Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed Tuesday that the Justice Department has identified hundreds of people who obtained custody of migrant children who crossed the southern border without a parent.

Bondi said officials have arrested approximately 458 “sponsors” of hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children who entered the United States in recent years.

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“Now what these sponsors are — they lie to [the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Refugee Resettlement], many of them, to have an unaccompanied alien child,” the attorney general told lawmakers. “Some of them later exploit and abuse these children. They’re not parents, they’re not guardians. They’re coming into this country. They were coming into this country without any ramifications across the Mexican border until Donald Trump became president again, and that’s when it stopped. We are doing everything in our power to find and arrest these people who are exploiting these children and find these children throughout our country.”

Her statement came in response to questioning from Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

Republicans have long pressed the government on around 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children they believe were released by the Department of Homeland Security into the U.S. in recent years. The majority of those happened under the Biden administration, and federal reports indicate that the DHS likely lost track of around 300,000, sparking concerns that the children could have been sex trafficked, used for labor, or left in similarly dangerous situations.

The Senate Judiciary Committee released a report in August stating that the Department of Health and Human Services processed approximately 468,000 unaccompanied children who crossed the border between October 2020 and September 2024.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the committee chairman, said the newly released data from HHS indicated that the agency violated federal law between January 2021 and January 2025 by placing 11,488 migrant children with unvetted sponsors who were not the child’s parent or legal guardian, who were not fingerprinted or did not receive a background check. The report also found the HHS did not conduct home studies for 79,143 migrant children under the age of 12, in violation of agency regulations.

A DHS watchdog report released in March indicated that the government likely lost track of around 310,000 children in recent years. The DHS Office of Inspector General report found that federal officers failed to enroll over 233,000 migrant children who crossed the border in immigration proceedings. Of those who were enrolled, more than 43,000 children failed to appear in court. HHS also failed to provide the DHS with complete sponsor addresses for over 31,000 unaccompanied migrant children. And in fiscal years 2023 and 2024, HHS released more than 24,100 migrant children to unrelated sponsors or distant relatives, which are situations noted by law enforcement officers to place children at the highest risk for trafficking.

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The Trump administration has recovered roughly 22,000 of those minors, Cornyn announced in September. Twenty-seven were found dead, either by murder, suicide, or drug overdose, according to the DHS. Others were found in deplorable conditions and exploited.

“We found children who have been raped,” HHS ORR senior adviser John Fabbricatore told Fox News last month. “We’re talking about debt bondage, where children are being made to work off debt, trafficking debt. We’re talking about children who 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.”