Trump: "As you know, 300,000 children are missing. Right? 300,000 under Biden. We've already gotten back 10,000 of those children and we have a lot more planned to come back. We're getting them back by the thousands." pic.twitter.com/bXl2fyfNb4
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 11, 2025
They want you to believe that 300,000 children are missing. They want you to think .4% of ALL children in America are missing. For perspective, a high school with 4,000 students would have 16 of them missing. Do you think we would hear about that? It’s bullshit. All of it. https://t.co/FQiv2Fgih4
— Fred Wellman (@FPWellman) July 11, 2025
According to immigration experts and attorneys, the claims largely stem from an August report from the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general's office, which found that 32,000 unaccompanied minors failed to show up for court dates at immigration courts from 2019-23.
The report noted that 291,000 migrant children received no court notices at all. It also called on the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to "take immediate action to ensure the safety" of unaccompanied migrant children in the US.
Migrant children "who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor", the inspector general's office reported.
But Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, a migrant advocacy group, told the BBC the figures are indicative of a bureaucratic "paperwork issue" rather than "anything nefarious".
"When you hear the phrase 'missing', you think that there is a child that someone is trying to find and can't," he said.
"That's not the case here. The government has not made any effort to find these children."
Many of the children, experts say, may well be at the addresses that are on file with the government, but were simply unable to make their court dates.
"That doesn't mean something bad happened to them," Mr Reichlin-Melnick said. "It means you missed a court hearing."
Mr Reichlin-Melnick added that there are "valid concerns" about exploitation.
"We cannot, however, suggest that all 320,000 of those children are being labour trafficked," he said.
Eric Ruark, an immigration researcher with NumbersUSA - which calls for tighter border controls - said that the children are difficult to track "because of some combination of apathy, incompetence and bureaucratic inefficiency".
"Many, hopefully even most, are safe with caring sponsors," he added. "But the Biden administration can't actually say one way or the other, and apparently doesn't care enough to find out."
What happens to children at the border?
Unaccompanied minors detained at the US-Mexico border go through a complicated process that begins with detention and processing by Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP.
If the child is from a foreign country that is not Mexico or Canada, they are placed into removal proceedings and transferred to the US Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS.
HHS, through its Office of Refugee Resettlement office, cares for the children in a network of state-licensed providers.
The office also seeks to reunify children with family members in the US or with individual or organisational sponsors - who in turn are obligated to ensure they arrive at immigration court dates.
What can the Trump administration do?What has Trump done? Blamed Biden. And not much more.
Homan and other Trump administration officials have so far not provided many details about how they plan to address the issues that plague the detention of undocumented minors.
Several immigration attorneys contacted by the BBC suggested that the administration is likely to make becoming a "sponsor" for undocumented children much more difficult, even if the sponsor is a member of their family.
In practice, this would mean that more undocumented children are kept in detention.
"They could do what the Obama administration did, and detain them," said Alexander Cuic, an immigration attorney and professor at Case Western Reserve University.
The controversial "Remain in Mexico" programme could also be applied to children, forcing them to wait across the border for the outcome of immigration proceedings.
"I'm not sure even they know what they're going to do with the kids," Mr Cuic said of the Trump administration. "But there's a border problem they're trying to figure out first, and that's the first concern before whether they're going to be harsh to both children and adults."
When the BBC asked the Trump transition team what plan they have for the undocumented migrant children, spokesman Taylor Rogers said only that "Democrats' wide-open border policies" have led to the children going "missing".
"President Trump and leaders in his administration will deliver on their promise to end the invasion at our southern border that puts innocent children in harm's way," she added.
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