The Trump administration has tracked down 13,000 unaccompanied migrant children, but that’s a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of children the Biden White House reportedly lost track of or placed with unvetted sponsors.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security continues to tackle the backlog of uninvestigated cases, and in some cases, serious allegations that unaccompanied minors were placed with sponsors who were actually smugglers and sex traffickers, according to a news release.
Many others were not related to the children or poorly vetted. Some have even been arrested for sexually abusing children in their care, including a case in Florida involving Wilson Manfredo Lopez-Carillo. The 37-year-old illegal was arrested by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office on May 22 and charged with three counts of sexual assault on a minor.
“The evil of human trafficking cannot be overstated. It’s modern-day slavery,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. “By leaving our borders open and even encouraging people to come here illegally, Biden enabled the largest human-trafficking operation in modern history.”
President Joe Biden’s reckless unaccompanied alien children program resulted in officials “losing track” of nearly 300,000 children, according to a bombshell report released in March by the DHS Office of Inspector General, a nonpartisan watchdog.
In March, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services uncovered a backlog of more than 65,000 reports related to unaccompanied minors. The Biden administration established a hotline that had one employee and failed to answer 65,000 calls, rangomg from minor complaints to serious allegations of abuse.
In response, HHS created a triage center and updated software systems to triage and action all reports. DHS reported as of July 24, more than 59,000 of the backlogged reports have been analyzed and processed, resulting in more than 4,000 investigative leads, including fraud, human trafficking and other criminal activity.
DHS continues to take the lead on rescuing children and following up on allegations of abuse, including:
- On June 16, a HSI worksite investigation identified and rescued a child and arrested eight foreign nationals for violations of immigration law. The child was working among adults and not enrolled in school since entering the U.S.
- On May 28, HSI New York special agents arrested an adult male subject from Ecuador at his residence for violations relating to the sexual exploitation of a child. He allegedly facilitated the illegal entry of a 15-year-old who was pregnant with the adult male’s child and had been in a relationship with him in Ecuador since the age of thirteen. His mother sponsored her after her illegal entry.
- On May 12, HSI Austin conducted a welfare check with the assistance of the FBI. Agents identified a pregnant 14-year-old female residing with an unrelated adult male sponsor, later determined to be the biological father of the unborn child.
- On May 1, HSI Newark conducted a welfare check in East Orange, NJ. Three minors, ages 17, 16, and 15, were found living at a filthy, mouse-infested home with no food and were not attending school.
- On June 24, HSI Nashville uncovered two victims of labor trafficking. The minor and her 18-year-old brother were forced to work to pay off their smuggling fees and to pay the sponsor’s household expenses.
Some officials have stated more than 500,000 children crossed the southern border and entered the UAC program. Numerous lawmakers and whistleblowers have sounded the alarm for months—even years—over concerns that UAC children were not being placed in safe homes.
During a July 16 hearing held by the House Committee on Homeland Security, several witnesses delivered startling testimony over the abuses they encountered and the elaborate network of non-governmental organizations that received billions of taxpayer dollars yet failed to keep track of unaccompanied minors.
In March, the DHS OIG confirmed Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley’s, R-Iowa, numerous concerns about abuse in the UAC program. Grassley has been fighting for protections for unaccompanied minors for a decade.
“DHS OIG’s report validated all of Grassley’s findings,” according to a news release from Grassley. “Notably, the report exposed how DHS was prevented from receiving key HHS information to follow up on potential criminal sponsors.”
Grassley broke through this inter-agency firewall last year by submitting a law enforcement referral to DHS containing HHS information provided to Grassley by legally protected whistleblowers. DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations followed up on 102 investigative targets Grassley identified.
Cherokee Federal, a business arm of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is among 23 entities that are the focus of a child-trafficking inquiry conducted by Grassley.
Cherokee Federal received a contract worth $706 million to care for unaccompanied children who are illegal immigrants and run a Pomona, California, processing site.
In July 2024, a whistleblower told members of the U.S. Senate that unaccompanied minors were being released to child traffickers and accused Cherokee Federal of facilitating those actions, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs reported in April 2025.
“Children continue to be trafficked into America, and we are paying for it,” said Deborah White, a career worker at the federal General Services Administration who transferred in May 2021 to the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, during a July 9, 2024, roundtable with U.S. senators. “Please understand, this is taxpayer-funded child slavery, sanctioned by our government and brought to you by NGOs like Cherokee Federal.”
Steven Bilby, president of Cherokee Federal, issued a statement to Tulsa’s CBS-affiliate News on 6 calling the testimony “outrageously false.”
In a letter sent on March 10, 2025, a year after his initial letter, Grassley warned officials with Cherokee Federal that as “a recipient of taxpayer money, your organization has an obligation to turn over responsive information and the failure to do so is obstruction.”
Some key findings of the recent DHS OIG report include:
- HHS failed to provide DHS complete sponsor addresses for over 31,000 unaccompanied migrant children. Without sponsor addresses, law enforcement is unable to keep track of migrant children.
- DHS law enforcement officers additionally estimated that addresses collected by HHS were incorrect 80 percent of the time.
- DHS officers failed to enroll over 233,000 migrant children who crossed the border since January 2021 in immigration proceedings, increasing their risk of trafficking and exploitation. Of those enrolled, more than 43,000 children failed to appear.
- HHS failed to provide updated sponsor information to DHS when sponsors changed addresses, further hindering DHS’s ability to find children.
- HHS placed migrant children with potentially dangerous sponsors. In Fiscal Years 2023 and 2024, HHS released more than 24,100 migrant children to unrelated sponsors or distant relatives. Law enforcement officers note these children are at the highest risk for trafficking.
- HHS frequently placed migrant children in rundown apartment complexes and dilapidated motels with barred windows, appliances stacked on patios and apartments with no doors or kitchens.
- Multiple DHS offices confirmed HHS released children to incomplete or commercial addresses, and ICE officials at one field office noted the Biden HHS released 34 children to two addresses that didn’t exist.
