Trump Admin Locates 148,000 Unaccounted-For Illegal Immigrant Children

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin says that the Trump administration has located 148,000 unaccounted for children who came into the United States illegally.

“We are taking historic action to protect one of the most vulnerable victims of the Biden Administration’s open border crisis—migrant children,” Mullin wrote on Monday. “We have already located over 148,000 of these children, and we will not stop fighting until every last one is rescued.”

Mullin linked to a post made by President Donald Trump earlier this week showing a graph citing DHS figures that indicated around 12,000 missing children were located between February and July.

As of July, around 330,000 such children remained missing, according to the DHS figures posted by the president.

A report released last year by DHS’s Office of Inspector General found that from fiscal years 2019 to 2023, around 448,000 unaccompanied minors crossed into the United States from Mexico and were transferred from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

However, according to the report, there were significant shortfalls in the data around the children who were released into HHS custody. It noted that in some cases, addresses were “blank, undeliverable, or missing apartment numbers,” while adding that ICE failed to issue around 233,000 notice-to-appear forms to minors that would assign them immigration court dates with the Justice Department.

Illegal immigrant children traveling alone are usually entrusted to U.S. government care, and there are various legal protections that apply to them once they’re in the United States and navigating the immigration system, including those afforded by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.

The law says the government should facilitate legal representation for children put into deportation proceedings. With some limited exceptions, it requires that children be placed in the “least restrictive setting possible,” which generally means they can be released to a sponsor, such as a relative in the United States, while their immigration proceedings play out.

The children can apply for a specially protected status if they can’t return to their home country because of abuse or neglect and they can also apply for asylum.

In June, federal prosecutors charged three illegal immigrants with taking part in a conspiracy to smuggle more than a dozen children into the United States, according to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The defendants were what Blanche called “super sponsors” in a news conference at the time, adding that thousands of these cases are currently under investigation by the Department of Justice and DHS.

“This is one example, one indictment, but it is not unique,” Blanche said. “There are over 15,500 super sponsor cases that we have identified.”

Explaining how some children are transported illegally into the United States, Blanche said that “criminals calling themselves sponsors trafficked these children to the border, usually committing fraud to do so, and oftentimes the children were abused, assaulted, and certainly exploited.”

“In some cases individuals would sponsor multiple children, which required them to lie to government personnel and on government forms, claiming they were close relatives when in fact they were not,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.