It’s also just a small dent in a tragic situation, a byproduct of U.S. borders left open.
Many may think of adults when they think of illegal immigration, but the administration of former President Joe Biden lost 320,000 unaccompanied children just from the border with Mexico alone, according to The New York Post. The Department of Health and Human Services launched an investigation in February to look into the mass disappearances of these children, many who are probably in the clutches of human traffickers, Trump administration officials say.
It has been announced that the Trump administration has now found 13,000 of these missing children.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, spoke with Jody Hice on Washington Watch last week, explaining how the Biden administration could lose these children in the first place.
“There's a special process for unaccompanied minors… where immigration hands them over to Health and Human Services (HHS) and then they find sponsors for them. Often the sponsors are illegal immigrant parents who paid to have them smuggled or some other relative,” Krikorian says.
Rushing through the process
He revealed that the goal of HHS officials was often getting these young people out of their custody to make it somebody else's problem.
“What they do in their cursory follow-up is one phone call to sort of check up on them and see what's going on, and it was the 300-plus thousand that they just never got any response for, and they kind of shrugged and just moved on,” states Krikorian.
While most of the children were legitimately delivered to family members, there are thousands given to pretend fathers, he continues. Multiple kids, mainly teenagers, are given to the same person.
“So, there are thousands, probably, of people out there who just had an easier time in picking up one of these unaccompanied illegal alien kids from the Biden administration than you would have to go and adopt a dog at the pound,” Krikorian states.
Not all undocumented children end up in the hands of traffickers, thankfully. In the photo above, a mother thanks Adela Morales, right, the notary who helped the mother sign documents giving legal guardianship to Nora Sandigo, left.
Over the last 15 years Sandigo has become the legal guardian for more than 2,000 children.
People like Sandigo help the children avoid the foster system.
After she takes legal custody, most children go on to live with extended family members or caring, vetted members of the community.
She remains in touch and helps provide emotional and logistical support. If legal documents need to be signed, she's available.
Unfortunately, many children have not found a Nora Sandigo.
Krikorian says that the 13,000 found by the Trump administration represents about 4-5% of the missing children, but they have made more than 400 arrests of these so-called sponsors.
There is a cursory vetting process of the proposed sponsors, he says, but it was pushed aside under the Biden administration and the HHS secretary, Xavier Becerra.
“Their goal and their objective was to get people out of the shelters that HHS had them in. If that meant they had to cut some corners and not do proper due diligence, proper vetting, that was okay because job one was reducing the number of these people in their custody,” informs Krikorian.
He explains that, ironically, complaining from advocacy groups and Hispanic-oriented groups to remove the children from the shelters they were in rushed the process, allowing a big portion of the children to be relinquished to human traffickers.
According to Krikorian, there is no way to know the percentage of children being trafficked in this way, only that there is a lot of it. So much so, that it’s not only whistleblowers and Republicans that are complaining about it.
“The New York Times did a series of stories on these so-called unaccompanied minors, like 13- or 14-year-olds, who were working in dangerous factories, doing graveyard shifts, working overnight around dangerous equipment,” Krikorian says. “So, the New York Times acknowledges that this isn't some kind of partisan thing. This is a real problem that the Biden administration just didn't care about, all in the name of just moving people quickly through the system rather than making sure these kids are safe.”
Krikorian states that with the borders more under control and fewer unaccompanied minors are coming in. All that’s left is to continue to identify problems from the Biden administration, he says, adding the Trump administration is doing this quite well.
However, there are some problems that only Congress can do something about.
Immigrants gaming the system
“There's a special status, a legal status for an unaccompanied minor, that's become something that smugglers use. They tell the illegal immigrant parents, ‘give us money, we'll bring your kid up,’ and the government will deliver them to you at taxpayer expense. That's what's been happening. Congress needs to fix that,” Krikorian informs.
The Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection Act of 2005 establishes procedures when immigration officers come across an unaccompanied alien child at a U.S. border. Among other things, these children are to be handed over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, barring any exceptions.
Recently, ICE and Customs and Border Protection raided two marijuana farms in California, arresting hundreds of illegal immigrants. The agents encountered 10 juvenile illegal immigrants, with several of them already gone the UAC procedures.
Krikorian says that, in the case of raids by ICE agents, the children who have gone through the system will need to be placed with new sponsors. Their previous one will be investigated to determine if they should be arrested.
But he believes that the law should be changed so that 16- and 17-year-olds -- the working age in Central America -- need to be sent back to their countries like regular illegal immigrant adults.
“They work with the home country government, make sure that they don't fall between the cracks, but they need to be sent home,” states Krikorian.
He says that there can't be this situation where a child pretends to come unaccompanied, that this is a golden ticket into the United States.
“What we saw at that marijuana farm is the kind of thing we're seeing all over the country in factories and farms and elsewhere of unaccompanied minor kids, who really are basically just coming to work in many cases or in many cases are exploited, enslaved, sent to brothels. I mean, there's all kinds of terrible stuff going on,” Krikorian explains.
Krikorian states that finding the children is laborious work with a lot of manpower needed.
“There's only so many people to go around. Hopefully, the new bill that the president signed, that big, beautiful bill that gave ICE and other parts of immigration a lot more money, will be able to speed this process up,” Krikorian says.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” provides the Department of Homeland Security and sub-agencies, such as ICE, with over $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement.
But he says that the mess from both Biden and Mayorkas can't just be fixed with a snap of fingers.
Krikorian wrote an op-ed last month titled “How’s Trump doing on immigration? Great! (mostly?).” In the article, he talks about the administration is doing right, such as detaining border jumpers instead of letting them go and pressuring foreign countries to take their people back.
But the article points out a mistake that the administration is making by bending the rules in favor of business.
“The one area where there's real potential problems, in my opinion —it hasn't happened yet—is that the president is talking about amnestying, potentially, some illegal immigrant workers because some farmers want them or hotel owners or restaurant owners,” Krikorian says.
Self-deportations working to some degree
The op-ed also reports that border crossings have dropped to an historic low. In June, border patrol saw a record low of illegal immigrants at the southern border, down by 15% from the previous low.
Krikorian states keeping the number of illegal immigrants low required reducing the amount of people coming in and increase the number of people leaving. He says that this is being accomplished through ICE deportation and self-deportations.
“In other words, people pack up and leave before they get arrested so they don't have to get arrested. They can go back on their own terms, pack up their stuff in a dignified way and go home,” explains Krikorian. “The administration is trying to create incentives to do that, some carrot and some stick. We don't know full numbers yet, but it is happening, and we need a lot more of that.”
