WASHINGTON — A lack of oversight under former President Joe Biden has given the Trump administration a harder job in locating missing migrant children, White House border czar Tom Homan said Wednesday.
The Biden administration handed off numerous unaccompanied migrant children to adult “sponsors” without properly verifying where the supposed caretakers lived or other information, giving authorities few leads on finding the children now, Homan said in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. Due to this “incompetence,” finding the more than 300,000 migrant children that the Biden administration lost track of is the hardest job Homan faces, he said.
“You all know, you all own cars … you got credit cards, you pay utility bills. We know how to find you,” the border czar told his audience. “Children don’t have that digital footprint, which means we got to count on the digital footprint of the so-called sponsors they release these children to. And when they didn’t fingerprint them, when they didn’t double-check their identity or address they provided, it makes it hard. Who are these sponsors?”
“Many of the addresses we’re going to now are a parking lot, a park-and-ride, a grocery store, church,” Homan said.
Children released en masse are more vulnerable to human trafficking and other exploitation than other migrants crossing the U.S. border, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned in 2024.
“Of course, the media says [Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)] is looking for children to deport them,” Homan said Wednesday. “HSI is looking for children to make sure they’re safe, to make sure they’re not victims of sex trafficking and labor trafficking. That’s what we’re doing.”
“Some of the children we found are in sex trafficking,” Homan said. “Some of the children we found in forced labor, and we rescued these children.”
The Biden administration continued releasing the children, even knowing some homes could be unsafe, to avoid public outrage against holding them in government facilities, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“They didn’t go to the house, they didn’t go to the address, make sure it was the actual address,” Homan said.
Despite the constraints, Homan said in July that the Trump administration had found roughly 10,000 of the missing children.
“President Trump wants to find every one of them, or run down every lead until we exhaust all the leads,” Homan stated on Wednesday.
“It’s sickening what the last administration did. I don’t want to hear another word about the cruelty of the Trump administration,” Homan said.
“I’ll say it again: he’s saving thousands of lives and we’re rescuing children every day because of the incompetence of the Biden administration,” the border czar added, prompting applause from the audience.
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