Protecting children shouldn’t require political courage. It should be the bare minimum — the one thing every American, regardless of party, agrees on without hesitation. Our grandparents understood this. Our parents understood this. It’s baked into every institution we hold dear, from our families to our courtrooms.

But something went catastrophically wrong over the past four years. While politicians in Washington treated immigration as an abstract policy debate, hundreds of thousands of children were being smuggled across our southern border and delivered into the hands of strangers. What federal investigators have now uncovered isn’t just a policy failure. It’s an indictment of an entire administration’s conscience.

From The Post Millennial:

On Thursday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, alongside several other federal officials, held a press conference on 146,000 alien children that had been found and the administration’s efforts to protect the unaccompanied migrant youth.

Both Blanche and Mullin spoke about the administration’s efforts to bring human traffickers to justice.

Read that again. 146,000 children — found. That’s the good news, if you can stomach calling any part of this story good. The bad news? That number represents barely one-third of the estimated 450,000 kids illegally smuggled into this country during the Biden administration. Roughly 300,000 children remain unaccounted for. Tonight. Right now. Somewhere in America.

A crisis born of negligence

The press conference on Thursday laid bare the staggering scope of Biden-era incompetence. Angie Salazar, acting director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, testified that more than 97,000 background checks on child sponsors simply never happened. Over 76,000 mandatory safety checks? Skipped. More than 81,000 addresses were used to place migrant children. Never visited. Never verified. Not once.

Think about what that means in practice. Children were handed off to strangers carrying fake IDs. Strangers who lied about being relatives. Strangers the federal government couldn’t be bothered to Google, let alone investigate. The system wasn’t broken. It was abandoned.

Secretary Mullin described what investigators discovered when they finally started looking. Some children reported being raped 600 to 700 times. Let that number sit with you for a moment. That’s not a statistic. That’s a childhood destroyed beyond recognition. One-third of girls smuggled into the country were likely sexually assaulted before they even reached the border.

Mullin called the Biden administration’s conduct “true neglect at best and criminal at worst.” Acting Attorney General Blanche went further, saying senior officials in the previous administration “knew this was happening and either didn’t care, encouraged it or a little bit of both.”

Sanctuary cities: safe havens for traffickers

So where are these kids turning up? Precisely where common sense would predict. “Sanctuary cities,” Mullin told reporters, “because they know they’re safe. That’s why they’re called sanctuary cities.” He called out New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani by name, accusing him of actively “harboring” and “abetting” the criminals who exploit children.

And here’s what should absolutely infuriate you. Democrats recently voted in lockstep against the $70 billion immigration bill that funds DHS operations through 2029. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries dismissed it as a “waste of taxpayer dollars.” A waste. The agency rescuing trafficked children from sex rings — and Jeffries calls funding it a waste. Remarkable priorities from the party that claims a monopoly on compassion.

Cleaning up the mess

Credit where it’s earned. The Trump administration isn’t issuing press releases and moving on. Three Guatemalan nationals in Ohio have been indicted for smuggling migrant minors. The DOJ is actively pursuing 15,500 “super sponsor” cases tied to hundreds of thousands of trafficked children. ORR has overhauled its entire vetting apparatus — DNA testing is now mandatory when sponsors claim family ties, finances are verified, and placement addresses are physically inspected.

“President Trump has made it a point to go find these kids,” Mullin said. That’s what actual governance looks like, as opposed to whatever the last administration was doing.

Three hundred thousand children are still missing. The Biden administration manufactured this nightmare through willful, documented indifference — and now Democrats in Congress are actively trying to defund the people cleaning it up. Mullin posed the right question on Thursday: “If you can’t stand for law enforcement to go find these kids, who are you?” Every Democrat who voted against that funding should have to answer that question on camera, to the parents of every single missing child.

Key Takeaways

• The Trump administration has located 146,000 trafficked children — roughly 300,000 remain missing.
• Biden-era officials skipped nearly 100,000 background checks on sponsors who took custody of migrant kids.
• Most rescued children were found in sanctuary cities whose leaders actively obstruct federal law enforcement.
• Democrats voted unanimously against funding the very agency rescuing these children.

Sources: The Post Millennial, NewsNation