Under Joe Biden, Have 85,000 Undocumented Children 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 didn't report on this fact, why?".

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.

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.”

"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.

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.”

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.

In later comments, Rep. Andy Biggs, noted the distinction between losing a child and failure to establish contact but argued that ORR had "No idea" where the children were.

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.

In April 2023, Sen. Josh Hawley 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.

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.