The federal government is unable to track hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who have crossed over the U.S.-Mexico border since 2019, according to a new report from U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General Joseph Cuffari.
The report raises concerns about the potential for wide spread human trafficking and other forms of abuse involving the hundreds of thousands of missing or unaccounted for children.
Republicans in Congress pinned blame for the lost children squarely on the Biden-Harris Administration, which has overseen unprecedented levels of illegal entries over the southern border since Jan. 2021.
According to DHS encounter data, the number of unaccompanied children crossing into the U.S. increased exponentially beginning in 2021 and has remained far higher than previous years ever since.
“The Biden-Harris administration is releasing hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied alien children without any way to track their whereabouts or status. The administration is simply enabling the cartels and human traffickers,” said the House Homeland Security Committee on X.
The report revealed that, between 2019 and 2023, 448,820 unaccompanied minors were transferred to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), before losing track of hundreds of thousands of them.
According to the report, 32,000 children failed to show up for their scheduled court appearances, meaning that their whereabouts are completely unknown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the HHS, or any other government agency.
“Based on our audit work and according to ICE officials, UCs who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” said the report.
Typically, the court date is the only opportunity for ICE to contact unaccompanied minors again and verify their well-being.
In addition to the children who missed their court dates, Cuffari revealed that ICE failed to issue court dates to 291,000 children, more than half the total number of children encountered from 2019 to 2023.
The children without court dates face essentially the same risks as those who skipped their dates because authorities cannot use their immigration hearings to verify the children’s well-being.
Cuffari accused ICE of failing to verify whether the children who passed through their care are being exploited through their failure to issue court dates.
According to a 2023 law, officials are required to check the address information for children who miss their court dates in order to verify that they have not become victims of human traffickers.
The investigation found that, in most cases, ICE officials simply ignored this requirement.
Investigators spoke with officials from ten field offices and found that only one office had officials who actually checked on the status of unaccompanied minors who failed to attend their immigration hearings.
Cuffari blamed some of ICE’s failures on the organization’s communication methods, which he found were often inadequate for sharing information about unaccompanied minors both internally between branches of ICE and externally with HHS.
“When ICE does not share information with HHS regarding UCs who did not appear for hearings, HHS personnel are unable to determine if UCs need wellness checks or post release services for individuals at an increased risk of being trafficked. Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” said the report.
The report offered two major recommendations: first, that ICE should implement an automated system of information sharing for documents related to unaccompanied children, and second, that ICE develop a formal process to identify children who fail to appear for their immigration hearings.
ICE issued a statement concurring with the report’s recommendations and vowing to work towards implementing the suggested changes.
The report comes after an HHS whistleblower testified that, under the new Biden-era border policies, the HHS does little to verify the safety of homes in which children are placed, leaving them open to be used for forced labor or child sex trafficking.
“Make no mistake: Children were not going to their parents. They were being trafficked with billions of taxpayer dollars by a contractor failing to vet sponsors and process children safely—with government officials complicit in it,” said whistleblower Deborah White.
She even accused the Biden-Harris administration of facilitating “taxpayer-funded child slavery.”
“All of this has resulted in an epidemic of missing children under Harris-Biden—where the most vulnerable among us are left to suffer the inhumanity of their open borders obsession,” said the Trump campaign in response to the report’s findings.
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