At Townhall, Mia Cathell asks the key question surrounding this disturbing news. Where are the missing children? The children in question are unaccompanied minors who entered the country illegally between 2019 and 2023. We're not talking about a few kids who somehow became lost in the shuffle at the border. There are more than 32,000 of them that cannot be accounted for. The Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security issued a disturbing report on Tuesday admitting that tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors were encountered at the border and given appointments to appear in immigration court at a later date, but more than 30,000 of them failed to appear and ICE is unable to track them and monitor their location or their condition. We are left to ask the obvious question of how something like this was allowed to happen. 

Since 2019, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lost track of tens of thousands of illegal alien children released into the United States, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)'s inspector general found.

Inspector General Joseph Cuffari issued the alarming 18-page report, titled "Management Alert - ICE Cannot Monitor All Unaccompanied Migrant Children Released from DHS and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Custody," and sent his office's findings to Congress on Tuesday.

According to the internal investigation assessing ICE's ability to monitor the whereabouts and welfare of children who had entered the United States illegally and arrived alone, the immigration enforcement agency cannot locate over 32,000 unaccompanied alien children (UACs) let into the country over a five-year period.

The report concludes that ICE transferred more than 448,000 illegal alien minors to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)'s custody during the five-year period in question. To their credit, they managed to keep tabs on more than 400,000 of them, but the rest have simply disappeared. There was no explanation offered beyond the IG saying that, "ICE cannot always monitor the location and status of UCs once they were released from DHS and HHS custody."

That brings us to what should have been the first and most obvious question. Why were any minors being released into the wild from HHS custody without a responsible adult taking charge of their welfare? It's bad enough that we do that with tens of millions of adults (many of whom turn out to have gang affiliations or are on the terror watchlist), but simply dropping off underage children to fend for themselves should be inexcusable. 

To be clear, the term "underage" applies to anyone 17 years of age or younger. I'm sure there are many 17-year-olds who were already fending for themselves, and some of them unfortunately may have already established criminal records. But we've all seen the videos of the traffic coming across the southern border and it frequently includes a lot of babies and elementary school-age kids. They are the most vulnerable to underage labor abuse and even child sex trafficking rings. Some of them reportedly show up with printed information naming relatives who will be willing to take them in, but it's impossible to accurately verify the contact information for all of those people or determine if they are even related. In either case, the child should be accompanied by an adult until they at least reach their final destination. 

It's tempting to cut CBP some slack on this issue because this wouldn't be happening if the flow of migrants wasn't so consistently overwhelming. But even with that being the case, the correct response would have been to turn more adults away and force them to remain in Mexico while our resources on this side of the border were more focused on the children. All of that was possible under Trump's policies, but it was Joe Biden's open border policies that brought us to this point and completely overwhelmed a system that had previously been working fairly well. If any of those children are found to be dead or living in servitude, the finger of blame must be pointed directly at Joe Biden and his border czar, Kamala Harris.