DHS struggles to locate migrant kids that went ‘missing’ under Biden

Homeland Security located less than 25% of the illegal immigrant children it tried to find when it visited the adults who were supposed to be taking care of them, the department’s inspector general told Congress last week, underscoring the deep hole the Biden administration left.

Some 300,000 children were flagged as worrying cases and agents identified 50,000 of them to look into immediately. Those were cases where a particular address had been used to sponsor more than one Unaccompanied Alien Child.

Of those 50,000, agents located just 12,000, Inspector General Joseph Cuffari told the House Homeland Oversight and Reform Committee.

About 400 sponsors were arrested by agents, the inspector general said.

Mr. Cuffari said his numbers came from briefings from Homeland Security.

The department on Friday released its own data saying that the Biden administration left it with a backlog of 65,000 tips about problems with UACs that came during the last four years.

The department has now processed 59,000 of those and, as a result, has developed more than 4,000 leads for further investigation.

“By leaving our borders open and even encouraging people to come here illegally, Biden enabled the largest human-trafficking operation in modern history,” Secretary Kristi Noem said. “We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to eradicate human trafficking operations targeting the United States.”

UACs are the toughest cases in the immigration debate, posing major risks of minors being trafficked into what Rep. Clay Higgins, the Louisiana Republican who chaired the hearing, called “some kind of horror.”

He said Mr. Cuffari’s findings were a “double-edged sword,” showing that some young children were abused even as some of the older children who came helped fuel a wave of high-profile migrant crimes that plagued the Biden years.

“The sheer volume of cases enabled the prior administration’s open border policies to simply overwhelm the system,” he said.

Asked specifically whether the Biden administration was able to vet sponsors to weed out criminals or gang members, Mr. Cuffari said, “No, they were prohibited from doing so.”

“Crazy,” said Rep. Nancy Mace, South Carolina Republican.

While the Trump administration has located some of the children, its bigger success has come in drying up the supply of new children coming.

The government recorded nearly 550,000 UAC southern entries from January 2021 to December 2024, averaging nearly 11,500 new children per month.

Over the last five months under President Trump that’s dropped to about 800 per month, and most of those aren’t being held long enough to turn over to HHS.

The result is that HHS had just 2,117 UACs in custody as of Tuesday, down from about 4,700 on Inauguration Day and just a fraction of the 22,557 recorded on April 29, 2021.

Fewer children means HHS has more time and resources to vet sponsors, which experts said leads to better decisions in keeping them out of potential harm.

It’s not just the children who came here alone.

Adults realized that they could get more lenient treatment if they showed up at the border as a family with a child, so they started streaming toward the U.S. with their kids — and sometimes with others’ children too.

Authorities say children were rented or sold to adults who wanted to portray as families.

The first Trump administration, seeking to tamp down on that, imposed DNA testing. The Biden administration curtailed the testing.

Mr. Cuffari said in a new report earlier this month that of 2.7 million migrants who crossed the border claiming to be part of a “family unit” from September 2021 to September 2024, just a 0.01% were tested.

But that small sample of tests showed more than 14% of cases were not biological relationships. There, again, the Trump administration has dramatically reduced the flow.

In September 2023, the worst month on record, more than 103,000 illegal immigrants claiming to be a family unit were caught at the southern border by agents. In June that figure was just 278.

Democrats didn’t defend Mr. Biden’s record on the issue, but said Mr. Trump has his own black eyes.

Rep. Lateefah Simon, California Democrat, said Mr. Trump attempted to cut legal services for juvenile migrants, leaving those as young as toddlers to have to face deportation proceedings in immigration court on their own.

She also said children are kept in “heinous” detention facilities for migrant families.

“We are not this cruel,” she said.

Rep. Summer Lee, Pennsylvania Democrat, attacked Mr. Cuffari as an unreliable witness after he was dinged by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency last year in a report finding he wrongly pursued investigations into staff members.