Trump officials find 62,000 children, some victims of sex trafficking and forced labor, Tom Homan reports

The Trump administration has located 62,000 children who entered the U.S. unaccompanied under the previous administration, according to border czar Tom Homan.

“Some of these children were in sex trafficking—we found them. Some were in forced labor, some were being mistreated—I can’t even discuss some of the mistreatment we found out about,” Homan said Sunday on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

“President [Donald] Trump, again, proves why he’s the greatest president in my lifetime,” Homan added. “Over 62,000 children rescued by President Trump, again, children that were ignored and weren’t being looked for under President [Joe] Biden.”

Under the Biden administration, hundreds of thousands of illegal alien minors arrived at the southern border alone and were released into the care of sponsors, but the Biden administration did not track the location or status of each child after placement.

Between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, more than 448,000 unaccompanied alien children were transferred from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, and most of those children were placed in the care of a sponsor. A sponsor could be a close or distant family member and sometimes had no direct family relation to the minor.

Among the 448,000 minors to enter the U.S. in recent years, ICE failed to issue more than 233,000 notices to appear in immigration court, Joseph Cuffari, inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, told lawmakers in July. Furthermore, more than 43,000 migrant children who were given a notice to appear in immigration court failed to do so.

The Trump administration is now working to safety return unaccompanied migrant children to their home countries, The Daily Signal previously reported.

The Trump-backed “Big, Beautiful Bill” now provides the Department of Health and Human Services with the ability to repatriate to their home country children who entered the U.S. alone.

Migrant children have consistently been a hot-button issue in recent years. Reports of “kids in cages” spread like wildfire thought the media during the first Trump administration.

In 2018, the Trump administration rolled out the Zero-Tolerance Policy for Criminal Illegal Entry, under which illegal aliens were prosecuted for entering the country illegally. Children cannot legally accompany adults into custody, hence family separation ensued, and minors were held in Border Patrol processing centers.

Facing backlash, the first Trump administration issued an executive order to stop the separation of families at the border.

When Biden took office in January 2021, he ended Trump’s border security measures, and mass migration, including of unaccompanied children, ensued. More than 10 million illegal aliens entered the U.S. in four years, flooding the immigration courts and overwhelming the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which operates under HHS and held responsibility for matching unaccompanied migrant children with sponsors.

A strained system led to poor vetting, rapid placement of minors with sponsors, and even abuses of the sponsor program, such as gang members applying to sponsor a migrant child, as whistleblower Aaron Stevenson previously exposed.

Working as an analyst for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2021, Stevenson began to notice that aliens with gang affiliations were applying to be sponsors for unaccompanied migrant children.

It’s Stevenson’s view that the primary reason gang members were seeking to sponsor children was financial.

“I think advantageous networks saw a situation, and they exploited it,” Stevenson said.

Finding the children placed with sponsors during the Biden administration is challenging, according to Homan, because children do not leave a digital footprint through credit cards, mortgage payments, or other transactions that allow authorities to track their location.

Still, Homan says, Homeland Security Investigations agents are working every day to find the missing migrant children and “make sure they’re safe.”

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]