On-going for several years now has been concern with whether or not the US has "lost 1,500+" unaccompanied minors who were placed with sponsors across the country. It seems that between the two extremes of "They've lost of all of them!" and "We've lost none of them!", is the truth:
Quote (New York Times (2018))
The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters, according to congressional findings released on Tuesday.
The revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out of shelters last year.
In findings that lawmakers described as troubling, Senate investigators said the department could not determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,488 out of 11,254 children the agency had placed with sponsors in 2018, based on follow-up calls from April 1 to June 30.
People concerned about this believe it irresponsible for the US government to place children with sponsors and not have a system in place that keeps track of them, increasing the likelihood that they become abused or subjected to human trafficking. One prominent example that let this concern really catch wind was:
Quote (Snopes)
In July 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted a ring of traffickers led by Aroldo Castillo-Serrano and accused them of smuggling children into the United States. They were also accused of lying to Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) by posing as relatives in order to gain custody of children in its care and use them for forced labor in Marion, a city north of Columbus. The federal indictment, filed in U.S. district court in Ohio accuses Castillo-Serrano and his conspirators of forcing the children to live in squalid trailers and work six or seven 12-hour days a week, using threats and physical violence as coercion.
According to the Justice Department, Castillo-Serrano pleaded guilty in August 2015 to counts related to trafficking. He was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison and ordered to pay restitution to the victims.
However, the DHHS contends that they're not responsible for the whereabouts of unaccompanied minors placed with sponsors after they've been placed, aside from a voluntary phone call. If the sponsors don't answer, or if the number is disconnected, then there's very little effort beyond this phone call made to confirm the whereabouts and well-being of the children. A fairly high percentage of these children are with sponsors who do answer the calls (84%), and so a minority of sponsors actually do not get in contact with the DHHS. The main explanation provided by the DHHS for why sponsors don't answer calls from a federal agency is because many of them are undocumented immigrants themselves, and avoid interactions with the federal government as a result.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/us/politics/us-migrant-children-whereabouts-.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/us/trump-immigrant-children-lost.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footerhttps://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-obama-administration-children-human-traffickers/This post was edited by Handcuffs on Jul 7 2020 12:11am