The Trump administration has made contact with 7,500 unaccompanied minors who were deemed untraceable after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border alone and were released into the United States, according to the White House.
Since the start of the year, the government has reached out to more than 7,500 unaccompanied immigrant children through the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency that detains and places each child with an adult sponsor in the U.S. after they cross the border, the White House told the Washington Examiner.
The Trump administration contacted the children and their sponsors in person at their residence or through a site visit. The 7,500 children were originally lost because of incomplete or inaccurate contact information originally provided at the time of their release to the HHS.
Of the 7,500 contacted, 100 of those children were reached by Department of Homeland Security investigators who found the children through federal investigations into criminal matters, where some of the children were determined to be victims.
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., with the exception of children who were 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.
HHS was named in a March DHS inspector general report as having released 31,000 children to sponsors with incomplete, inaccurate, or otherwise untraceable addresses.
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