According to a shocking new report, the Biden-Harris administration has effectively lost track of more than 320,000 unaccompanied migrant children (UACs). Many of them have likely fallen victim to brutal human trafficking rings that have flourished under Democrats’ open borders agenda.
The figures were released as part of a 14-page report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the agency at the forefront of the border crisis. In total, the report finds, 32,000 UACs were released into the US with hearing dates but then failed to show in court, while 291,000 were never even given a date to appear in immigration court.
UACs who cross the border and are apprehended by border agents are then turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is supposed to connect them with a sponsor, usually a family member already in the country. But as HHS whistleblowers have alleged, in reality children are often handed over to “traffickers, members of transnational criminal organizations, bad actors, bad, bad, bad people.”
Moreover, the report found that just one of the eight Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices that they audited had even “attempted to locate” the missing children.
One shudders to imagine what happens to children—some as young as five years old—who are left without legal protections or oversight. A New York Times exposé published last February reveals in horrifying detail the conditions many of these children are subject to. Many are forced to work long hours in dangerous jobs, violating child labor laws. The Times spoke to 13-year-olds in Virginia who spent their days working in hotels washing sheets and towels instead of going to school, and 12-year-olds working 12-hour days as roofers in Florida and Tennessee.
Other UACs are being handed over by the Biden-Harris administration directly to sex traffickers. According to some estimates, as many as 60 percent of UACs who cross the border end up ensnared in sex trafficking or prostitution. As of 2022, human trafficking at the border had become a billion-dollar industry.
Along with openly encouraging migrants to flood to the border, the Biden-Harris administration’s decision to stop issuing Notices to Appear (NTA) to UACs has directly exacerbated the current crisis.
An NTA is a formal document that serves as both a court summons and a tracking mechanism for illegal aliens that arrive with an asylum claim. The OIG report states it plainly: “by not issuing NTAs to all UCs, [unaccompanied children] ICE limits its chances of having contact with UCs when they are released from HHS’ custody, which reduces opportunities to verify their safety.” It goes on to say that “without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation or forced labor.”
In May 2023, the Biden-Harris administration also moved to stop DNA testing of families at the border, which makes it more difficult to verify that children are related to the adults they are traveling with. As AMAC Newsline reported earlier this year, initial trial runs for DNA testing found that “nearly 30 percent of adults tested were crossing the border with someone else’s children, using doctored identifications.”
This means that even the 320,000 number reported by the OIG report likely grossly underestimates the scale of the crisis facing migrant children. The Biden-Harris administration has effectively hamstrung itself in identifying and stopping bad actors from trafficking children across the border to face unknown fates.
As a result of the Biden-Harris administration’s decisions, hundreds of thousands of children have no opportunity to seek relief and are left to fend for themselves as victims of the very administration that claims to champion human rights. This tragedy also underscores that the border crisis is not just a threat to the security of the American people—it’s also a life-or-death situation for these children who have already endured incredible hardships to reach the United States.
Despite these egregious failures, Harris has continued to tout the Biden-Harris border policy record as a success on the campaign trail. The 2024 Democrat Party platform furthermore claims that, under Biden and Harris, border crossers were treated “humanely and with dignity.”
While the platform contains a vague promise to “punish human smugglers and traffickers,” it unsurprisingly does not mention who exactly is responsible for those smugglers and traffickers making record profits – namely, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Nor does it make any commitments to restore the policies of the Trump administration, like DNA testing at the border, to solve the crisis that the current administration has created.
While Democrats have portrayed themselves as “compassionate” toward migrants and Republicans as “inhumane,” the result of liberal policies is precisely the opposite. For those truly concerned about the safety and security of migrant children, they should hope – and vote – to keep Kamala Harris out of the Oval Office.
Kristen Ziccarelli is a graduate of Christopher Newport University and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
