On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy gave testimony before the Senate Finance Committee. In his opening remarks, Kennedy mentioned as part of his successes as HHS Secretary, the location of 22,000 of the 476,000 unaccompanied minors that had gone missing from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) under the Biden-Harris administration.
First, we are doing our part to fulfill the president's commitment to stop human trafficking, especially of children. We inherited a terrible humanitarian crisis from the previous administration with its open border policies which allowed the appalling loss of 476,000 unaccompanied children. We have implemented policies now to ensure that that appaling tragedy can never happen again.
We have knocked on 82,000 doors and located 22,000 of those children. I promise you that we will do more in the next three years.
Dig Deeper: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Testifies to Senate Finance Committee: 'Change Has Its Enemies'
As RedState reported in August of 2024, the Office of Inspector General had documented the number of unaccompanied minors that had gone missing as 290,000.
In 2020, then-Senator Kamala Harris tweeted about the "outrageous" separation of 545 unaccompanied minors, attaching a link to an NBC article directly blaming the Trump administration. Fast forward to 2024, and under Border Czar Kamala Harris, ICE has now reported that over 290,000 undocumented minors are not only separated from their parent or guardian, but no one in the Biden-Harris administration knows where they are. Not a peep from NBC News, and the few headlines from other news organizations use the generic designation of "The Department of Homeland Security" instead of attaching this gross incompetence to the Biden-Harris administration.
By November 2024, when then-HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra was in the hot seat for his complicity in this debacle, this number had expanded to 320,000. All told, between January 2021, when Biden-Harris first threw open the border, to December 2024, ORR had received more than 470,000 referrals for unaccompanied minor children, and all those children had somehow disappeared into the ether.
Read it Here: Kamala's America: Border Czar Harris Has Lost Track of 290,000 Unaccompanied Minors
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra Has No Answer to Children Trafficked and Missing Under His Watch
Instead of the Finance Committee senators, or the legacy media for that matter, acknowledging the good news that a fraction of these children had been recovered, Democrats and some Republicans only focused on their displeasure with Kennedy's shakeup at the CDC over the firing of director Susan Monarez. The location of 22,638 unaccompanied minors in a space of five months is nothing short of remarkable, so Fox News exclusively embedded with the unit housed in ORR to document how it had been done.
WATCH:
Fox News got exclusive access to the team responsible for locating the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who crossed the border and disappeared into the system under the Biden administration.
Under the Trump administration, 22,638 unaccompanied children have been located so far, and more than 400 sponsors have been arrested. 27 of the minors were found dead, either by murder, suicide or drug overdose, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
"It's important that we find these cases where children are being used for labor and sexually trafficked," John Fabbricatore, HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement senior advisor, said.
This team of volunteer investigators from various agencies (FBI, Homeland Security, and others) was pulled together by Border Czar Tom Homan as the "ORR Interagency Crime Coordination Cell." ORR senior advisor John Fabbricatore decried the conditions in which these children were discovered.
"We found children who have been raped," he said. "We're talking about debt bondage, where children are being made to work off debt, trafficking debt. We're talking about children that were brought into situations and then treated like sexual slaves. You know, where children are in horrific environments, just environments that they should not be in, where the sponsor is a heroin dealer and that child winds up dying of a heroin overdose."
During the hearing, Kennedy tried to explain that because of the former HHS secretary's faulty data during the COVID pandemic, he could not give an accurate count of how many people had actually died from COVID. It is the same with the tracking of where these children were supposed to end up. Biden-Harris played fast and loose with the documentation, if there was any documentation at all.
"There wasn't very good recordkeeping" under the Biden administration, Fabbricatore said. "It's drawing that data back in, being able to identify addresses, where these children went, who these sponsors actually were. In many cases, that data is, is horrible. What the Biden administration was taking in and putting into our computer systems was not the right information. So now we have to draw that all back in and deeply investigate into where some of these children went."
The prior administration had also completely dropped screening procedures, namely DNA testing, to ensure the minors were being released to actual family members, and not the traffickers and drug dealers with whom they ultimately landed. The Trump administration has not only re-established screening procedures of unaccompanied minors, but requires sponsors to show proof of income to prove they are financially capable of caring for a child, do a criminal background check, as well as fingerprint and ID verification.
When Kennedy took over at HHS, there was a backlog of 65,000 Notifications of Concern: post-release reports that document allegations ranging from administrative issues to possible human trafficking or criminal exploitation. According to the exclusive, HHS has cleared 90 percent of that number, leaving fewer than 7,000 of those reports to be addressed.
Even with this reported and documented progress by ORR, activist district judges like Sparkle Sooknanan continue to meddle in the executive branch's authority to oversee immigration concerns.
Meanwhile, Democrats like Sen. Ron Wyden (OR), the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, continue to peddle false reports about what is being done to repatriate these children back to their home countries and their families. In his attack on Kennedy during the hearing, Wyden said:
This weekend, under the cover of darkness, Robert Kennedy attempted to disappear hundreds of children under its care at office of refugee resettlement facilities. These children here without parents or family were rounded up in the middle of the night and put in planes to Guatemala. Lawyers on the ground described unthinkable scenes. Our staff, some who are here today, were party to this in the middle of the night. One child said to their lawyer, "Why do they want to send me back? My mom is dead and my dad abuses me. Why do they want to hurt me?" This was an actual conversation. These actions were illegal, documents show that many of these children were in the country to escape trafficking in their home land. Mr. Kennedy calls himself a protector of children. Some kind of rich claim...
These 76 Guatemalan children are now back at U.S. shelters pending resolution of this judicial salvo. As ORR continues its work, these questions concerning the Trump administration's authority to make such decisions need to be resolved.
When children are located, Fabbricatore said, the goal is to reunite them with their parents if they are in another country and there is no credible fear claim.
"If their parents are in a previous country and there is not a credible fear claim, is it not better for a child to be with their parents or in our foster care system here in the United States?" Fabbricatore said. "I would argue that we shouldn't be putting them in care here in the US when they have families in their country of origin. And if we can prove that they're safer in the country, that they're going back to, that is where they should be with their parents."
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy RedState’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join RedState VIP and use the promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership!