OAN Staff Jenna Lee and Brooke Mallory
4:43 PM – Friday, June 12, 2026
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that federal agencies have located approximately 146,000 unaccompanied minors who had gone missing after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden administration.
“We found 146,000 kids so far. 146,000 kids. We still have nearly 300,000 missing. When we start digging into these cases, and you start hearing the absolute horrific things that took place underneath the Biden administration, either true neglect at best and criminal at worst, to allow 450,000 kids to go missing throughout this country,” said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin during a joint press conference at the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) headquarters.
During the Biden administration, federal authorities encountered more than 10 million migrants at the southern border, including over half a million unaccompanied minors. Following initial processing by the DHS, these children were either released or transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which released the remaining children to adult sponsors while they awaited their immigration court proceedings.
However, although Biden’s HHS was legally required to vet adult sponsors before releasing unaccompanied minors to them, a process that involves checking government databases, verifying identities, and conducting background checks, federal watchdogs repeatedly exposed major gaps in how thoroughly these checks were actually executed.
A February 2024 audit by the HHS Office of Inspector General revealed that at least 16% of case files lacked proof that sponsors underwent required safety checks, and at least 19% of children were released before the government received mandatory FBI fingerprint background results.
The current Trump administration has pointed to these exact failures as proof that the vetting was fundamentally broken, arguing that lax oversight allowed bad actors to manipulate the system. A significant and highly dangerous subset of these children were genuinely missing and severely endangered, despite denials by former Biden officials.
Federal officials on Thursday highlighted that human trafficking rings and smugglers actively exploited the Biden government’s vetting gaps by using stolen or fake identities to act as fraudulent sponsors for multiple unrelated minors. Children effectively disappeared under the federal radar and were forced into illegal industrial labor, agricultural and sexual exploitation, or other abusive situations.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went on to emphasize the severe consequences of child trafficking, detailing a newly unsealed federal indictment against three Guatemalan adults accused of smuggling and trafficking more than a dozen children.
“The criminals calling themselves sponsors trafficked these children to the border, usually committing fraud to do so, and oftentimes the children were abused, assaulted, and certainly exploited. In some cases, individuals would sponsor multiple children, which required them to lie to government personnel and on government forms, claiming they were close relatives, when in fact they were not. They would use fake or stolen identities and make other false claims during the application process in order to obtain custody of the children,” said Blanche.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) praised the enforcement efforts to track down the missing minors and prosecute fraudulent sponsors.
“I spent YRS [years] sharing whistleblower evidence of migrant child trafficking w the Biden admin while my Democrat colleagues turned a blind eye,” stated Grassley on X.
DHS officials concluded the briefing by stating that task forces are actively searching for the remaining 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children who are still missing.
“We’re going to rescue as many kids as we possibly can,” Mullin added.
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