HHS Stonewalls FOIA Request on ‘Lost’ Migrant Children
Records would shed light on claims that Biden-Harris admin can’t locate 325,000 unaccompanied minors
By Colin Farnsworth on September 16, 2024
On August 30, 2024, Donald Trump claimed at a campaign rally that the Biden-Harris administration had lost track of 325,000 unaccompanied migrant children who had crossed the border illegally. It appears Trump’s statement was based roughly on numbers cited in an August 19, 2024, report prepared by the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security.
Concerns over the number of missing migrant children was first widely published in early 2023 by both the New York Times and the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. Those reports stated that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) lost contact with 85,000 migrant children in the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration after releasing the children to adult “sponsors”.
UAC zip code map
This map represents over 8000 zip codes that contain anywhere from one to thousands of missing UACs each, based upon the limited data HHS produced. After the judge forces HHS to lawfully interpret CIS’s FOIA request, the public will learn the exact number of missing UACs in each zip code, since 2021. Due to HHS’s delays, the judge’s decision is not expected until March of 2025.
Based on these 2023 reports, the Center for Immigration Studies submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to HHS to obtain “The zip code for each sponsor associated with each unaccompanied alien child (UAC) that the agency could not reach after its ‘safety and wellbeing call’, since January 1, 2021.” The Center’s request was designed to obtain the last known zip code of each missing child and, in turn, would also provide an updated count of missing children since the most recently reported number in early 2023. The Center’s FOIA request specifically stated its underlying purpose:
https://cis.org/Farnsworth/HHS-Stonewalls-FOIA-Request-Lost-Migrant-Children
