Nearly 146,000 unaccompanied migrant minors who were, according to the Department of Homeland Security, part of 450,000 kids illegally smuggled across the U.S-Mexico border during the Biden administration have been located since President Donald Trump took office, DHS officials announced Thursday.
Although almost 300,000 minors smuggled across the border remain unaccounted for, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin praised a joint effort between DHS, ICE and the Department of Health and Human Services for finding the migrant minors. Mullin pledged to find those responsible for the human smuggling rings and bring them to justice.
In many cases, those children were abused, assaulted and exploited during the process of being trafficked across the border by criminal sponsors, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
Those criminals, working with Mexican drug cartels to move the children across the border, often sponsored multiple migrant children, Blanche said, which required them to lie to U.S. government officials, claiming they were close relatives of the children being trafficked into the country.
Those individuals, known to federal prosecutors as “super sponsors,” often used fraudulent forms of identification and made false claims to government officials to gain custody of the children once they were in the United States.
Blanche announced the indictments of three Guatemalan nationals living in Ohio, who federal prosecutors claimed worked as super sponsors, meaning they were connected to more than three migrant minors trafficked into the U.S.
The three immigrants are allegedly connected to more than a dozen cases of smuggling migrant minors into the U.S., the attorney general said.
Blanche said the Department of Justice is currently tracking 15,500 super-sponsor cases connected to hundreds of thousands of migrant minors smuggled into the country between 2021 and 2024.
“I think I’m stating the obvious, but when the government fails to protect our borders, it is the most vulnerable who suffer,” Blanche said in a news conference Thursday.
Biden administration ‘turned a blind eye’: DHS Secretary Mullin
Mullin pinned the blame for the trafficking of migrant minors on the Biden administration. Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary earlier this year, described the cases as “horrific” and said the Biden administration was guilty of “true neglect at best and criminal at worst” in allowing the trafficking of migrant minors to take place.
Mullin accused the Biden administration of “turning a blind eye” to criminal behavior by illegal immigrants.
He also said the previous administration allowed unvetted sponsors to take custody of those minors. He also claimed the Biden administration failed to conduct wellness checks on those children after they were placed in the custody of sponsors.
“President Trump has made it a point to go find these kids,” Mullin said, adding he would “move heaven and hell to go find these kids.”
Pressed for evidence that the Biden administration knowingly allowed migrant minors to be placed into the custody of unvetted sponsors, Blanche says “it can’t be disputed” that senior administration officials knew this was happening.
“There were individuals occupying positions of leadership in this country that knew this was happening and either didn’t care, encouraged it or a little bit of both,” Blanche said, saying he wasn’t indicting anyone in the previous administration, but was instead saying there was an “incredible dereliction of duties at best.”.
Mullin said in many cases, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its Homeland Security Investigations unit along with Customs and Border Protection, are responsible for locating the missing migrant children. Mullin said DHS is investigating claims the minors were allegedly raped 600-700 times.
He said one-third of girls smuggled into the U.S. were likely sexually assaulted before they reached the southern border.
“I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you have kids, don’t have kids, I don’t care if you’re a liberal, you’re an Independent, you’re a Democrat, you’re a Republican, if you can’t stand for law enforcement to go find these kids, who are you?” Mullin told reporters.
Mullin alleges many unaccompanied children found in ‘sanctuary’ cities
Mullin claimed most of the unaccompanied minors were being found in “sanctuary” cities, which have remained under constant attack by the Trump administration. Mullin specifically targeted New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for not allowing federal immigration agents and officers into the city and accused the mayor of harboring and abetting criminals.
Without presenting a definite timeline, White House border czar Tom Homan said this week he would surge ICE officers into New York. Homan blamed New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul for not working with federal officials to allow ICE to go into places like New York.
Hochul has pushed back against those criticisms and said while state officials have worked with federal officials to go after criminals, she has taken certain steps against ICE, which she said has “been trampling on the basic rights of Americans, including here in the state of New York.”
The Office of Refugee Resettlement did not immediately return a request from NewsNation seeking to verify where those located under the Trump administration were located.
Mullin said that the 146,000 children who have been located were found through a series of processes, including standard wellness checks at addresses where minors were sent. In some cases, the children were found to be in good health and with sponsors who are in the United States legally.
In other cases, however, Mullin said minors were found to be in the custody of criminal sponsors who are now facing federal charges. Some of those sponsors were found to be part of labor or sex trafficking rings and Mullin said minors placed in the custody of those individuals have been transferred to legal and vetted sponsors.
What has changed with sponsor vetting under the Trump administration?
Angie Salazar, the acting director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said the agency was referred an average of more than 300 unaccompanied children per day for four years during the Biden administration. ORR is responsible for the placement and care of those who are placed in the custody of sponsors
Salazar that the placement process should mirror the American foster care system, in which potential foster parents undergo rigorous background checks and vetting. But Salazar said that migrant minors were often placed into the custody of sponsors “who were rarely seen” and sent to addresses which were never visited or verified.
Salazar said that since 2025, ORR has reviewed more than 81,000 addresses that were used repeatedly to place migrant children and where more than 76,000 mandatory safety checks were never conducted. She alleges that in more than 97,000 cases, background checks of sponsors were never run and that in many cases, fingerprinting and other identification verification processes were never followed.
Under the Trump administration, Salazar said that ORR has overhauled its verification systems and has removed loopholes used in the past. She said that DNA testing is now required when a sponsor claims to be a family member of the migrant being placed.
The agency is also verifying financial information and visiting the addresses where children are being sent to ensure the safety of children being placed.
Earlier this year, NewsNation reporting partner Border Report found that hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children continue crossing the border from Mexico, with the highest numbers heading into South Texas since the start of this fiscal year.
Blanche, the acting attorney general, said Thursday that the country is no longer facing a “widespread” issue with unaccompanied minors. However, he said federal issues are dealing with “a crisis” caused by what Trump officials have characterized as an “open border policy” under former President Joe Biden.
“There’s still a tremendous amount of work yet to do,” Blanche said.
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