Unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. border each year present among the most worrying challenges in America's response to migration, with reports showing a recent rise in apprehensions of children, and criticism that the White House has violated providing legal protections for them.
A March 2023 report by the Council on Foreign Relations think tank stated that more than 152,000 unaccompanied minors were found at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2022, an all-time high, separated from friends or family.
As conservatives and others argue for stricter immigration policies and border control measures, the welfare of these children has formed part of their argument. Reports earlier this year that a 17-year-old Honduran migrant had died while in U.S. custody was referenced by, among others, Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, who accused President Joe Biden of "causing death" at the border.
Incidents like this have at the very least highlighted the treacherousness that children face. Some, however, argue that these stories risk becoming a tool of partisan politics. If that is true, therein lies the possibility that information and data surrounding this phenomenon could become distorted as a result.
One such instance appeared on social media this week, with a claim suggesting tens of thousands of child migrants had gone missing.
A Facebook post by former U.S. senatorial candidate Peggy Hubbard, posted on 11 July, 2023, read: "85,000 + illegal migrant children have gone 'missing' according to DHS Since Biden took office. MSM [mainstream media] didn't report on this fact, why?"
To find out whether that claim warranted merit, Newsweek investigated the story which led to it.
Losing Contact
There are a number of things to unpick here.
To start, the figure appears to be sourced from a New York Times article, published in February 2023, about migrant children working in jobs that violate labor laws.
The article states that in 2022 there were 130,000 unaccompanied minors who entered the U.S., "three times what it was five years earlier". Although unaccompanied, these minors were not children who had been "stolen into the country undetected" the article read.
It added: "The federal government knows they are in the United States, and the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for ensuring sponsors will support them and protect them from trafficking or exploitation."
The Times report also included figures attributed to the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) about monitoring checks carried out on all unaccompanied minors who'd been homed after entering the U.S.
This is where the 85,000 "missing" figure appears to have come from.
"While H.H.S. checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children," the article read.
"Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children."
Newsweek has contacted the article's author, Hannah Dreier, via email for comment and data.
As the article states, if an unaccompanied child is referred to the HHS—more specifically, its Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)—efforts are then made to put them into the care of a sponsor.
As an HHS fact check released in 2023 confirms: "As soon as children enter ORR care, they are put in contact with their parents, guardians, or relatives, if known, and the process of finding a suitable sponsor begins.
"The vast majority of sponsors are a parent or a close family relative living in the United States."
After these minors are put into the care of a sponsor, the ORR then carries out "safety and well-being" calls to follow-up on the arrangement. A 2023 ORR audit stated: "While sponsors and children are not required to respond to a call and sometimes contact information is no longer accurate, ORR makes at least three separate attempts to call all available phone numbers to reach both the child and sponsor."
The audit claimed that ORR was able to reach the sponsor, the child, or both in more than 80 percent of cases.
This is slightly confusing, as it doesn't seem to fit with the figures provided by the New York Times. HSS states that in the last two years, tracked by state, 235,093 unaccompanied children were placed with sponsors. However, as the February 2023 Times report read "over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children" (nowhere near the 80% contact rate HSS quotes in its audit).
Newsweek has contacted HSS to clarify.
What is clear is that when check-in calls are not received, that is not the same as saying a child has gone missing or disappeared.
This is where the confusion and conflation appear to have started.
Examination and Outrage
After the New York Times published its article, a number of Republican senators and representatives began scrutinizing the HHS. Some appeared to suggest that 85,000 children had gone missing, not that follow-up contact hadn't been established in that number of cases.
At an April 2023 Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing, ORR director Robin Dunn Marcos was challenged by Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), who said: "It was reported in the New York Times, according to reports, you've lost or you don't no longer know where 85,000 unaccompanied minors are."
Dunn Marcos replied: "I would like to set the record straight, we did not lose anyone. We provide safety and well-being calls between 30 and 37 days after release.
"ORR's custodial authority ends when they are discharged to a vetted sponsor. However, our concern does not and we have a number of things in place where we try to maintain contact..."
Dunn Marcos added that ORR was "very committed to continuing to provide support post-release services" which she said remained "our best option to provide continual care for them."
Grothman later pressed: "So could the 85,000 number be right that the New York Times has? We don't know where 85,000 unaccompanied minors wound up?"
When Dunn Marcos repeated that ORR custodial authority ends after a child is discharged to a sponsor, Grothman replied: "We will take that to mean we don't know where they are."
In later comments, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), noted the distinction between losing a child and failure to establish contact but argued that ORR had "no idea" where the children were.
Newsweek has contacted an ORR representative via email to ask for its thoughts on these characterizations and whether there were other data about post-custodial services.
The end of ORR's custodial authority, and the reported inability to contact 85,000 children thereafter, is arguably concerning, even if ORR attempts to provide post-custodial services and manages to contact a significant number of children or sponsors.
However, this issue was markedly different from the way it was described by some politicians and public figures elsewhere.
For example, in April 2023, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) issued a statement titled "Hawley Demands FBI Launch Full-Scale Effort to Locate Missing Migrant Children" calling for a "a full-scale effort [to] be made to locate the nearly 85,000 migrant children that have gone missing under the Biden administration."
While Hawley later clarified in the same statement that this referred to HSS losing contact "with as many as 85,000 migrant children", a cursory interpretation may lead one to believe that children had disappeared entirely, failing to mention how they had been processed through ORR's services and put into sponsor care beforehand.
A similar (arguably misleading) headline was published by the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, describing the hearing with Dunn Marcos: "ORR Director Fails to Answer Questions About 85,000 Lost Unaccompanied Alien Children."
The report states that ORR had "lost contact" with 85,000 children but doesn't clearly state this was after they were released by ORR into the care of a sponsor.
More misleading was the summary of Rep. Biggs' questioning saying he had asked "why 85,000 unaccompanied children from the border have been reported missing in the past two years", despite Biggs recognizing during the hearing that 85,000 were the children ORR had been unable to contact.
Did 85,000 children go 'missing'?
To return to Peggy Hubbard's claim, the former senatorial candidate quoted the wording "missing" in her Facebook post.
Much like some of the other coverage that has surrounded this story, this punctuation may suggest to a discerning reader that there was more information behind the central claim.
However, like some of the other headlines, there is simply not enough information within the post that clearly states the surrounding data and background.
While the details of the 85,000 figure can be gleaned from further scrutiny, one may reasonably believe from a cursory reading of material like this that 85,000 children had disappeared, not that post-custodial checks received no response.
This may have led some to interpret that these children had disappeared entirely.
Newsweek has contacted Hubbard's campaign email and an email available via her Facebook to ask what the intention of the post was and whether they knew that the underlying story was about contact rates, not disappearances.
Again, this examination of how the figures have been interpreted does not dismiss the important questions being asked about contact rates.
What it does highlight, however, is that the matter has not always been summarized with clear details, leading to potentially misleading interpretations.
Newsweek has contacted the White House via email to comment on the challenges made about President Biden's responsibility in this matter.
