Not quite sure how this one slipped under the radar.
Fox News host Harris Faulkner reported on Friday that the Trump administration has already located between 75,000 and 80,000 of the missing 300,000 migrant children believed to have been trafficked at the southern border.
This story has not been confirmed by administration officials. However, if true, it is a bombshell.
Faulkner told viewers that the second wave of Trump border czar Tom Homan’s mass deportation efforts will focus on finding the missing migrant children. She said:
That number has already started to come down from 300,000. So, they’ve found about 75,000 to 80,000 of those kids already. If they can get the list of these guys – four full days in office for Trump – if they can get the list of where some of those kids have been, and they’ve been identifying it since the election, … what in the world was Biden’s administration doing? What was Secretary of Homeland [Security] Mayorkas doing when he said to the committees on Capitol Hill ‘We don’t know where those kids are. I’ll look into it’?No, dude, you obviously had a better way to find them and you didn’t do your job. I can’t believe they impeached him and didn’t remove him.
Perhaps former President Joe Biden should have added one more person to his preemptive pardon list.
If the Trump administration was able to locate 25% of these children in 100 hours, how did the Biden administration fail to find them in four years?
More relevant still, how did they lose track of 300,000 migrant children in the first place? According to The Wall Street Journal, Biden administration officials wanted to avoid the optics of “kids in cages” at the border. The Journal reported that the Department of Health and Human Services prioritized the rapid release of unaccompanied minors to sponsors without thorough vetting. That resulted in many children being placed right into the hands of traffickers.
Below is an excerpt from the report:
In 2021, when the new Biden administration was struggling to cope with a sudden influx of unaccompanied migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border, the government repeatedly overrode the concerns of lower-level workers who warned about placing them in certain households, documents and interviews show.
“It does not appear safe for the minor to be released to a home environment that was not fully assessed,” a caseworker wrote about a child slated to live in a hostel-like home in Florida with at least three adults. A few days later, an official dismissed the recommendation to reject the proposed guardian, according to internal government memos.
The Trump administration introduced DNA testing at the border to verify familial relationships. During a three-day trial to assess whether DNA testing should become standard practice, agents discovered that nearly 30% of adults tested were attempting to cross the border with children who were not their own, using falsified identifications.
Deciding that ignorance was bliss, the Biden administration ended DNA testing at the border. This decision came as a gift to human traffickers and the numbers of missing migrant children escalated.
In the end, the most reasonable explanation for the large number of migrant children who remained unaccounted for at the end of the Biden administration is that they simply weren’t looking for them. After all, finding these children in vulnerable situations would only emphasize the dangers of their reckless open border policy.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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