The Trump administration has located thousands of unaccompanied migrant minors who were deemed untraceable, with a significant majority being identified through a door-knocking campaign carried out by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
ORR is the Department of Health and Human Services office responsible for detaining unaccompanied migrant children after they cross the border and placing them with adult sponsors in the United States. But senior White House officials tell the Washington Examiner that, since January, the office has also “located, contacted, and updated case information” for 7,500 unaccompanied migrant children who were considered “lost” because of incomplete or inaccurate contact information originally provided at the time of their release to HHS.
Furthermore, Department of Homeland Security investigators have located an additional 100 lost children while pursuing separate federal investigations.
ORR has also resolved roughly two-thirds of a separate backlog of safety complaints filed with the Biden administration regarding the safety of unaccompanied minors. In some cases, those have led to the discovery of child labor and sexual abuse cases.
White House officials estimate that ORR’s efforts in total have properly identified and located more than 10,000 unaccompanied children whom the previous administration had misidentified.
The contacts represent a significant step forward for Trump, who claimed in July that 300,000 children who came over the border alone were “missing” and that 10,000 children had been found. However, Trump’s descriptions have conflated two different immigrant child populations.
By the end of the Biden administration, more than 500,000 children had crossed the border without a parent, a staggering figure that far outpaced any previous administration. Roughly 90% of all children were released to adults within the U.S., except for children from Canadian, Mexican, and some Central American countries.
Trump said as a candidate in 2024 that then-President Joe Biden had lost 88,000 children, a reference to a 2023 New York Times report that more than 85,000 children released in the first two years of the Biden administration were unable to be contacted when the HHS attempted to follow-up with the children and their sponsors. That figure is accurate.
Vice President JD Vance separately claimed during a 2024 debate that 320,000 children had been lost after crossing the border. This figure referred to a different subset of immigrant children: those who were let into the U.S. between 2019 and 2023 and not yet given a date by federal authorities to appear in immigration court, which effectively rendered them unaccounted for, but not because of inadequate paperwork.
In a March DHS inspector general report, HHS was named as having released 31,000 children to sponsors with incomplete, inaccurate, or otherwise untraceable addresses.
