The Trump administration is diligently working to find thousands of missing children who may have fallen victim to sex trafficking during the Biden border crisis, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said.
During a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Kennedy accused the Biden administration of acting as a "collaborator" in the child sex trade.
Unaccompanied alien children (UACs) who cross the border illegally are held by the Health and Human Services' Office Of Refugee Resettlement, which has the responsibility of caring for them and eventually placing them with an adult sponsor.
During the Biden era, standards of vetting declined as the number of unaccompanied minors flooding across the border skyrocketed. It is feared that many of these children fell into the wrong hands.
A former Biden HHS employee, Tara Lee Rodas, testified to Congress last year about HHS sending children to traffickers, likening the set-up to a "white-glove delivery system." Republican Senator Chuck Grassley (IA) obtained internal records showing that Biden's HHS knowingly released two children to a sponsor with ties to MS-13.
Over 600,000 unaccompanied minors have crossed the border since 2019, a recent Inspector General report confirmed. The majority of them entered the U.S. under Biden, although crossings ticked up midway through Trump's first term in 2019 before dropping off with the onset of COVID in 2020.
As of January 2025, 233,000 UACs were released into the U.S. without receiving notices to appear in immigration court, the Inspector General report found. Another 43,000 who did receive notices to appear had failed to show up for their court dates.
An additional 31,000 were released with addresses that were blank, undeliverable, or missing apartment numbers, according to the report.
"Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UACs, ICE is unable to facilitate court appearances and has no assurance UACs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, forced labor, or involvement in criminal activities that may pose a risk to local communities," the report notes.
Since Trump returned to the White House and reinstated tough border policies, illegal crossings have plummeted to record lows.
The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has fallen from over 11,000 per month under Biden to less than 700 per month.
Under Secretary Kennedy, HHS is tightening vetting standards, implementing changes like mandatory fingerprinting to keep kids safe.
"We have ended HHS, as the role as the vector — the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy said.
“During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking and for sex and for slavery. And, we have ended that, and we are very aggressively going out and trying to find these children — 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”
