Some of these children were pushed into forced labor and sex trafficking, the Trump administration’s border czar said.
Nearly 25,000 missing illegal immigrant children in the United States have been identified by the Trump administration, border czar Tom Homan said this past week.
“When President Trump called me to come back from retirement, he told me they wanted me to do three things—secure the border, run the largest deportation operation the country’s seen, and third, find over 300,000 missing children. And that was priority one,” Homan said in a Sept. 18 interview with Fox News.
“So, they’ve already located just under 25,000. Some of these children were fine, with parents just hiding because they didn’t want to be deported.”
“But many were in sex trafficking. Many we found in forced labor, slavery. I mean forced to work ungodly hours, not going to school,” he said. They were “not getting paid, being abused.”
Homan said he and President Donald Trump are committed to looking for these missing children and “run down the leads” until every one of them is found.
“And unfortunately, 27 of these children have since died. So, we’re not giving up. This is the main priority for the Trump administration. We’ll keep going at it,” he said.
In November 2024, after Trump’s election, Homan said that his agency would prioritize locating or rescuing the 300,000 illegal immigrant children.
An August 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that 323,000 illegal immigrant children were unaccounted for in the United States. These were children who illegally entered the United States and are considered at risk of exploitation.
As of May 2024, this included more than 32,000 children who were served notices to appear in court but failed to do so. In addition, the safety of another 291,000 children could not be verified, the report said.
In a September 2024 post, the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, questioned the figures.
“These media reports are misleading—ICE is the immigration enforcement agency whose mission is to remove individuals, including children, who do not have a legal basis to remain in the United States,” the post said.
“It is not a child welfare agency, and it did not ‘lose’ these children. The OIG report reflects paperwork gaps, not lost children.
“The lack of a current address on file does not mean that the children have been trafficked, are lost, or that their parents or sponsors are purposely evading immigration proceedings. Quite the contrary, a majority of the children may be residing in loving homes, attending school, and acclimating to their new surroundings after being reunited with family members in the United States.”
Meanwhile, illegal immigration numbers have plummeted under the Trump administration.
“Daily Southwest Border encounters have plunged by 93 percent since President Trump took office,” said an Aug. 15 statement from the DHS.
“The number of nationwide apprehensions in July was also a historic low of just 6,177. Notably, on July 20, Border Patrol recorded only 116 apprehensions nationwide—the lowest single-day total in agency history.”
