White House border czar Tom Homan announced Thursday that a federal immigration operation in Minnesota has located 3,364 unaccompanied alien children — kids he says the Biden administration lost track of and never bothered to find.
"ICE here, in this state, have located 3,364 missing, unaccompanied alien children. Children the last administration lost and weren't even looking for."
Homan also announced plans to end Operation Metro Surge, though he did not elaborate on the operational details behind the 3,364 figure — what "located" means in practice, or what happens to these children now.
The number is striking on its own. It becomes staggering when you zoom out.
Homan's Minnesota figure appears connected to a much larger problem the administration has been flagging for over a year. A federal report found that more than 320,000 unaccompanied migrant children either failed to appear for immigration hearings or were never even issued a notice to appear in court. Vice President JD Vance referenced this figure in late 2024, saying Homeland Security had effectively lost 320,000 children, as Breitbart reports.
The underlying data covers October 2018 through September 2023. During that five-year window, ICE released 448,820 unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement. Of those:
The federal report itself offers no explanations for why these children went unaccounted for. No breakdown of what happened to them. No accounting of where they ended up. Just a massive number and silence.
Unnamed immigration experts have characterized this as a "missing paperwork problem" rather than a "missing kids problem." Media fact-checks from the Associated Press and USA Today have echoed this framing, suggesting the administration's use of the 320,000 figure misrepresents or distorts the underlying data.
This deserves scrutiny — but not in the direction the media intends.
When nearly 300,000 children released into the interior of the United States never even receive a notice to appear before an immigration judge, calling it a "paperwork problem" is not a rebuttal. It's an admission. The system designed to track these children and ensure they appeared before a court simply didn't function. Whether you call that "lost kids" or "lost paperwork," the result is identical: the federal government released hundreds of thousands of minors into the country and then lost the ability to account for them.
The distinction between "we don't know where these children are" and "we never bothered to send them a court date" is not the exoneration the fact-checkers seem to think it is. One implies negligence after the fact. The other implies the system was never serious about enforcement in the first place.
The data window — October 2018 to September 2023 — spans both administrations. Roughly 15 months of that period fell under Trump's first term. The rest fell under Biden. The source data does not break down how many of the 448,820 children arrived under each president, but the math is directional. The border crisis that produced the overwhelming majority of unaccompanied minors accelerated dramatically after January 2021. The Biden administration's policy posture — dismantling Remain in Mexico, pausing deportations, signaling openness — created the conditions under which hundreds of thousands of minors were processed and released.
And then no one followed up.
Children were reportedly sent to foster care, shelters, or to live with family members through a Homeland Security refugee program. Some may have qualified for asylum or special immigration visas. But for more than 320,000 of them, the government either never initiated removal proceedings or watched as they simply didn't show up to court. Under Biden, the pipeline moved in one direction — into the country — with no functioning mechanism pulling anyone back.
Homan's claim raises a fair question: what does it mean, operationally, to "locate" 3,364 children? Were they physically found? Were their cases updated in a database? Were they contacted by ICE agents? Homan didn't say, and the distinction matters. If these children were physically identified and their welfare confirmed, that's a significant enforcement and humanitarian achievement. If it's a records reconciliation, it's useful but less dramatic than the language suggests.
The administration would do well to clarify. The facts here are damning enough without ambiguity. More than 320,000 children unaccounted for across the federal system is not a number that needs embellishment — it needs explanation, accountability, and a visible effort to fix it.
The media's instinct on this story has been to fact-check the Republican framing rather than investigate the underlying catastrophe. Every outlet racing to qualify whether these children are technically "missing" or merely "untracked" is asking the wrong question. The right question is: how did the federal government release nearly half a million minors into the country over five years and lose meaningful contact with the majority of them?
That's not a paperwork problem. That's a policy choice dressed up as incompetence. The Biden administration built an intake system with no back end — a conveyor belt that moved children from the border into the interior and then shrugged. No court dates. No follow-up. No accountability. And when the numbers finally surfaced, the institutional response was to quibble about terminology.
Three thousand three hundred sixty-four children in one state. Over 320,000 nationwide. The previous administration wasn't even looking. This one is.
