Locate the kids and save the ones who are being abused
By Andrew R. Arthur on November 8, 2024
Then-candidate Joe Biden attacked then-President Donald Trump on the 2020 campaign trail for using “family separation as a weapon against desperate mothers, fathers, and children seeking safety and a better life”, and one of his first acts as president was to set up a “Family Reunification Task Force”. During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump highlighted the fact that the federal government has “lost” hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied alien children (UACs) released into the United States. The 47th president should take a page from his successor and predecessor and set up a “Missing Migrant Children Task Force” to locate lost children and save them from abuse. Justice, and the children themselves, deserve nothing less.
“Family Separation”. On April 6, 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “Zero-Tolerance Policy for Criminal Illegal Entry”, under which all aliens who entered illegally were to be prosecuted for “improper entry” under section 275(a) of the INA.
Those aliens subject to zero-tolerance were passed from DHS to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service (in DOJ) for prosecution.
Because children aren’t subject to prosecution for illegal entry — and are not detained in DOJ custody — however, the previously accompanied children in those FMUs became UACs and were sent to shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in accordance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA), which limits their detention in DHS custody.
Due to public outcry over (and poor implementation of) that policy, President Trump ended it in an executive order (EO) captioned “Affording Congress an Opportunity To Address Family Separation” on June 20, 2018.
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported in February 2021 that between 5,300 and 5,500 children in family units were separated under the Trump administration (one of its calculations pinpoints the number as 5,349 between March 2017 and November 30, 2020).
To say that “family separation” was a political issue in the 2020 campaign would be an understatement, and in fact it was the only one of his proposed immigration policies that Joe Biden highlighted on the stump.
As noted at the outset, Biden created a task force to reunite those separated children, and it apparently fulfilled that task by flying thousands of their parents and other shirt-tail family members to the United States. There has never been a formal accounting of the actual number of aliens who have entered or reentered under this administrative pathway, however.
“Lost Children”. Trump was also blamed for “lost children”, UACs who had been released from HHS custody under the TVPRA and whom the department was not subsequently able to contact. Let me explain.
The TVPRA directs DHS to transfer all unaccompanied children who are from “non-contiguous countries” (i.e., every country other than Mexico and Canada) whom it encounters unaccompanied by a parent or guardian to HHS and directs HHS to place nearly all of those non-contiguous UACs with “sponsors” in the United States.
Once that placement occurs, the TVPRA is silent with respect to any subsequent U.S. government responsibility toward those children. Because they are subject to removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), DHS should place them into removal proceedings, but HHS has no authority over those children post-release.
Nonetheless, HHS attempts by policy to place a “Safety and Well-Being Follow Up Call” to both the released child and the sponsor within 30 days of release. In many cases, HHS is unable to reach one or both.
In May 2018, the Washington Post ran an article headlined “The U.S. lost track of 1,475 immigrant children last year. Here’s why people are outraged now”, which included the following:
During a Senate committee hearing late last month, Steven Wagner, an official with HHS, testified that the federal agency had lost track of 1,475 children who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on their own (that is, unaccompanied by adults) and subsequently were placed with adult sponsors in the United States.
The lost children in question were ones that HHS had been unable to contact, and as I noted that June, “thereafter, the story took on a life of its own”, particularly in the context of the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy described above:
For example, an opinion piece in USA Today headlined “The feds lost — yes, lost — 1,475 migrant children” that begins: “Before announcing a plan to separate more children from families, shouldn’t there be a plan to adequately protect the children?” Thus, the purported “loss” of 1,475 alien minors became conflated with a Trump administration policy to enforce the immigration laws, always a hot topic for certain quarters of the mainstream media.
Contrast that media response that to news in April 2023 that HHS has lost track of 56 times as many children — approximately 83,000 — under the Biden-Harris administration.
That disclosure came just months after a blistering HHS Inspector General’s (IG’s) report that found, “field guidance issued from March 2021 through June 2021 removed basic safety measures from the sponsor screening process in an effort to expedite children’s release from care”.
Quickly moving children out of HHS care to sponsors has been a key goal of the Biden administration. In FY 2020, under the Trump administration, UACs spent on average 102 days in HHS custody while that department found and vetted a suitable sponsor in the United States. By FY 2022, Biden’s HHS had pared that down to 30 days, and at present the average is 34 days of HHS housing of UACs prior to placement.
Perhaps the department is able to safely place children in that much-truncated period, but the IG’s report suggests that critical corners have been cut in a race to release those kids.
A few major news outlets started finally paying attention to post-Trump UAC issues, with the New York Times running an expose on the fate of many of the children released by HHS under the Biden-Harris administration headlined “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.”
And yet, for most in the media, the whole episode was either ignored or greeted with yawns. When candidate Trump raised the issue of “88,000 missing children” during a town hall in Phoenix, Ariz., last summer, the Washington Post fact-checker gave him “Three Pinocchios”, explaining:
HHS’s ability to reach children or their sponsors isn’t any better under Biden than it was under Trump. The main difference is that the numbers coming across the border are so much higher under Biden, so the number of children who can’t be reached is almost three times as large.
Still, the Post estimated that the number of “missing” children under Biden-Harris was then actually closer to 135,000.
In August, Trump revised his own estimate of missing children up to 325,000, well after the Center submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to HHS asking for: “The zip code for each sponsor associated with each unaccompanied alien child (UAC) that the agency could not reach after its ‘safety and wellbeing call’, since January 1, 2021”.
As the Center explained in September:
On April 10, 2024, HHS produced a spreadsheet that it claimed satisfied the Center’s FOIA request. However, instead of the spreadsheet containing at least 85,000 zip codes, reflecting the zip code “associated with each [UAC] that the agency could not reach after its ‘safety and wellbeing call,’” the spreadsheet only included 8,650 zip codes (each distinct), with each zip code reflecting anywhere from one to thousands of missing UACs, making it impossible to identify any “trends regarding the frequency and geographic locations” of the missing UAC, and the total number thereof.
Needless to say, that information wasn’t very helpful.
Deterrence vs. Inaction. I will note that the Obama administration went to great lengths to deter parents and guardians from paying smugglers to bring unaccompanied alien children to the United States, launching a massive PR program throughout Central America and dispatching then-Vice President Joe Biden to Guatemala City in June 2014 to warn about the dangers of the illegal trip here.
Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration failed to do anything to deter UACs from entering the United States, even as the number of children coming illegally soared from fewer than 5,700 in January 2021 to more than 18,600 that July. All told, nearly 150,000 UACs were apprehended by Border Patrol at the Southwest border in FY 2022, more than 130,000 in FY 2023, and almost 100,000 more in FY 2024.
Yes, as the Washington Post noted, there are more “lost children” under Biden-Harris than there were under Trump because more have entered under the current administration, but the UAC surge over the past four years was largely an executive-branch policy choice, not the result of external factors.
Legislative Action and Immediate Needs. In June 2014, President Obama called on Congress to plug the “non-contiguous UAC” loophole in the TVPRA, but Congress failed to act. Facts on the ground have shown that whatever good proponents of that legislation thought they were doing has been outweighed by the harm the TVPRA has inflicted on children (and border security) in practice.
Regardless of any action Congress may take with respect to alien kids, it is incumbent on the incoming administration to set up a task force to locate any migrant child whose whereabouts are not otherwise known to the U.S. government and to save the ones who are being neglected or abused. If not for the sake of justice, then for the sake of the children.
