Why Are 300,000 Migrant Children Lost?

Families, communities, states, and nations are stronger when adults seek the safety of all children. This effort includes pressuring government agencies to care properly for children who enter the United States unaccompanied by parents.

Bradley Devlin at The Daily Signal shared results from a recent report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General says that “the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of approximately 300,000 migrant children.” 

From fiscal year 2019 through fiscal 2023, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred nearly 450,000 unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. (Fiscal 2019 began Oct. 1, 2018, and ended Sept. 30, 2019, when Donald Trump was president; fiscal 2023 began Oct. 1, 2022, and ended Sept. 30, 2023, with Biden as president.)

While Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, remains responsible for managing the child migrants’ immigration cases through the system, the Office of Refugee Resettlement is tasked with the children’s care and custody while their cases are litigated.

“However, ICE was not able to account for the location of all UCs [unaccompanied children] who were released by HHS [Health and Human Services] and did not appear as scheduled in immigration court,” the inspector general’s report says.

In the same period of fiscal 2019 to 2023, more than 32,000 of the unaccompanied children failed to appear in court after receiving a Notice to Appear.

“ICE did not always inform HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) when UCs failed to appear in immigration court after release from HHS’ custody,” the inspector general’s report says. “ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers at only one of the eight field offices we visited stated they attempted to locate the UCs.”

But those 32,000 failures to appear in court amounted to just the tip of the iceberg. The report also found that “as of May 2024, ICE had not served NTAs [Notices to Appear] on more than 291,000” unaccompanied children.

Although updated guidance attempted to manage the surge of illegal immigrants, the inspector general’s office in the Department of Homeland Security says that, despite “site visits at four ICE locations,” it “observed no change in local procedures based on the guidance.”

“At one location we visited, 34,823 (84%) of 41,638 UCs in the local area had not been served NTAs to initiate immigration proceedings,” the report adds.

Republican senators and representatives were quick to jump on the Biden-Harris administration for not protecting the unaccompanied children.

The Homeland Security Act of 2021, the report notes, defines unaccompanied children “as minors who have no lawful immigration status in the United States, have not attained 18 years of age, and have no parent or legal guardian in the country available to provide care and physical custody.”

These children are “at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor” because of the Biden-Harris administration’s failures in enforcing immigration law, the inspector general’s report says.

According to Devlin, the Inspector General’s report is not the only one sharing some of the same results. The New York Times published a report in February 2023 that was “based on its investigation into the lives of unaccompanied migrant children who recently came to the United States.” Devlin continued with the Times report: “Human trafficking and sexual abuse involves migrant children more often than one might think, and those cases are more extreme than the more commonplace labor exploitation that migrant children may undergo in the United States.”

From 15-year-olds packaging cereal in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to 12-year-old construction workers and roofers in Florida and Texas, to slaughterhouses in Delaware, Mississippi, and North Carolina, the Times reported, “migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country.”

Some children made it as far west as Los Angeles, where they sew “Made in America” tags on T-shirts. Others go even further, across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii, where they harvest coffee.

“This shadow workforce extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century,” the Times reported. “Unaccompanied minors have had their legs torn off in factories and their spines shattered on construction sites, but most of these injuries go uncounted.”

The pattern of exploitation sometimes turns deadly. In Brooklyn, a 14-year-old was struck and killed by a car while delivering food on his bike. In Atlanta, a 16-year-old was crushed under a tractor while on the job. In Alabama, a 15-year-old died after tumbling off a roof.

Devlin explained that the chaos in the immigration system in America “is the result of decades of liberal border policies paired with confused, convoluted enforcement procedures. He then brought information from Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, into the discussion. Arthur told The Daily Signal that “although children long have been smuggled into the United States, the problems in dealing with unaccompanied alien children became much more difficult after the so-called Flores Settlement in 1997.”

The agreement put narrow parameters on how the old Immigration and Naturalization Service – dissolved in 2003 as part of the launch of the Department of Homeland Security – could process migrant children. Matters got only more complicated when, during passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 creating DHS, Democrats demanded that the new agency send unaccompanied children directly to the HHS Office of Refuge Resettlement, Arthur said.

“Don’t ask me why they picked ORR,” Arthur said of Democratic lawmakers and the office in HHS. “I literally have no idea. They didn’t detain anybody before this point, didn’t have any experience, and they’ve never really been good at it.”

Arthur explained that the “radical changes” in the immigration system of America, but “the country didn’t begin to see major increases in unaccompanied alien children crossing the border until 2008 and the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.” This legislation was passed by a Democrat-run Congress and signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush. Section 235 of this legislation “requires DHS to send every unaccompanied alien child that it comes in contact with to the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement ‘within 72 hours,’ Arthur said. Arthur also explained that the legislation did “something else weird.”

It separates out UACs into two separate groups. The first, if they’re from contiguous countries, Canada and Mexico, DHS can send them back if they haven’t been trafficked and they don’t have any persecution claims. But if they’re from any other country, then those kids have to be sent to HHS, and HHS has to then place them with sponsors in the United States.

The result, he said, was a massive increase in unaccompanied children from noncontiguous countries, especially the so-called Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Vice President Joe Biden was sent to Guatemala City in 2014 “to work with regional governments to slow the flow of migrant children to the United States.” As a result, “the number of unaccompanied children showing up on the southern border” was reduced. However, the number increased during the Trump-Pence administration in 2019.

To address this problem and to ensure that unaccompanied migrant children weren’t sent to unsafe situations, Arthur told The Daily Signal, “HHS was taking 102 days by 2020 to vet the sponsors.”

The goal, he said, was “to let parents know, look, … we’re going to really look at you. And if you’re here illegally, we may put you into proceedings if you have your kids smuggled here.”

Although the problems associated with migrant children crossing the border long predate the Biden-Harris administration, Arthur submits that they became much worse on Biden’s watch.

When Biden became president on Jan. 21, 2021, “all of those safeguards that Trump had put on the system to protect those kids were gone,” Arthur said.

The immigration system “doesn’t work at this scale,” he said. “They’ve brought so many people into the United States that the very people who say the immigration system is broken are the ones breaking the immigration system.”

The problems involving unaccompanied migrant children will not slow or stop if Kamala Harris is elected POTUS. Her policies will be the same as Biden’s but on steroids. If Americans genuinely believe in protecting these children, we must elect a POTUS who will take action to stop them from coming to the United States in such numbers and members of Congress who will put safeguards in place to protect the ones who do come. Adults must act to protect these children if we honestly believe in strengthening families, communities, states, and nations.