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Trump Administration Finds 25,000 Migrant Kids ‘Lost’ By Biden Admin
The Trump administration has located roughly 25,000 migrant children who crossed the border alone and were “lost” under the Biden administration, Border Czar Tom Homan revealed Thursday.
During President Joe Biden’s time in office, roughly 320,000 migrant kids went unaccounted for after they were released into the United States to poorly vetted sponsors, according to an inspector general’s report released last year.
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While some of the children were “fine” and hiding with their parents “because they didn’t want to be deported,” many others “were in sex trafficking” and “found in forced labor” conditions, where they were enslaved to “work ungodly hours, not going to school … not being paid, being abused,” Homan said on Fox News Thursday.
“We’ve rescued thousands of children and President Trump is committed, I’m committed that we’re not gonna stop looking for these children ’til we find every single one of them or run down the leads on them,” Homan said.
The former Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief also revealed that 27 of the children had “unfortunately” died.
“So we’re not giving up. This is a major priority for the Trump administration, we’re gonna keep going at it.”
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There were 291,000 migrant children who came to the United States unaccompanied who were never given future court dates as of May 2024, leaving federal immigration authorities with no way to know their locations, the government watchdog found.
An additional 32,000 migrant children who were released into the United States with hearing dates failed to appear in court, according to the report, which tracked cases from October 2018 to September 2023.
Several federal whistleblowers came forward under the Biden administration to expose the faulty vetting system that placed migrant kids into the hands of “sponsors” who they believed were trafficking the children.
One whistleblower testified to a Senate panel in July 2024 that the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services took her off the job and retaliated against her after she alerted supervisors to the fact that children were being placed with people who clearly were not their relatives and that there was evidence of sadistic abuse.
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The vetting procedure amounted to a single phone call to the children 30 days later, but by that point they couldn’t be reached.
Deborah White, another HHS whistleblower, said the agency wasn’t able to investigate red flags, adding that they deliberately kept their heads in the sand.
“Children were not going to their parents. Children 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,” she said, adding that it “will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
“We never saw sponsors face-to-face and fake documents were rampant. When we questioned documents, ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] leadership said, ‘You’re not a fake ID expert, and your job is not to investigate the sponsor. Your job is to reunify the child with the sponsor,’” she added. She said ORR provided its staff with “no training” to identify human trafficking or fraud, and when she tried to provide it, she was blocked.
“Contacting the Guatemalan consulate in regard to fake documents resulted in a reprimand … When I checked on a child’s welfare at another facility I was told, ‘Do not do that again. Once these children leave here … they’re gone and they are no longer your responsibility.’”