 [ET Via Zero] President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming border czar said he would prioritize locating or rescuing 300,000 unaccounted-for children who entered the United States as illegal immigrants and are at risk of exploitation.
"The third rail is we got over 300,000 missing children," Tom Homan told Fox News on Monday, likely referring to a government report issued earlier this year. "Over half a million children have been trafficked into the United States. This administration released them to unvetted sponsors, and they can’t find 300,000. And based on three-and-a-half decades, some of these children are in forced labor."
Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) inspector general released a report finding that 323,000 illegal immigrant children are unaccounted for inside the United States. As of May 2024, more than 32,000 children who were served notices to appear in court did not appear, while the safety of an additional 291,000 could not be verified because they were not placed into removal proceedings, making monitoring their status challenging, according to the report.
Those figures came from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and covered the period from October 2018 to September 2023
"We already found some in forced labor, some of them are in for sex trafficking, some of them are with pedophiles," Homan said. "We need to save these children. That’s going to be the third rail."
The DHS report noted that ICE, which Homan had overseen under the first Trump administration, should "take immediate action" to ensure those unaccounted-for children are safe.
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