On
June 11, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin seemed
close to tears as he described what the Trump administration has deemed
the mass trafficking and abuse of children. Under the Biden
administration, Mullin asserted that “absolute horrific things” occurred. “Some of these kids claim that
they were raped six to seven hundred times,” he said. “We’re going to
rescue as many kids as we can possibly find…. As a father of six with three
young girls, I will do whatever I have to do.”
Mullin was not referring
to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, but rather to a widespread conspiracy-driven
theory about hundreds of thousands of “unaccompanied alien children,” or UACs, who
entered the United States during the Biden administration and are falsely
described by the Trump administration as missing and potentially trafficked.
Now under
intensified pressure to increase deportations and with a seemingly unlimited
budget, DHS is using its $150 billion windfall to incentivize local law enforcement to
assist in confirming the locations of UACs across the country via the 287(g)
program, which deputizes police, sheriffs, and some constables to act as
immigration agents. According to documents from DHS, these financial incentives
can add up to tens of thousands of dollars for each UAC found and verified.
Immigrant children
are facing multiple attacks by the Trump administration, including decimation
of legal services and ramped-up detention. Added to that mix, local police are
getting in on the action under the guise of protecting children and fighting
human trafficking. As part of the overall web of silent mass deportations, the
supposed search for UACs blends QAnon-style conspiracy theories with an
overfunded and supercharged deportation machine that has been targeting immigrant
children and families without regard to the human rights consequences.
“Sending armed
agents to the homes of immigrant children is not a safety check. It is a
serious threat of enforcement,” Mary Miller Flowers, the director of legislative affairs at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, explained. The
results are likely to be nothing short of disastrous for everyone involved.
When young people
enter the country seeking asylum without their parents, they are generally
released to a sponsor, often a family member already living in America. Unlike
adults, children are processed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR,
which is under the auspices of Department of Health and Human Services, not
DHS. According to a 1997 consent decree and the 2008 Trafficking
Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, child immigrants are entitled to certain
rights and protections, including safe and sanitary conditions as well as
prompt release from detention. Unlike DHS, a law enforcement agency, ORR was
intentionally kept separate. Jen Smyers, the deputy director of ORR during the
Biden administration, explained that ORR was intended to be about child welfare—not
immigration enforcement.
After ORR places
immigrant children with their sponsors, most UACs
receive a court date for their pending immigration case. These youth are
supposed to keep their addresses current in order to follow up on their
applications for asylum and immigration court dates, but not all of them do. Under the Biden administration, large numbers of UACs entered the country, largely as a result of changes to
draconian immigration policies imposed by the first Trump administration. Detention
facilities for these children filled to capacity, presenting dangers to young
people’s health and safety. As required, the Biden administration released children
to sponsors living in the United States.
Republicans have
claimed, with little evidence, that UACs were being placed with unvetted or
unfit sponsors, arguing that this amounted to “human trafficking.” These rumors
gained popularity as anti-immigration groups used alleged “human trafficking” as a
reason to limit migration. As soon as Trump came into office for the second time, his
administration claimed that nearly 450,000 UACs were potential victims of
trafficking and that some 300,000 were considered “missing.” Immigration
experts agree that this number is an utter invention—most UACs live with
their sponsors, and some are now adults.
Nevertheless,
Trump’s DHS has prioritized locating these young people alongside other
policies that have ramped up mass deportations, including by requiring ORR to
turn over all the information it has to DHS for law enforcement purposes. According
to a memo Immigration and Customs Enforcement released just days after Trump’s inauguration, DHS would
“commence an operational initiative” to locate UACs who entered the country
during the Biden administration. This included ensuring “UAC’s immigration
obligations are met” as well as “investigative activities to ensure
UAC are not subjected to crimes of human trafficking or other
exploitation.”
The initial
phases of the initiative, according to the memo, were focused on locating UACs who were threats
to public safety or flight risks, including young people who had run away from
shelters. Later stages of the program appear intended to locate UACs and charge
their sponsors with potential crimes—such as trafficking, violations of the
Mann Act, or making false statements. Other publications have reported that ICE has hired private companies to locate immigrants,
including UACs. DHS agents have also been engaged in these “wellness checks,”
including in at least two Los Angeles elementary schools. It is not clear exactly what is happening
to the children the agencies do find, but in most cases, they are still in deportation
proceedings.
In November 2025, DHS announced that 287(g) agencies would also have the option to
participate in locating UACs, beginning in Florida, an example of the mission
creep for 287(g). The memo reads, “The primary focus of this initiative is to conduct welfare
checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited.”
Information about these UACs was sent to law enforcement, and the 287(g)
partners are expected to return “an electronic form” to an email address, UAC287g@ice.dhs.
Mullin and DHS
have made “locating” these children a priority, transferring reams of
information about UACs and their sponsors from ORR to DHS, as Reuters just reported. Attorney General Todd Blanche has
instructed prosecutors to prioritize charges against UAC sponsors as part of
this program. In reality, this so-called “verification initiative” has led
to more arrests, mostly of adult sponsors. “They are trying to lay the
predicate to do more removals,” Scott Shuchart, an immigration attorney and a former
DHS official, explained. ICE, he said, was “spending like a moron with lottery
money.”
Since Trump took
office in January 2025, 287(g) agreements have exploded. Most of the agreements are “task force” agreements, a
program that allows local law enforcement to act like roving immigration agents
with the same powers to question, arrest, and detain. Thanks to DHS’s
supersized budget, 287(g) task force agencies are eligible for compensation, including reimbursement for officer time
and stipends for vehicles and other equipment.
There is no real way
to track which 287(g) partners are also locating UACs as part of DHS’s program, because DHS has largely forbidden them from disclosing
specifics. (The Young Center filed a lawsuit this week for records on the UAC
verification initiative.)
The information we
do have suggests that agencies are being paid (or at least seeking payment)
for each UAC verified. A reporter from the Chattanooga Times Free Press found through public records that an
elected constable in southeastern Tennessee was assisting with locating UACs in
other states. He had already received $107,500 for a vehicle and equipment, and
he billed DHS for additional time. A document from the constable explains a payment structure that
resembles a bounty—agencies are paid up to $2,500 for confirming the address
of UAC as well as up to $20,000 for “verify[ing] the child’s safety and living
conditions,” as well as school enrollment status.
The mission is
presented in the documents thus: “The UAC Safety Verification Initiative builds
a unified framework among law enforcement partners to ensure every
unaccompanied child is safe, accounted for, and protected from harm. It’s about
coordination, accountability, and shared duty—every officer, every agency,
working together for every child.”
Information about
agencies participating in UAC verification has been difficult to find. The
impact of this “safety verification initiative” has been done with little
notification or alert.
On the few
occasions that members of the public obtain information, officials have reacted
fairly quickly. In Ohio, for example, a police chief from the township of Gratis went to a Cincinnati public school in an
attempt to verify the location of some children there, according to school
officials. Not only did the school principal deny access, but the officer was placed on administrative leave.
In Lancaster
County, Pennsylvania, the local district attorney Heather Adams signed a 287(g) agreement with
ICE in September 2025 and trained one detective through a 40-hour online course
for the “task force” 287(g) program. Adams told the public, “No one in our office is conducting immigration
‘sweeps’ or stopping cars as a part of our 287(g) agreement to assist in
immigration enforcement.”
It was not until
March of this year that community members learned that this 287(g) task force
agreement included a provision that allowed the trained detective to assist
with the Unaccompanied Alien Children Safety Verification Initiative. (Trex
Profitt, a member of Indivisible Lancaster, said that he thought the disclosure
was an inadvertent slipup by Adams.) Adams issued a press release claiming the detective’s involvement was
“minimal.”
With 287(g)
programs reaching historic heights—according to one researcher, there are now over 2,000 agencies with at
least one agreement around the country—more local law enforcement agencies
may become involved in locating immigrant children, often without clear
guidelines or public notification. Plus, since it is back-to-school season,
advocates told me that many people are concerned about the safety of sending
children to school. “Giving the task of ‘child wellness checks’ to local law
enforcement only exacerbates the widespread fear and distrust that immigrant
families and communities experience when they consistently see local law
enforcement engaged in immigration arrests and enforcement,” Nithya Nathan-Pineau, policy attorney at the Immigrant
Legal Resource Center, said.
The greatest risk,
according to advocates, is the arrest of adult sponsors and other family
members. Once a child’s sponsor is arrested, that child returns to the
custody of ORR and is still placed in deportation proceedings, according to Smyers. Under Trump, the ORR has added additional hurdles before it places kids
with a sponsor, including complete background checks, which has led to children
spending more time in ORR custody and has further separated parents from their
children.
Combined with the
ongoing crisis over the lack of lawyers for young immigrants and hurried mass deportation hearings, children face an unprecedented risk of deportation.
The Trump administration recently gave a no-bid contract to OUR Rescue, an “anti-trafficking” nonprofit formerly
known as “Operation Underground Railroad,” to represent immigrant children in
court. The founder of OUR Rescue, Tim Ballard, was ousted over accusations of
sexual assault and trafficking.
It’s plain that
DHS’s main concern is not human trafficking; instead, it appears to be using a
manhunt for UACs, under the guise of protecting children, as yet another way to
locate immigrants to deport. None of this keeps children
safe, Flowers emphasizes: “We know what keeps kids safe: being with family who
loves them, living in a home and not a detention facility, and having a lawyer
who represents them.”
