Where Are the Children?

There are hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children who cross illegally into the United States. According to an article posted by Virginia Allen at The Daily Signal, there was an average of “11,132 unaccompanied children” who were “encountered at the southern border monthly under the Biden administration.” 

Allen wrote that there was a “record high of 18,716” of unaccompanied children “under the administration of then-President Joe Biden in March 2021 – compared to 631 unaccompanied alien children encountered by Border Patrol in March 2025 under the Trump administration.

Allen quoted Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, as saying that “March [2025] was the lowest number of unaccompanied children arriving at our southern border in recorded history.” One problem with unaccompanied children coming across the border is that some of them get lost. This is how Allen explained the problem.

Following extensive reporting and a number of congressional hearings on missing migrant children during the Biden administration, DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari conducted an audit “to determine [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s] ability to monitor the location and status of [unaccompanied alien children] once released or transferred from DHS and HHS’ custody.”

In a report released in March, the Inspector General’s Office found that the location of thousands of illegal alien children remains unknown, and ICE cannot monitor the status of those children after they are released from government custody.

From the start of fiscal year 2019 to 2023, “ICE transferred more than 448,000 [unaccompanied alien children] to HHS,” according to the report. Most of those minors were then transferred to sponsors, but “more than 31,000 of the 448,000 children’s release addresses were blank, undeliverable, or missing apartment numbers.”

Children have long been some of the greatest victims of cartel smuggling schemes at the U.S. southern border with Mexico.

In 2008, Congress voted to pass the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. The bipartisan piece of legislation contained a glaring loophole that the criminal cartels have exploited.

Under the bill, unaccompanied migrant children from noncontinuous nations (i.e., any countries other than Mexico and Canada) are to be screened to determine if they are trafficking victims and then released into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which in turn releases the child to a sponsor in the U.S., making it much harder to find a child if they do not appear for their asylum hearing.

A sponsor can be a distant relative the child has never met, or not related at all. Because the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection law allows for the release of unaccompanied minors into the U.S. who are not from Mexico or Canada, the cartels were given the opportunity to entice minors to cross the border, knowing they would not be turned away.

According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 81% of unaccompanied alien children are between the ages of 13 and 18. The average age of a trafficking victim in the U.S. is between 12 and 15, according to Anti-Trafficking International.

The Flores Settlement Agreement is another policy border security experts have warned is being exploited to the benefit of the cartels.

The Flores Settlement Agreement was first implemented in the 1990s and prohibits the detention of a minor for more than 20 days. Because processing an illegal alien often takes longer than 20 days, and seeing an immigration court judge takes even longer, the unaccompanied minors are often released rapidly, again creating more incentive for the cartels to exploit minors.