Senator Josh Hawley is demanding answers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regarding the nearly 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children who “may have gone missing” inside the United States.
The agency’s internal watchdog warned of an “urgent problem” with the way immigration officials have been handling cases of immigrant minors, finding that more than 32,000 children had failed to show up for immigration summonses and ICE “was unable to account” for their locations.
According to the watchdog, ICE has not bothered to notify more than 291,000 unaccompanied immigrant minors, two-thirds of the migrant children who have arrived in the United States, of court dates.
“Unaccompanied migrant children are some of the most vulnerable individuals in the United States. They are routinely trafficked for sex, forced into illegal labor, burned with chemicals, and subjected to countless atrocities by cartels,” wrote Hawley, R-Mo.
Senator Josh Hawley is demanding answers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regarding the nearly 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children who “may have gone missing” inside the United States.
“Not only did your agency lose track of these children, it didn’t even bother to tell anyone. That’s unacceptable.”
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is responsible for placing immigrant children with sponsors, but it has lost track of tens of thousands of them after the children and their sponsors stopped responding. ICE, which is responsible for connecting children for immigration hearings, also did not follow up with them.
“ICE must take immediate action to ensure the safety of unaccompanied immigrants residing in the United States,” Inspector General Joseph Cuffari said in an alert. “Based on our audit work and ICE officials, unaccompanied immigrants who fail to appear in court are considered to be at increased risk of being trafficked, exploited or forced labor.”
“By not issuing NTAs to all UCs, ICE limits its ability to have contact with UCs when they are released from HHS custody, reducing opportunities to verify their safety,” Cuffari added.
Without the ability to monitor children, “there is no guarantee that they will be safe from trafficking, exploitation and forced labor.”
Hawley recalled Mayorkas’ testimony to the Senate in October 2023 when he stated: “We have, in fact, prioritized the rescue of children who have been victims of trafficking.”
“But according to your Inspector General, your policies are fully exacerbating that very risk of trafficking of migrant children,” Hawley wrote.
She demanded that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas provide answers about where his agency believes these children are, why they were not served with court notices, what his agency is doing to track them, and what led to the failed communication between HHS and DHS.
ICE does not notify HHS when a child fails to appear and does not have a procedural code to track such cases. HHS created an email inbox for ICE to notify them when a child fails to appear for a deportation hearing. But ICE officials could not tell the inspector general how often, if ever, deportation officers used it.
In response to the report, ICE said it would send an alert to officers informing them to begin using it.
Mexican migrant Veronica Marquez, 36, comforts her son Mariano, 5, as she waits to be detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers after crossing into the United States on June 25, 2024.
These migrant children are often sent with smugglers to travel north in the hopes that they will have a better chance of not being turned away at the border without their parents.
In fiscal year 2019, approximately 68,000 people were apprehended and released, and in 2020, the last full year under President Trump, only 15,128 were apprehended and released. During Biden’s first three years, nearly 366,000 people were apprehended and released to the Department of Health and Human Services.
For ICE, children are just the tip of the iceberg of the agency’s problems with tracking migrants.
ICE has more than 7 million fugitive immigrants on file and they are not being tracked by a monitoring device.
Children who come forward and go through the immigration court process have little chance of being deported.
Of those who arrived in 2018, nearly a quarter obtained some form of legal status within three years and only 5 percent were sent back to their home countries. About 14 percent were supposed to leave but defied those orders and the remainder, 57 percent, had no progress on their legal status three years later.