DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Thursday that the Trump administration has located 146,000 unaccompanied migrant children who fell out of federal tracking during the Biden years, as roughly 300,000 more remain unaccounted for.
Standing together at the Department of Justice, Mullin and Blanche delivered a blunt assessment of what they called a systemic failure by the previous administration to protect the most vulnerable people who crossed the southern border. The announcement marked the most detailed public accounting yet of the Trump administration's effort to locate children placed with sponsors during the Biden years, many of whom federal officials say were never verified to be safe.
"True neglect at best, and criminal at worst," Mullin said of the Biden-era handling of unaccompanied children, according to NewsNation. He pledged to "move heaven and hell" to find those still unaccounted for. Acting AG Blanche announced at the same press conference the indictment of three individuals in northern Ohio accused of smuggling dozens of children into the country, a case he said illustrated the dangers children faced when the federal government stopped asking where they ended up.
The scale of the Biden-era placement program has drawn scrutiny from congressional investigators and federal watchdogs alike. From January 2021 to January 2025, at least 11,488 migrant children were placed with sponsors who were not their parent or legal guardian and who were not fingerprinted or did not receive a background check, according to DHS data. The Biden-Harris administration also dismissed or failed to act on more than 65,000 reports about migrant children's welfare, including over 7,300 reports flagged as potential human trafficking cases, according to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
ICE case files reviewed during the current administration's search found children who were forced to work by their sponsors to pay off smuggling fees. In one case documented by ICE, a child disclosed during an immigration court proceeding that she and her teenage brother had been compelled to work to cover both smuggling debts and the sponsor's household expenses. A June 2025 worksite enforcement operation in Alabama found a minor working among adults who investigators believed had never attended school since arriving in the United States two years earlier, according to a DHS release at the time.
Advocates for unaccompanied minors have pushed back on how the administration characterizes the children's status. Jennifer Podkul of KIND, a nonprofit focused on unaccompanied minors, told fact-checkers that calling the children "lost" reflects a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how the placement system works, arguing that in many cases officials simply went to the address on file and found the child there. That dispute does not erase the documented cases of abuse, but it shapes how the overall numbers should be read. The 146,000 figure includes children confirmed at known addresses as well as those recovered from more acute situations.
Accountability and Legal Exposure
Whether Biden-era officials face legal consequences remains an open question. Mullin's language at Thursday's press conference, describing the failures as potentially "criminal," signals the administration is at minimum laying the groundwork for accountability proceedings. Blanche's presence at the event, alongside the Ohio indictments, suggests the Justice Department is treating the child trafficking dimension as a live prosecutorial priority rather than a political talking point.
Congressional Republicans have pressed for answers since at least 2023. The Senate Judiciary Committee released data in 2025 confirming that the Biden administration had access to tens of thousands of welfare reports it did not act on. The House Homeland Security Committee held hearings the same year in which experts testified that taxpayer-funded nongovernmental organizations helped facilitate placements without adequate oversight, according to committee documents published on the panel's website.
The 300,000 children still unaccounted for represent the clearest measure of how much work remains. Mullin has tasked DHS, ICE, and HHS with continuing joint outreach, and the administration has said it will pursue every available lead. The Ohio indictments suggest federal prosecutors are working the criminal end of the pipeline at the same time. Whether additional charges follow, and whether any accountability reaches into the previous administration's leadership, will define the story in the months ahead. The next milestone to watch is whether the located count continues to climb and whether any of the unresolved cases produce criminal referrals that name officials rather than traffickers.
Also read: HHS Opens Formal Probe of CAIR Over Terror Ties and Misspent Afghan Funds • State Department launches $750 premium visa program to cut interview backlogs • DHS directive makes illegal voting by any alien grounds for deportation
