Inside Trump’s Push to Find Unaccompanied Migrant Children

Deep within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) headquarters in Washington, D.C., sits the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where newly hired and appointed officials of Donald Trump’s administration have established what looks like an old-fashioned war room. Their battle: track down the locations of unaccompanied minors who illegally immigrated to the U.S. during Joe Biden’s administration, many of whom may have suffered abuse or exploitation. If they can be found, law enforcement officials will check on their conditions and current immigration status.

In the war room, hundreds of volunteers from several federal law enforcement agencies are combing through about 65,000 calls from a federally funded hotline where people reported concerns about unaccompanied children who were placed with sponsors throughout the U.S. Most of the calls came from the unaccompanied minors themselves. A majority of these children came from Guatemala, and were between the ages of 15 and 17 at the time they crossed. 

According to HHS, the backlog of calls was discovered in early February, and the effort to follow up and investigate began a few weeks later, even for immigrants who were minors when they entered the U.S. but have since turned 18 and thus are no longer part of ORR’s system.

The hotline calls now being traced piled up for about three years during the Biden administration, according to Trump administration officials. About half a million children crossed the border alone during those three years, and reports from federal watchdog agencies and whistleblower testimony indicated that some children were placed with improperly vetted sponsors. The most serious examples included children who wound up with sponsors who had ties to MS-13 gang members or human traffickers.

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