May 3, 2025 minute read

The Trump administration has a plan to find and ensure the safety of those 400,000 unaccompanied minor children who crossed the border illegally under the Biden administration. The goal is to find the children and make sure they are safe after revelations that the vetting system for the sponsors of these children was not robust, and children could be subjected to exploitation. 

Trump administration officials have been doing house checks and conducting interviews to find the children, starting with those 65,000 cases in which there have been complaints since 2023. So far this year, about 450 cases have been referred to federal law enforcement, the AP reports, sourcing an anonymous HHS official. New sponsorship requirements include making sponsors undergo DNA tests to verify familial relationships, fingerprinting, and income verification.

Since President Donald Trump took office, about 100 unaccompanied minor border crossers have been taken back from their sponsors, who were found to be unfit, and placed in private shelters. Officials are working to find every child, investigate sponsorship applications, specifically for those sponsors who have claimed familial relationships with over a dozen children each, and make sure the children are safe.

When unaccompanied minors cross the border, they are first placed into the hands of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which then places them with Health and Human Services (HHS), specifically the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is tasked to match the minors with sponsors. Per the Flores decision, children are only allowed to be kept in government care for 20 days, at which point they must be transferred to a sponsor or an alternate kind of facility. 

HHS posted on X: “ORR is digging through nearly 65,000 reports of concern about unaccompanied alien children — most ignored, many dismissed — each one a missed chance to protect a child. This isn’t just paperwork. This is a systemic failure of the Biden administration. It is children’s lives put at risk.

“Now, it’s all ORR hands on deck. We’re combing through every report, every detail — because protecting children isn’t optional. It’s our responsibility. The Trump administration WILL NOT look away. The system may have failed before, but not on our watch. We’re rebuilding trust, restoring accountability, and putting children first — exactly where they belong.”

Under the Biden administration, the problem of unaccompanied minor border crossers blossomed as the administration announced that they would all be welcomed and not turned away. This led to a surge of hundreds of thousands of children crossing the border on their own. 

The background checks and vetting systems failed under the sheer volume of children they were dealing with. “Federal officials failed to conduct background or address checks in some cases before placing children with sponsors. In other instances, sponsors provided plainly false identification,” the AP reports.

The Office of the Inspector General in August 2024 revealed that ICE was not able to monitor all those unaccompanied migrant children who were released into the US. The report indicates that over 300,000 of those children were essentially lost in the system.

The FBI told the AP that “protecting children is a critical mission” and that this is why they are doing welfare checks across the country. 

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