Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin says that the Trump administration has located 148,000 unaccounted-for children who came into the United States illegally.
“We are taking historic action to protect one of the most vulnerable victims of the Biden Administration’s open border crisis—migrant children,” Mullin wrote on Monday. “We have already located over 148,000 of these children, and we will not stop fighting until every last one is rescued.”
Mullin linked to a post made by President Donald Trump earlier this week showing a graph citing DHS figures that indicated around 12,000 missing children were located between February and July.
As of July, around 330,000 such children remained missing, according to the DHS figures posted by the president.
A report released last year by DHS’s Office of Inspector General found that from fiscal years 2019 to 2023, around 448,000 unaccompanied minors crossed into the United States from Mexico and were transferred from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
However, according to the report, there were significant shortfalls in the data around the children who were released into HHS custody. It noted that in some cases, addresses were “blank, undeliverable, or missing apartment numbers,” while adding that ICE failed to issue around 233,000 notice-to-appear forms to minors that would assign them immigration court dates with the Justice Department.
Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, illegal immigrant children traveling alone are usually handed over to U.S. government care. It also gives some some legal protections when they are residing in the United States.
The law stipulates that the government should provide legal representation for those unaccompanied children who are placed into deportation proceedings. It also allows for them to be placed into the care of a sponsor, such as a relative in the United States, when immigration proceedings continue.
According to the law, the provisions are meant to protect children “who had escaped traumatic situations such as armed conflict, sweatshop labor, human trafficking, forced prostitution, and other life threatening circumstances.”
The defendants were what Blanche called “super sponsors” in a news conference at the time, adding that thousands of these cases are currently under investigation by the Department of Justice and DHS.
“This is one example, one indictment, but it is not unique,” Blanche said. “There are over 15,500 super sponsor cases that we have identified.”
Explaining how some children are transported illegally into the United States, Blanche said that “criminals calling themselves sponsors trafficked these children to the border, usually committing fraud to do so, and oftentimes the children were abused, assaulted, and certainly exploited.”
“In some cases individuals would sponsor multiple children, which required them to lie to government personnel and on government forms, claiming they were close relatives when in fact they were not,” he said.
