On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy gave testimony before the Senate Finance Committee. In his opening remarks, Kennedy mentioned as part of his successes as HHS Secretary, the location of 22,000 of the 476,000 unaccompanied minors that had gone missing from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) under the Biden-Harris administration.
First, we are doing our part to fulfill the president’s commitment to stop human trafficking, especially of children. We inherited a terrible humanitarian crisis from the previous administration with its open border policies which allowed the appalling loss of 476,000 unaccompanied children. We have implemented policies now to ensure that that appaling tragedy can never happen again.
We have knocked on 82,000 doors and located 22,000 of those children. I promise you that we will do more in the next three years.
As RedState reported in August of 2024, the Office of Inspector General had documented the number of unaccompanied minors that had gone missing as 290,000.
In 2020, then-Senator Kamala Harris tweeted about the “outrageous” separation of 545 unaccompanied minors, attaching a link to an NBC article directly blaming the Trump administration. Fast forward to 2024, and under Border Czar Kamala Harris, ICE has now reported that over 290,000 undocumented minors are not only separated from their parent or guardian, but no one in the Biden-Harris administration knows where they are. Not a peep from NBC News, and the few headlines from other news organizations use the generic designation of “The Department of Homeland Security” instead of attaching this gross incompetence to the Biden-Harris administration.
By November 2024, when then-HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra was in the hot seat for his complicity in this debacle, this number had expanded to 320,000. All told, between January 2021, when Biden-Harris first threw open the border, to December 2024, ORR had received more than 470,000 referrals for unaccompanied minor children, and all those children had somehow disappeared into the ether.
Hellbound and Down 