The Department of Homeland Security located less than 25% of the illegal immigrant children it tried to find when it visited the adults who were supposed to be taking care of them, the department’s inspector general told Congress last week, underscoring the deep hole the Biden administration left.
Some 300,000 children were flagged as worrying cases, and agents identified 50,000 of them for immediate investigation. In those cases, a particular address had been used to sponsor more than one unaccompanied alien child.
Of those 50,000, agents located just 12,000, Inspector General Joseph Cuffari told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Agents arrested about 400 sponsors, the inspector general said.
Mr. Cuffari said his numbers came from Homeland Security Department briefings.
On Friday, the department released data showing that the Biden administration had left a backlog of 65,000 tips about problems with unaccompanied alien children during the previous four years.
The department has now processed 59,000 of those and, as a result, has developed more than 4,000 leads for further investigation.
“By leaving our borders open and even encouraging people to come here illegally, Biden enabled the largest human trafficking operation in modern history,” Secretary Kristi Noem said. “We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to eradicate human trafficking operations targeting the United States.”
Unaccompanied alien children are the toughest cases in the immigration debate. These minors are at risk of being trafficked into what Rep. Clay Higgins, the Louisiana Republican who chaired the hearing, called “some kind of horror.”
He said Mr. Cuffari’s findings were a “double-edged sword,” showing that some young children were abused while some of the older children helped fuel a wave of high-profile migrant crimes that plagued the Biden years.
“The sheer volume of cases enabled the prior administration’s open border policies to simply overwhelm the system,” he said.
Asked specifically whether the Biden administration was able to vet sponsors to weed out criminals or gang members, Mr. Cuffari said, “No, they were prohibited from doing so.”
“Crazy,” said Rep. Nancy Mace, South Carolina Republican.
Although the Trump administration has located some of the children, its bigger success is lowering the number of arrivals of unaccompanied children.
The government recorded nearly 550,000 southern entries of unaccompanied alien children from January 2021 to December 2024, averaging nearly 11,500 monthly.
Over the past five months under President Trump, that number has dropped to about 800 monthly, and most of the children aren’t held long enough to be turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services.
As of Tuesday, HHS had 2,117 unaccompanied alien children in custody, down from about 4,700 on Inauguration Day and just a fraction of the 22,557 recorded on April 29, 2021.
Fewer children means HHS has more time and resources to vet sponsors, which experts said leads to better decisions in keeping them out of potential harm.
It was not just the children who arrived alone.
Adults realized that they could get more lenient treatment if they showed up at the border as a family with a child, so they started streaming toward the U.S. with their children — and sometimes with others’ children.
Authorities say children were rented or sold to adults who wanted to portray themselves as families.
The first Trump administration, seeking to tamp down on such abuse of the system, imposed DNA testing. The Biden administration curtailed the testing.
In a report earlier this month, Mr. Cuffari said that of the 2.7 million migrants who crossed the border claiming to be part of a “family unit” from September 2021 to September 2024, just 0.01% were tested.
That small sample showed that more than 14% of cases did not have biological relationships. Again, the Trump administration has dramatically reduced the flow.
In September 2023, the worst month on record, more than 103,000 illegal immigrants claiming to be family units were caught by agents at the southern border. In June, that figure was just 278.
Democrats didn’t defend Mr. Biden’s record on the issue but said Mr. Trump had his own deficiencies.
Rep. Lateefah Simon, California Democrat, said Mr. Trump attempted to cut legal services for juvenile migrants, leaving those as young as toddlers to have to face deportation proceedings in immigration court on their own.
She also said children are kept in “heinous” detention facilities for migrant families.
“We are not this cruel,” she said.
Rep. Summer Lee, Pennsylvania Democrat, attacked Mr. Cuffari as an unreliable witness because the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency dinged him last year in a report finding he wrongly pursued investigations into staff members.
“We have a corrupt and incompetent inspector general at DHS,” she said.