ICE Launches 287(g) Initiative to Find Missing Migrant Kids

DHS issued a press release last week headlined “ICE and State, Local Law Enforcement 287(g) Partners Launch Initiative to Protect Vulnerable Children the Biden Administration Allowed to be Placed with Unvetted Sponsors”. The “UAC Safety Verification Initiative” described therein will send ICE officers and their partners in state and local law enforcement out into the community to “to conduct welfare checks on migrant “children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited”, the loftiest of endeavors, but one likely to meet with local protests. It’s overdue.

Boneheaded U.S. Migrant Child Laws

The issue of UACs, “unaccompanied alien children”, is one the Center has focused on for years, largely because the laws governing UACs entice parents and other relatives to entrust children with criminal smugglers in the hope they’ll make it to the United States unmolested.

You don’t have to believe me when I say many child smugglers are predators. Here’s how then-Vice President Joe Biden referred to them at a UAC roundtable in Guatemala City in 2014:

These smugglers — and everyone should know it, and not turn a blind eye to it — these smugglers routinely engage in physical and sexual abuse, and extortion of these innocent, young women and men by and large.

And they profit from the misery of these children and teenagers; these desperate, desperate young people.

That the smugglers — and the relatives who pay them — are aided and abetted by some of the most boneheaded laws ever passed is a fact most Americans and their elected officials can’t quite grasp.

The first is section 462 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA), which defined “unaccompanied alien child” as:

a child who — (A) has no lawful immigration status in the United States; (B) has not attained 18 years of age; and (C) with respect to whom — (i) there is no parent or legal guardian in the United States; or (ii) no parent or legal guardian in the United States is available to provide care and physical custody.

As that definition makes clear, only alien minors without parents or legal guardians here are considered UACs, but the federal government — and DHS in particular — considers most kids who aren’t with their parents and guardians when they are encountered by the department to be UACs.

The HSA created DHS, but prior to the establishment of that department, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was responsible for detaining, caring for, and releasing alien children.

It’s the “former INS” because it was abolished in section 471 of the HSA, with its various immigration duties dispersed among agencies at DHS, including CBP, ICE, and USCIS.

Responsibility to care for and release UACs wasn’t retained by any agency within the new DHS, however. An amendment to the HSA transferred responsibility for those children to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Many aliens and immigrants’ advocates had criticized how INS dealt with alien children, and sponsors of that amendment likely assumed placing those children with anyone other than ICE was a better choice.

As I’ll explain below, that was a bad assumption, but in the first few years not many UACs were affected.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports that the number of UACs apprehended by DHS and referred to ORR in the early 2000s “averaged 6,700 annually and ranged from a low of about 4,800 in FY 2003 to a peak of about 8,200 in FY 2007”.

That quickly changed, however, after Congress passed the next boneheaded UAC law, the questionably titled “Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008” (TVPRA).

Section 235 of that act divided unaccompanied children into two groups: (1) nationals of contiguous countries (i.e., Mexico and Canada); and (2) nationals of non-contiguous countries (everywhere else).

Under section 235, UACs from contiguous countries can be sent home if they haven’t been trafficked and don’t have a credible fear of return.

UACs from non-contiguous countries, however, must be transferred to ORR’s care and custody within 72 hours and placed into removal proceedings (UACs aren’t amenable to expedited removal), even if they haven’t been trafficked and have no fear of return.

Section 235 directs ORR to then place most of those children with “sponsors” in the United States — often the very parents or guardians who paid the smugglers Vice President Biden referred to.

Not surprisingly, after Congress passed the TVPRA, illegal entries of non-contiguous UACs soared, as parents (and more importantly smugglers) realized that section 235 essentially ensured that children who made it illegally here would be released into this country.

Here are the statistics: According to CRS, in FY 2008, the fiscal year before the TVPRA was passed, CBP encountered fewer than 10,000 UACs at the Southwest border.

By FY 2009, when that bill was signed, that figure rose to around 20,000 UACs, 82 percent Mexican nationals, and just 17 percent from the non-contiguous “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

The number of UACs entering illegally kept growing thereafter, with Border Patrol apprehending more than 68,500 of them in FY 2014. By that point, however, just 23 percent of UACs came from Mexico and 77 percent from the Northern Triangle.

Objective observers would conclude that section 235 of the TVPRA created a loophole that’s being exploited by those seeking to bring UACs to the United States illegally (smugglers, parents, other relatives, traffickers, the children themselves, etc.).

The logic was obvious even to the editorial board at the Washington Post, which in August 2014 stated: “Inadvertently, [the TVPRA] has encouraged thousands of Central American children to try to reach the United States by granting them access to immigration courts that Mexican kids don’t enjoy.”

That followed a request by President Obama to give “the DHS Secretary additional authority to exercise discretion in processing the return and removal of unaccompanied minor children from non-contiguous countries like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador” — that is, to plug the “non-contiguous” loophole.

Congress did nothing in response, and sections 426 of the HSA and 235 of the TVPRA remain in effect.

Botched Implementation

The U.S. Code is replete with poorly considered but ineffectual laws, but the bigger issue with these two is how they’ve been implemented.

As I explained in August, “in its haste to move UACs out of immigration custody, Congress failed to provide [ORR] any guidance on how to screen and when to deny would-be sponsors”.

That flaw is compounded by the fact neither the HSA nor the TVPRA assigns any federal government entity the responsibility of following up on the children and sponsors once the kids are out of custody.

In the first Trump administration, however, ORR took great pains to vet sponsors prior to placement, including by requiring HHS to provide DHS with information on potential sponsors (170 of whom were placed into removal proceedings between July and November 2018).

Consequently, however, the time UACs spent in ORR care while proper sponsors were located increased from 48 days in FY 2017 to 89 days in FY 2020.

As CRS has explained, advocates contended the Trump I policy increased the number of UACs in custody and detention costs, and “extend[ed] family separation” while arguing adult sponsors’ immigration statuses were irrelevant to “a child’s safe placement with a sponsor”.

Candidate Joe Biden hammered Trump over sponsor vetting, complaining on his 2020 campaign website that “It is a moral failing and a national shame when … children are locked away in overcrowded detention centers and the government seeks to keep them there indefinitely,” and once he took office, ORR changed course.

A September 2022 report from the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) concluded that ORR guidance issued in March 2021 under Biden “greatly reduced the information collected by case managers to examine children’s mental health, social history, and the quality of children’s relationships with their potential sponsors, for children being released to a parent or legal guardian”.

That guidance also removed “a level of third-party review of the sponsor screening process designed to help ensure that children are safely released to their sponsors”, as well as “background checks and identity verification for other adult household members and alternate adult caregivers in cases involving a sponsor who is the child’s parent or legal guardian”.

In a July 2021 letter to ORR leadership, referenced in the OIG report, federal field specialists noted: “Case management staff are encouraged to strive to do the absolute minimum vetting of sponsors to effectuate the quickest releases. As a result, there are safety issues that are likely being overlooked.”

That turned out to be an understatement, as later media reports indicated children were being placed in unsafe conditions with often untrustworthy sponsors.

And yet most in the media ignored these issues. When candidate Trump complained about “88,000 missing children” during a town hall in Phoenix, Ariz., in June 2024, for example, the Washington Post fact-checker gave him “Three Pinocchios”, arguing:

HHS’s ability to reach children or their sponsors isn’t any better under Biden than it was under Trump. The main difference is that the numbers coming across the border are so much higher under Biden, so the number of children who can’t be reached is almost three times as large.

UAC Safety Verification Initiative

The voters, however, weren’t so blasé, and days after the 2024 election, I called on the incoming Trump II administration to set up a “Missing Migrant Children Task Force” to determine how many UACs released to sponsors couldn’t be located and then find them.

Which brings me to last week’s DHS press release announcing that ICE had launched the UAC Safety Verification Initiative to “protect” the 450,000 UACs “illegally smuggled over the border and placed with unvetted sponsors under the Biden administration”.

DHS has entered into 1,167 agreements with state and local law enforcement entities to “perform specified immigration officer functions” in accordance with authority in section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), and under this initiative, those cops will assist the agency in conducting “welfare checks on” UACs “to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited”.

Thus far, ICE has located 24,400 of those kids “through visits and door knocks”, but with the assistance of those state and local partners, this initiative will speed up that process.

14-Year-Old “Pregnant with the Sponsor’s Baby”

Neither the locals nor the agency should rest until that process is completed, because the press release indicates that more than a few children have been placed with predators. Consider the following examples:

In Maryland, ICE arrested a Guatemalan alien sponsor who had been arrested by Maryland law enforcement for rape of the unaccompanied child.

In Massachusetts, ICE arrested an Ecuadorian alien sponsor who had been criminally arrested for enticement of a child under 16 and possession of child sexual abuse material.

In New York, ICE arrested a Venezuelan alien sponsor who had been criminally arrested by New York law enforcement for prostitution, possession of marijuana, and failure to appear.

Nothing, however, chills the blood like the following: “In Texas, ICE and local law enforcement arrested a Guatemalan alien sponsor unrelated to the unaccompanied child for human trafficking and statutory rape. The 14-year-old unaccompanied child was pregnant with the sponsor’s baby” (emphasis in the original).

Expect Protests

Notwithstanding the likelihood that this initiative will save migrant children, expect protests to erupt when cops and ICE officers start knocking on doors to speak to sponsors.

Consider the following headline from “United We Dream”, which describes itself as “the largest immigrant youth-led network in the country”, members of which “advocate for the dignity and respect of all immigrants”: “As ICE Abducts and Disappears Parents, Moms Nationwide Are Speaking Out”.

That statement assumes any number of facts “not in evidence”, but for many advocacy groups, the “facts” are beside the point. In their worldview, everything related to immigration enforcement is bad, and all aliens are simply “looking for a better life” for them and their children.

Thanks to the lax UAC sponsor vetting regime under the Biden administration, ICE is only likely to find young teen UACs pregnant by their unrelated sponsors after their cases are investigated, meaning once officers speak to both the children and the adults entrusted with their care.

When the federal vehicles pull up in front of random houses, though, expect to see crowds of “citizen journalists” and advocates with their cellphones out, screaming epithets at the officers (or worse), even though it’s always better in the case of law enforcement to just let the process play itself out.

You’d expect the government to keep children safe, but under the last administration, tens of thousands of migrant kids went missing. ICE and its state and local partners are now trying to find them and save those being exploited. Let’s hope they’re successful, and that ill-informed agitators don’t derail the agency’s plans.