The Trump administration recently announced it has located 13,000 migrant children who crossed the border illegally and unaccompanied during the Biden years and then dropped out of sight, a big number but minuscule compared to the estimated total. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking to locate roughly 300,000 more amid growing concerns that many have been exploited, abused, or trafficked. Various numbers and abbreviations have been listed in reports about this situation but without much depth. The word “missing” is often used without context. So where are they?
Migrant Minors Lost in the Shuffle
Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, a first-term Trump appointee, released a report in August 2024 that claimed hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) could not be located, indicating that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “was not able to account” for them because they didn’t show up for their court hearing or weren’t served a Notice to Appear (NTA). According to the report, 32,000 UACs did not show up to court between FY2019-23, and another 291,000 were never issued NTAs as of May 2024, for a total of 323,000 people “missing.”
In fewer than 72 hours, all UACs that Customs and Border Protection or ICE encounter are supposed to go into the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), according to the Homeland Security Act of 2002. But once the children leave ICE’s custody, there appears to be no communication or follow-ups, no coordination between agencies, and little communication involving the whereabouts of the migrant children. And ICE rarely, if ever, notifies ORR when they fail to appear in court.
ORR puts UACs in one of 300 shelters across 27 states and searches for suitable sponsors to provide for them while they wait for a court hearing, which can take up to four years. Sponsors are often family members, but they are also frequently undocumented immigrants. Once the kids are in somebody else’s care, ORR is no longer required to stay in contact with them or the sponsors. It’s an assembly line, one that the Biden administration pushed to move faster because the system was backed up due to remiss open border policies.
As more children arrived, the Biden administration “ramped up demands on staffers to move the children quickly out of shelters and release them to adults. Caseworkers say they rush through vetting sponsors,” said Xavier Becerra, former secretary of Health and Human Services, speaking to Congress in 2021.
The Biden White House seemed unconcerned. In December 2024, responding to a question about whether children were being trafficked, former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation that “we certainly have received reports of children being trafficked, even those as to whom we know where they are.” But, he said, “That is outside the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security. … Remember, we’re dealing with a system that was last reformed in 1996.”
They’re out there, though, and most of them, one hopes, are not being trafficked and abused. Unfortunately, some probably are, hence the Trump administration’s sense of urgency about locating them. Many, however, shouldn’t be too hard to find. Just step into a factory.
An Underground Labor Market
Migrant child labor has exploded in recent years, “a result of a chain of willful ignorance,” said Hannah Dreier, a reporter for The New York Times. “Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help.”
Before writing the article in 2023, Dreier spoke to more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states. Migrants 15 and younger were working in meat plants and “at suppliers for Hyundai and Kia.” Some were “tending giant ovens to make Chewy and Nature Valley granola bars,” while others were in factories packaging Cheerios, Lucky Charms, or Cheetos.
The consensus among the more than 60 caseworkers Dreier interviewed was that “about two-thirds of all unaccompanied migrant children ended up working full time” and “that H.H.S. regularly ignored obvious signs of labor exploitation, a characterization the agency disputed.”
“It’s getting to be a business for some of these sponsors,” a former caseworker in Central Florida told Dreier. The woman had seen “so many children put to work, and found law enforcement officials so unwilling to investigate these cases, that she largely stopped reporting them.”
Well, times have changed.
‘A Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity’
In March 2025, Health and Human Services found a backlog of more than 65,000 reports of UACs and soon “stood up a triage center and modernized outdated software systems to triage and action all reports.” By the end of July, more than 59,000 of those reports had been “analyzed and processed, resulting in more than 4,000 investigative leads, including fraud, human trafficking, and other criminal activity.”
In June, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) set up a worksite enforcement operation targeting employers known to hire illegal aliens and “rescued a child and arrested eight foreign nationals for violations of immigration law.” In another instance, HSI was conducting a welfare check in New Jersey and found three minors living unsupervised at a residence where a sponsor was supposed to be residing. The children hadn’t attended school and “were living in filthy conditions with active mouse infestations. The residence was void of food. An HSI forensic interview of the minors revealed alleged verbal, physical, and sexual abuse of the three minors, along with potential labor exploitation.”
Numerous other cases have unfolded, resulting in arrests and harrowing stories. The days of lax border policies and negligent care of children appear to be over. It seems the Trump administration is on a mission to account for all these children and to ensure their safety.
“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to eradicate human trafficking operations targeting the United States,” said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in a recent press release. “Under the leadership of President Donald Trump, and working together at every level of government, we can win this fight. And we will.”
