Has the US government found 145,000 ‘lost’ migrant children? Fact-checking Kristi Noem

Kristi Noem's recent comments during two congressional hearings drew scrutiny on several levels. From President Donald Trump, who fired the Homeland Security secretary March 5 after denying he knew of her decision to spend over $200 million on an ad campaign featuring her. And from experts interested in the Noem's statements about the alleged recovery of missing migrant children.

During one of the hearings, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Noem accused former President Joe Biden of losing nearly half a million immigrant children, and commended her department for finding more than a quarter of them.

"Under President Biden, more than 450,000 unaccompanied alien children went missing or were lost due to the dangerous open border policies that were embraced," Noem said at the March 3 hearing. "Under President Trump, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services have already located over 145,000 of these children."

Noem repeated the statement again in a March 5 X post thanking Trump and listing her accomplishments.

Trump and members of his cabinet have talked about lost immigrant children since the 2024 presidential campaign, and cite a Homeland Security report from that year. But as PolitiFact and other outlets have previously reported, those statements distort the report’s findings. 

Looking at data spanning both the Trump and Biden administrations, from fiscal year 2019 to 2023, the report found Immigration and Customs Enforcement could not monitor all unaccompanied minors released from the agency’s custody. It didn’t say the children were "missing" or "lost."

But later in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Noem said the children had been found through the "investigative work" of Homeland Security Investigations, a law enforcement branch of DHS that focuses on cases related to human smuggling and trafficking, money laundering, and transnational gang activity.

DHS told PolitiFact in February that the administration had located more than 145,000 children through "visits and door knocks."

"We've jumpstarted our efforts to rescue children who were victims of sex and labor trafficking by working with our state and local law enforcement partners to locate these children," the department said in a statement.

Other members of the Trump administration have also touted the discovery of "lost" or "found" children.

White House Border Czar Tom Homan said in February that ICE officers in Minnesota had "located 3,364 missing unaccompanied alien children. Children that the last administration lost and weren't even looking for." 

In a December Fox News interview, Homan said the administration had found 62,000 children nationwide.

But Jennifer Podkul, chief of global policy and advocacy at KIND, a nonprofit organization that advocates for unaccompanied minors, said calling the children lost is a "fundamental misunderstanding" of the process and the report.

Report did not say hundreds of thousands of migrant children were missing

Unaccompanied minors are children under 18 years old who arrive at the U.S. border without a parent or legal guardian. Under federal law, border agents must refer unaccompanied minors to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, under HHS. The office must then quickly seek a sponsor for the child, typically a family member.

If the child seeks legal status in the U.S., for example by applying for asylum, DHS is responsible for tracking the case.

The Homeland Security report audited this process and found:

• ICE transferred 448,000 unaccompanied minors to HHS custody.

• ICE had not served 291,000 of them with a Notice to Appear, a charging document with instructions to appear in immigration court. ICE is required to file these.

• More than 32,000 unaccompanied minors failed to appear for their immigration court hearings.

"That does not mean in any way that the child is missing," said Mary Miller Flowers, director of policy at the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights. "That means that paperwork largely has not been able to reach that child, or phone calls have not been able to reach that child."

Miller Flowers said ICE may not have been able to serve a child a Notice to Appear because they moved, they didn’t have a complete address on file or the sponsor didn't answer a phone call or letter.

Jonathan Beier, the Acacia Center for Justice’s research and evaluation director, previously told PolitiFact that the report focused only on ICE records overseeing children’s cases in immigration court. It did not mention checking records with other government agencies that are involved in migrant children’s cases, such as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, another DHS agency that processes some efforts to obtain legal residency. 

ICE losing track of unaccompanied minors is likely a reflection of agencies not collaborating, not a child being at risk or a sponsor being a threat, Podkul said.

What does the administration mean when it says it found thousands of children?

We don’t know, and we haven’t been able to get a straight answer. Trump administration officials have been vague about what they mean by saying they have "found" hundreds of thousands of children. 

In response to PolitiFact’s questions about such comments, DHS sent a list of more than a dozen examples of sponsors who had been arrested on criminal charges including assault, attempted robbery and rape. The department did not specify whether the unaccompanied minors of those sponsors were among the 330,000 who did not receive a Notice to Appear or failed to appear in court.

"Oftentimes, when they say they found them, what they did is they went and they knocked on the door of the address they had on their paperwork, and the kid was there," Podkul said. "They didn't find them necessarily working in a factory in the middle of the night, being taken advantage of. They found them exactly where the kid said that they were going to be."

Experts on unaccompanied minors acknowledged that migrant children are vulnerable and could end up in dangerous situations. In a Pulitzer-winning investigation, The New York Times detailed the stories of migrant children working dangerous jobs at factories. 

However, experts said that reality doesn’t support the administration's talking point that hundreds of thousands of children were lost and later found.

"To say that they are missing and unfindable just really stretches the bounds of accuracy," Miller Flowers said.