Before she was fired as Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem said her department found 145,000 of the 450,000 unaccompanied migrant children the Biden administration “lost.” Experts say the children were never lost.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appears for an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, at the Capitol in Washington, March 3, 2026. Kristi Noem 's recent comments during two congressional hearings drew scrutiny on several levels.
From President Donald Trump, who fired the Homeland Security secretary March 5 after denying he knew of her decision to spend over $200 million on an ad campaign featuring her. And from experts interested in the Noem's statements about the alleged recovery of missing migrant children. During one of the hearings, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Noem accused former President Joe Biden of losing nearly half a million immigrant children, and commended her department for finding more than a quarter of them. "Under President Biden, more than 450,000 unaccompanied alien children went missing or were lost due to the dangerous open border policies that were embraced," Noem said at the March 3 hearing."Under President Trump, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services have already located over 145,000 of these children." Trump and members of his cabinet have talked about lost immigrant children since the 2024 presidential campaign, and cite a Homeland Security Looking at data spanning both the Trump and Biden administrations, from fiscal year 2019 to 2023, the report found Immigration and Customs Enforcement could not monitor all unaccompanied minors released from the agency’s custody. It didn’t say the children were"missing" or"lost." But later in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Noem said the children had been found through the"investigative work" of Homeland Security Investigations, a law enforcementDHS told PolitiFact in February that the administration had located more than 145,000 children through"visits and door knocks." "We've jumpstarted our efforts to rescue children who were victims of sex and labor trafficking by working with our state and local law enforcement partners to locate these children," the department said in a statement.in February that ICE officers in Minnesota had"located 3,364 missing unaccompanied alien children. Children that the last administration lost and weren't even looking for." But Jennifer Podkul, chief of global policy and advocacy at KIND, a nonprofit organization that advocates for unaccompanied minors, said calling the children lost is a"fundamental misunderstanding" of the process and the report.Unaccompanied minors are children under 18 years old who arrive at the U.S. border without a parent or legal guardian. Under federal law, border agents must refer unaccompanied minors to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, under HHS. The office must then quickly seek a sponsor for the child, typically a family member. If the child seeks legal status in the U.S., for example by applying for asylum, DHS is responsible for tracking the case.ICE transferred 448,000 unaccompanied minors to HHS custody. ICE had not served 291,000 of them with a Notice to Appear, a charging document with instructions to appear in immigration court. ICE is required to file these."That does not mean in any way that the child is missing," said Mary Miller Flowers, director of policy at the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights."That means that paperwork largely has not been able to reach that child, or phone calls have not been able to reach that child." Miller Flowers said ICE may not have been able to serve a child a Notice to Appear because they moved, they didn’t have a complete address on file or the sponsor didn't answer a phone call or letter.that the report focused only on ICE records overseeing children’s cases in immigration court. It did not mention checking records with other government agencies that are involved in migrant children’s cases, such as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, another DHS agency that processes some efforts to obtain legal residency. ICE losing track of unaccompanied minors is likely a reflection of agencies not collaborating, not a child being at risk or a sponsor being a threat, Podkul said.We don’t know, and we haven’t been able to get a straight answer. Trump administration officials have been vague about what they mean by saying they have"found" hundreds of thousands of children. In response to PolitiFact’s questions about such comments, DHS sent a list of more than a dozen examples of sponsors who had been arrested on criminal charges including assault, attempted robbery and rape. The department did not specify whether the unaccompanied minors of those sponsors were among the 330,000 who did not receive a Notice to Appear or failed to appear in court. "Oftentimes, when they say they found them, what they did is they went and they knocked on the door of the address they had on their paperwork, and the kid was there," Podkul said."They didn't find them necessarily working in a factory in the middle of the night, being taken advantage of. They found them exactly where the kid said that they were going to be." Experts on unaccompanied minors acknowledged that migrant children are vulnerable and could end up in dangerous situations. In a Pulitzer-winningHowever, experts said that reality doesn’t support the administration's talking point that hundreds of thousands of children were lost and later found. Management Alert - ICE Cannot Monitor All Unaccompanied Migrant Children Released from DHS and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Custody Phone interview, Mary Miller Flowers, director of policy and legislative affairs at the Young Center, March 4, 2206X posts After U.S. vessel strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, “drugs entering our country by sea are down 97%.” “No están recibiendo el entrenamiento tradicional de cinco meses… .El entrenamiento para los agentes de ICE ahora es de 47 días”. Con respecto a los ataques contra las embarcaciones en las costas de Venezuela, “por cada barco que destruimos, salvamos 25,000 vidas estadounidenses”. “If you vote no on Prop 50 to stop the redistricting, it shows through the envelope,” making it easy for Democrats to cheat. “As a condition for ending the Democrat shutdown, Democrats want hospitals paid MORE to treat illegal aliens than American citizens.” “Los demócratas están amenazando con cerrar todo el gobierno porque quieren dar cientos de miles de millones de dólares en beneficios de cuidado de salud a los inmigrantes ilegales”. “Democrats are threatening to shut down the entire government because they want to give hundreds of billions of dollars of health care benefits to illegal aliens.”“There is no history … that shows an air campaign alone will result in positive regime change. In fact, there's not a single example of it in the entirety of American history.” U.S. men’s hockey Olympian Brady Tkachuk said about the Canadian hockey team, “They booed our national anthem, so I had to come out and teach those maple syrup eating f----s a lesson.”
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