More than 22,000 unaccompanied migrant children have been found by a task force established earlier this year after federal officials knocked on about 82,000 doors. This staggering number only represents about one in every 13 children lost during the Biden administration due to carelessness and politicized priorities. If losing these children was a travesty of justice, finding them is an under-appreciated triumph.
The rapid influx of migrant children was a side effect of the Biden administration’s unofficial open-border policy, which encouraged foreign families to send their children to the United States in search of a better life. These children were packed off across thousands of miles, with no better protection than the human smugglers who transported them — and sometimes assaulted them. Additionally, many poor families could not afford the smugglers’ fee, which meant their children were coerced into forced labor until they could pay off the debt.
Between January 2021 and December 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) processed more than 470,000 unaccompanied minors.
When the Trump administration took over in January 2025, it found the office in complete disarray. “There wasn’t very good recordkeeping” under the Biden administration, remarked John Fabbricatore, senior advisor for the ORR. The Trump administration found that approximately 300,000, roughly two-thirds of the unaccompanied minors, were “lost or placed with unvetted sponsors.”
Additionally, the Trump administration found a backlog of more than 65,000 unaddressed “Notifications of Concern,” where someone had notified HHS about their concern for the well-being of an unaccompanied minor after the minor left HHS custody. It seems that the Biden administration simply never bothered to follow up as the reports piled up.
In March, President Trump assembled an interagency task force, led by border czar Tom Homan, to track down the missing children from the ORR Interagency Crime Coordination Cell. This task force is “drawing that data back in, being able to identify addresses, where these children went, who these sponsors actually were,” Fabbricatore explained. “In many cases, that data is, is horrible. What the Biden administration was taking in and putting into our computer systems was not the right information. So now we have to draw that all back in and deeply investigate … where some of these children went.”
The deplorable condition of the data explains why government agents needed to knock on 82,000 doors to find 22,000 children — making their work three to four times harder than it should have been.
Thus far, the Trump administration has made significant progress. By the end of July, they had worked through over 59,000 of the 65,000 reports, and they had located 13,000 of the missing children. By the end of August, the Trump administration had located 22,638 of the lost children.
Fortunately, many of the children were doing just fine and were only deemed “lost” due to the Biden administration’s abysmal record-keeping. Still, the results show that the Biden administration placed far too many children in harm’s way. “Most of them probably were delivered legitimately to either family members or parents,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, on “Washington Watch,” “but thousands of them, probably tens of thousands, were kind of pushed out the door fast so that they gave them to people who pretended to be their fathers and they weren’t.”
So far, the Trump administration has arrested more than 400 sponsors for charges including child endangerment, neglect, labor exploitation, or sexual or physical abuse. Many of these illegitimate sponsors were able to collect more than one child, Krikorian said.
“It’s important that we find these cases where children are being used for labor and sexually trafficked,” declared Fabbricatore. “We’re talking about debt bondage, where children are being made to work off debt, trafficking debt. We’re talking about children [who] were brought into situations and then treated like sexual slaves. You know, where children are in horrific environments, just environments that they should not be in, where the sponsor is a heroin dealer, and that child winds up dying of a heroin overdose.”
Of the 22,000 minors found by the Trump administration, 27 had died by murder, suicide, or drug overdose, according to HHS. In a July 25 press release, the Department for Homeland Security cited at least two instances where teenage girls (14 and 15 years old) were impregnated by their sponsor or a close relative of their sponsor living under the same roof.
These are only the known instances out of the unaccompanied minors the Trump administration has tracked down so far.
It’s difficult enough to imagine the full extent of the human misery present in only a handful of such exploitative situations. Multiplying the results across hundreds, perhaps even thousands or tens of thousands of cases, makes it almost impossible to fathom.
The blame for this human suffering lies partly with the Biden administration. They had charge of the border, so they assumed custody of the unaccompanied minors who came across it. For them to transfer custody to unknown adults without performing due diligence is like a father who would give away his daughter as a bride to any old ne’er-do-well who happened to come along.
At the same time, the Biden administration was engaging in an all-out culture war with conservatives, largely over issues of child welfare, including education, health care, and gender ideology. The administration claimed to care deeply about the welfare of children — while neglecting the children in its own care.
“Under Biden and the HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra … their objective was: get people out of the shelters that HHS had them in. And if that meant they had to cut some corners and not do proper due diligence (basically proper vetting), that was okay, because job one was reducing the number of these people in their custody,” Krikorian criticized. “Their cursory follow up is they do one phone call. … And it was the 300-plus thousand that they just never got any response for, and they kind of shrugged and just moved on.”
In fact, the ORR has identified 1,700 cases involving children placed with unrelated sponsors, where the Biden administration’s records show no evidence of a home study.
The result is hundreds of thousands of children whom the government cannot account for. Many may be in safe and stable homes, but the government that had charge of them cannot say. If a parent kept such poor track of his own children, he would justly lose custody for neglecting his responsibility. Yet the Biden administration presumed to know better than parents. And losing track of the children was entirely unnecessary, as the Trump administration’s efforts to track them down prove.
The Trump administration has only just begun to find these minors. If they continue to find the minors at the August rate of 9,000 per month (300 per day), it will take nearly three years to track down all 300,000 lost minors. According to the rate of the first six months (22,000 minors located from March to August), it would take more than six years to find all the minors — longer than Trump’s term in office. The pace of the ORR task force will likely taper off towards the end of its term, when it has only the most difficult cases left. A small number of lost minors may never be found.
For its part, the Trump administration is determined to avoid the mistake of the Biden administration by not placing unaccompanied minors in unvetted homes. “Children are staying in custody longer, but there’s a reason for that, because we want to ensure that these children remain safe,” Fabbricatore explained. “Under this administration, we are making sure that we know there’s a real familial connection through DNA, and we are not releasing these children unless we have the right information.”
When the history books are written, losing so many unaccompanied minors will likely rank among the rankest moral failures of the Biden administration, just as Trump’s efforts to restore contact will stand as a noble quest to correct that injustice. Alas, it would still be better to have never lost the children in the first place.
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Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
