The Challenge of Finding the More Than 7,000 Children Biden Lost
The open-borders madness of the last administration came at a human cost.
The loss of even one child is a tragedy. The loss of over 7,000, some potentially to sex traffickers, due to Joe Biden's immigration policies, is a national shame.
As part of its open borders policy, the Biden administration failed to investigate more than 7,300 reports of human trafficking involving child migrants, reports from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) show. HHS is working through over 65,000 backlogged reports from the last administration, including reports of unaccompanied migrant children who may have been trafficked by gangs or sexually abused. In one notorious case, “a young girl who arrived at the border in the custody of individuals claiming to be her family was bruised, disoriented, and in pain. Medical examinations revealed that she had been raped, yet she was sent back to her abusers because no verification was done to confirm her guardianship.”
“This is such a stain on our nation,” said a whistleblower with HHS.
The second Trump administration has taken up the issue of the lost children, with a small starter number of 36 prosecutions to date. HHS determined over 100 child sponsors from just a single intake site were suspicious enough to warrant further investigation. In a letter to Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asked for “an immediate update on government wide efforts to find and rescue children who were placed in harm’s way” by President Joe Biden’s policies. Together they represent, according to HHS, “a systemic failure of the Biden administration,” which resulted in “children’s lives being put at risk.”
What did Biden do to knowingly place so many children at risk? His stated goal was simply offering hard-working migrants a chance at a better life—at the cost of their children, apparently.
With no legal avenue for them to immigrate, Biden just did away with any effective border enforcement, allowing migrants to walk north and blend into the estimated 11 million illegals already in the U.S. For those who wished to quasi-legalize their status, vast numbers of economic migrants requested asylum. Asylum applicants must demonstrate that, if sent home, they would be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The definition of those protected grounds has varied based on American domestic politics. But asylum never has been and was never intended to stretch to economic situations affecting almost everyone in a given country. “Wanting a better life” has never been grounds for a claim under any president.
Economic immigrants without legitimate claims to asylum have long taken advantage of slow processing. A Mexican man caught on the border who says he came just to work may be sent back almost immediately. Yet, should he make a claim to asylum, the U.S. is obligated to adjudicate his case, however frivolous.
The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act requires those seeking asylum be detained while their cases are processed. But for political reasons, the Biden administration simply released most asylum seekers into American society. Asylum-seekers become eligible to apply for work authorization if their case is left pending for more than 150 days, as almost all do (as was the case for the antisemitic Egyptian terrorist fire-bomber in Colorado). Trump has since ended this system. He also negotiated for many asylum seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico instead of working while in the U.S.
The problem has always been what to do with the kids. While many children at the border are with parents, others arrive with human traffickers, some on their own. “Children” can include everyone from infants to 17-year-old “boys,” and the dangers of housing vulnerable children among adults should make it obvious why the law is written as it is. While on its face “parents with their own kids” sounds like a nice solution, terrible things can happen when children and adults are detained together. Under Trump, parents arrested at the border are criminally charged with illegal entry. Due-process laws do not allow children to be kept with the parent because the child is not being criminally prosecuted. The answer under Trump was to put “kids in cages,” that is, to detain children separately from their parents under federal control as their parents’ cases played out through the legal system.
Democrats and the media accused Trump 1.0 of running “concentration camps” on the border, ignoring America’s long history of holding children for their own safety. Bill Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act set new records for immigrants of all ages detained. George W. Bush’s 2005 Operation Streamline was a zero-tolerance plan to prosecute all illegal entrants. But to avoid the logistics and negative optics, the program made exceptions—not written into the law—for adults traveling with children. Nature finds a way, and more and more economic migrants arrived with somebody’s child in hand as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Fewer kids in cages, but more illegals, and more children at risk.
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
The Obama administration in 2014 established then-legally permitted family detention centers to hold parents and children—potentially indefinitely—in cages as a means of deterring others. There were also children held alone in cages when they arrived without parents, or in the hands of human traffickers, or when their parents were criminally dangerous. The program ended only because of a 2016 court decision ordering the release of most of those families and largely prohibiting family detention facilities. Adult men, women, and children would be held separately.
Abetted by the media, Biden’s strategy was simply to ignore all this precedent and allow children, accompanied or not, to enter the U.S. freely. Little vetting was done of the “guardians” many were matched with in an effort to get the maximum number of people across the border with the minimum of political fuss. It does not take a degree in government (or criminology) to see how bad actors would quickly recognize and exploit such a system for their own needs. The result is the massive, backlogged clean-up project Trump’s HHS faces, years after the feds lost sight of so many vulnerable children to ensure their own policy “succeeded.”
One hopes the majority of missing children were eventually reunited with their illegal alien relatives, and only a few were drawn into the underworld of child labor and sex trafficking. But until HHS corrects Biden’s shameful lack of oversight, no one really knows.
