Department of Homeland Security May Have Lost Track of Thousands of Unaccompanied Migrant Minors

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An internal watchdog report has found that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may have lost track of thousands of children who immigrated to the country as unaccompanied minors, putting both the safety of the children and the effectiveness of the immigration process at risk.

According to a report from the ICE Inspector General’s Office, more than 32,000 unaccompanied minors failed to show up for their immigration court hearings between 2019 and 2023. In addition, ICE “failed to account” for all of their locations.

During that period, more than 448,000 unaccompanied children immigrated to the U.S. They were transferred from ICE custody to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency responsible for placing these children with sponsors or foster care.

After being turned over to HHS for settlement, ICE was unable to determine the whereabouts of all of these children. More than 291,000 of them were not placed in removal proceedings because ICE never sent them a notice to appear or scheduled a court hearing for them.

“Without the ability to monitor the location and status of (unaccompanied migrant children), ICE has no assurance that (they) will be safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” Inspector General Joseph Cuffari wrote in the report.

If children do not appear in court, they can also be deported.

ICE agreed with some of the report’s recommendations to include more automated tracking mechanisms, but argued the agency had “misunderstandings about the process.”

“While we agree with the inspector general’s recommendations to improve information sharing within Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and externally with HHS, we are concerned that the report’s findings are misleading and could be misinterpreted because they fail to acknowledge important facts,” an ICE spokesperson told The Independent.

The agency said in comments on the report that it sometimes delays filing removal orders to give children time to find legal counsel, seek help from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and to keep immigration courts from becoming overcrowded. It also pointed to dedicated field officers tasked with resolving issues involving unaccompanied minors who fail to appear in immigration court.

“Since last year, ICE has taken steps to automate information sharing regarding the presence of unaccompanied children in immigration court proceedings,” the ICE spokesperson added. “We will continue to enhance these procedures and implement the OIG’s recommendations.”

The young people described in the DHS report are separate from the children who were intentionally separated from their families when they crossed the border during the Trump years, under that administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy.

The initiative was criticized for inadvertently separating U.S. nationals from their parents. It took years for authorities to reunite families torn apart by the policy.

At the end of last year, 68 children of U.S. citizen parents were still separated from their families, and 297 U.S. citizen children were separated from their non-U.S. citizen parents.

As part of a December settlement, a federal judge banned officials from enforcing family separations for the next eight years.