by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News August 4, 2026
Roughly 540,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended after crossing into the U.S. illegally during the Biden-Harris regime. About 448,000 were released to sponsors.
Due to the poor vetting of sponsors, the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of those children is unknown, former Health and Human Services (HHS) official John Fabbricatore told the Heritage Foundation in June.
While over 100,000 of the children have been found by his administration, President Donald Trump said efforts to locate the more than 300,000 that remain missing are not being helped by sanctuary cities and states.
Fabbricatore, who helped lead the Trump Administration’s operation to find the children, said the task remains difficult due to the Biden-Harris regime’s lack of monitoring and rampant fraud and misrepresentation the regime accepted from January 2020 through January 2025.
Among the sponsors of the unaccompanied minors were over 15,000 classified as “super-sponsors,” meaning they claimed more than three children each. In one of the most egregious cases, a single Guatemalan woman (here illegally) was able to take custody as the sponsor of 41 children, who were then trafficked for labor. She has subsequently been indicted.
While there are more than 1,500 unaccompanied minors under the care of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) currently, that is seen as far more manageable than the thousands that were reportedly taken in per week under the Biden-Harris open border policies.
Sanctuary cities which refuse to cooperate with federal immigration operations are part of the missing children problem, the Trump Administration contends.
There are approximately 600 sanctuary jurisdictions of differing sizes across the country.
