"Our government, under the policies of Kamala Harris, has lost thousands of innocent children to sex trafficking, to drug trafficking, to human trafficking," Vance said.

One year later, the fate of most of those children remains unknown. While the Trump administration has all but stopped the crush of migrants that occurred during Biden's term, neither the government nor the nonprofits that were largely responsible for resettling this vulnerable population of unaccompanied minors have been able to tell RealClearInvestigations where they are living.

Experts say it's likely that the overwhelming majority of unaccompanied minors remain off the grid because their parents, guardians, and caregivers do not want to draw the attention of immigration authorities. But they also acknowledge the likelihood that some of the migrant minors have been picked up by human traffickers and forced into exploitative labor and sexual roles – a criminal trend that's on the rise in the U.S. 

This story has been forgotten as politicians and the media have turned their attention away from immigration after Trump virtually closed the southern border. But the recent shooting of two members of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., by an Afghan refugee who had collaborated with the U.S. special forces has brought the issue of a broken immigration system back to the forefront. 

Nearly half a million unaccompanied minors under the age of 18 were apprehended at the border between 2021 and 2024, overwhelming the immigration system. Taxpayers spent more than $23 billion on a network of government agencies, construction companies, and nonprofits charged with finding them a safe place to live while sponsors were sought. 

Now the entities that took the money are unwilling to address the whereabouts of the minors. Nor are they forthcoming about how they spent – or misspent – the funding that was supposed to avoid the very problem the nation faces of missing migrant children.

"They don't want to talk about it," said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies. "Those groups are the very ones that were pressing to release the unaccompanied kids faster."