Since the Trump administration took over in January, it has spent billions of dollars targeting migrants across the country for dubious reasons. While the White House continues to suggest it’s targeting the “worst of the worst” criminal migrants, it has swept thousands off the streets who had no prior criminal record. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the agencies under its purview have targeted migrant children, oftentimes taking them from their parents as they are being detained or deported.
On Friday, DHS’s Office of Public Affairs announced a new initiative employing Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) 287g program, authorizing local and state agencies to target unaccompanied migrant children that “the Biden administration lost or placed with unvetted sponsors.” The agency continues to use a broadly debunked narrative, claiming as many as 450,000 children were placed with unvetted sponsors and are now “sex slaves or dead.”
Typically, sponsors are family members and, frequently, foster families.
“This new law enforcement partnership, known as the UAC (Unaccompanied Children) Safety Verification Initiative, represents ICE’s commitment to protect vulnerable children from sexual abuse and exploitation through collaboration with 287(g) law enforcement partners,” reads the announcement. “The primary focus of this initiative is to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited.”
However, the system is far from perfect. In 2024, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a report titled “Gaps in Sponsor Screening and Follow-up Raise Safety Concerns for Unaccompanied Children.” The report highlighted persistent problems during a major influx, concerning the screening of sponsors who apply to care for children, alongside issues regarding post-release follow-up.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a program office of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) under HHS, is tasked with the evaluations. The report made various recommendations to improve its “process intended to safely release children to sponsors.” The report indicated that ACF “concurred” with the following recommendations.
- Implement additional safeguards to ensure that all safety checks are conducted and documented, as required, prior to approving the release of a child to their sponsor
- Develop a reference guide to help case managers better evaluate sponsors’ identity
- Take additional steps to ensure that mandatory home studies are conducted when required
- Provide additional guidance for case managers on when to consider recommending discretionary home studies
- Ensure that sponsors’ records in the UC Portal accurately capture sponsorship history and information obtained after children’s release regarding sponsors’ suitability
- Develop an effective monitoring mechanism to identify children who do not receive timely follow-up calls after their release to sponsors
The analysis signals just how arduous the process can be during a major influx of migrant children seen in recent years. For example, the OIG’s report found that despite HHS being required to make follow-up calls 30 to 37 days after placement for every child and their sponsor, in many cases where the agency didn’t follow up with the children, it took an average of 122 days for a caseworker to reach out.
Even so, there is no basis for the idea that the Biden administration “lost or placed with unvetted sponsors” 450,000 children – a point Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, pointed out on X (formerly Twitter).
“The suggestion that ‘over 450,000 children’ were placed with sponsors who were child predators/criminals is a bald-faced lie. Did it happen in some cases, just as it happened under Trump 1.0 and under Obama, given the challenges of screening? Yes. Was it 450,000? Absolutely not.”
Reichlin-Melnick drilled down a little further.
“The law requires that unaccompanied children be sent from the border to shelters within 72 hours, but shelters have limited capacity, so there is pressure to release [them] to sponsors. Both Dem and GOP admins have struggled with how to balance this pressure with adequate vetting.”
Earlier this year, reports began to surface of ICE “checking on” migrant children released to sponsors, exposing them to their parents, who are often immigrants. Agents would then detain the parents, separate the families, and, in many cases, deport them separately. Months later, the White House moved to detain migrant children indefinitely, a direct violation of the Flores Settlement Agreement, which dictates how migrant children should be treated.
Family separations have not become the flash point they once were. Still, they are certainly happening as many families have been separated and deported separately, leaving parents to wonder where their children might be and leading to Latin American leaders, like Nicolas Maduro, to declare that the United States is “kidnapping” children. What started as targeting entire migrant families and deporting them together has become a new family separation policy.
The new DHS policy only promises to exacerbate the issue.
“We’ve jump-started our efforts to rescue children who were victims of sex and labor trafficking by working with our state and local law enforcement partners to locate these children,” said Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “President Trump and Secretary Noem are laser-focused on protecting children and will continue to work with federal, state, and local law enforcement to reunite children with their families.”
It should be noted that after the 2024 OIG report, the Biden administration began the process of improving the system through “training, monitoring, technology, and evaluation.”
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