,800 hospice centers in California --- roughly a third of the entire nation's hospice capacity. They believe half of them are fraudulent. Hospice owners enrolling patients without their knowledge. Collecting Medicare payments. Allowing those patients to die without the care they were entitled to because the care was never delivered.
Durable medical equipment fraud. South Florida has twice as many businesses selling wheelchairs, canes and medical braces as McDonald's locations. Twice as many. South Florida does not have twice as many people who need wheelchairs as anywhere else. It has twice as many people billing Medicare for wheelchairs that were never delivered to patients who never needed them.
Here is the timeline that matters.
Tim Walz is the Governor of Minnesota. He has approximately nine months left --- his term ends January 2027. A sitting governor has sovereign immunity. That means he cannot be personally charged for official acts while in office. Sovereign immunity does not make crimes legal. It delays accountability.
When Walz's term ends in January 2027 that immunity drops. If federal investigators are building a case --- documenting the fraud, tracing the money, establishing who knew what and when --- the window of criminal exposure opens the moment he leaves office.
Scott Brady successfully prosecuted the Hunter Biden case. He is a prosecutor who follows evidence. The task force has access to every federal agency. Treasury. DOJ. HHS. All Inspector General offices. All of them working together on a unified investigation instead of operating in separate silos the way they did before.
Here is what makes this investigation different from past fraud enforcement.
In the past, fraud referrals from Inspector General investigators were routed through individual agencies. Each agency handled its own referrals. Treasury did not talk to HHS. DOJ did not coordinate with the Office of Inspector General. Cases that crossed agency lines fell into gaps. Fraudsters operating across multiple programs could exploit those gaps because no single investigator had the full picture.
The Vance task force changes that. Every agency feeds into one coordinated investigation. When a fraudster stealing from Medicaid in one state and child nutrition programs in another and housing assistance in a third gets investigated all three threads get pulled at once. That is how large-scale prosecutions get built.
One of the most telling details Oz mentioned --- of the fraud referrals his agency was receiving from Inspector General investigators they were only acting on about 30 percent of them. Thirty percent. The investigators finding the fraud had their work ignored 70 percent of the time. Oz told his team he wants 100 percent of referrals acted on.
The federal government spends approximately 1.5 trillion dollars per year on Medicare, Medicaid and related programs. Conservative estimates of fraud in these programs run from 3 to 10 percent. At the low end that is 45 billion dollars a year. At the high end 150 billion. Per year. Every year. Under administrations of both parties that treated fraud as an acceptable cost rather than a crime.
Tim Walz has nine months left. The clock is running on more than just his term.
The improper payment rate in Medicaid alone --- payments made in error or through fraud --- was documented at over 22 percent in recent years. More than one in five Medicaid dollars going out the door improperly. In a program that spends over 800 billion dollars a year that is an extraordinary number.
The COVID relief fraud is a separate category. Estimates put total COVID relief fraud at somewhere between 100 billion and 400 billion dollars. The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program alone may have had 40 percent of its payments go to fraudulent claims. The Small Business Administration's Economic Injury Disaster Loan program lost somewhere between 70 and 90 billion to fraud. These are not disputed estimates. These are numbers from government auditors and Inspector General reports.
Most of this money has not been recovered. Most of the people who took it have not been charged. The Vance task force is the first serious attempt to change that ratio with a prosecutor in charge and the full resources of the federal government behind it.
The entire federal defense budget is approximately 886 billion dollars a year. The estimated annual fraud in Medicare and Medicaid alone runs between 45 and 150 billion. At the high end that is more than 16 percent of the defense budget being stolen out of healthcare programs every single year. Not misspent. Not wasted. Stolen. By people running fake clinics and phantom patients and paper companies.
The first major prosecution out of this task force will set the tone for everything that follows. If Brady brings a significant case and wins it --- a case with real defendants, real money, real prison time --- it changes the calculus for everyone still sitting on fraudulent gains and hoping this blows over.
The first meeting was March 27, 2026. Watch what happens next.
Kash Patel has been director of the FBI for roughly 14 weeks. For years before he got the job he said he would shut down FBI headquarters on day one and turn it into a museum of the deep state. He has not done that.
Here is what he has done.
The FBI has shifted its primary focus to immigration enforcement. That is not a traditional FBI mission. The Bureau was built around counterterrorism, cybercrime and public corruption. Those units are still operating but field offices across the country have been redirected toward immigration enforcement in alignment with the administration's border priorities. Former agents with decades of experience say the mission drift concerns them. The agency that stopped domestic terror plots and took down organized crime networks is now spending significant resources on cases that used to belong to ICE and DHS.
Senior officials have been pushed out. Multiple rounds of dismissals have removed agents tied to the classified documents investigation and other cases connected to the previous administration. By late February the number of dismissed employees had grown into the dozens. Patel has made no apologies for any of it.
He has also decentralized the Bureau. Headquarters staff are being moved to field offices across the country including a major campus in Huntsville Alabama. Former FBI officials actually support this idea --- they have said for years that Washington headquarters grew too large and too far removed from the actual work. That part of Patel's agenda has bipartisan support inside the law enforcement community.
Here is the tension at the center of his tenure.
The FBI's independence from political influence is the foundation of its credibility. Every director since J. Edgar Hoover has had to navigate the line between serving the executive branch and maintaining the Bureau's institutional integrity. Some directors drew that line clearly. Some did not. Patel came in as a political ally of the president with a stated agenda to remake the agency. He is remaking it. Whether the remake produces a more effective FBI or a more compliant one is the question that will take years to answer.
The agents who spoke to the New York Times --- 45 current and former officials --- described an agency now focused on political priorities rather than the cases that make America safer. Patel's supporters say the FBI needed exactly this kind of disruption after years of being weaponized against conservatives.
Both things can be true. The FBI did have a credibility problem before Patel arrived. Whether the solution is a director appointed specifically to fix the people his boss considers enemies is a different question.
What is not in dispute --- the FBI looks different today than it did 14 weeks ago. Whether different means better is what the next few years will show.
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AND THAT'S IT.
Three stories tonight.
Child marriage --- 34 states. Four with no minimum age. 300,000 children in 18 years. 86 percent girls. 19 states where marriage removes the age of consent protection. A minor can't sign a contract or buy a beer but in 34 states can be legally married. Equality Now and Unchained At Last are working on it state by state. Now you know it's happening.
Vance fraud task force --- 9 billion in Minnesota alone. 221 fraudulent hospices in LA shut down in 10 weeks. 30 percent referral action rate now going to 100 percent. Every agency working together instead of separately. Tim Walz has nine months of sovereign immunity left. January 2027 that immunity drops.
Kash Patel --- 14 weeks in. FBI refocused on immigration over counterterrorism. Dozens of senior agents pushed out. Headquarters being decentralized to field offices across the country. 45 current and former officials told the New York Times the agency has been captured by the White House. Patel's supporters say it needed to be dismantled. The answer comes in the years ahead.
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