When unaccompanied minors arrive in the U.S., they are typically transferred from border patrol (or customs officers) to the custody of the HHS.

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Work in progress on the Mexican side of the US/MEXICO border

A post shared by JR (@jr) on Sep 6, 2017 at 1:33pm PDT

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reunites the adolescent with a relative or another sponsor.

Minors leave their home countries seeking refuge in America due to a multitude of reasons; Violence from Wars, poverty, and to reunite with family members.

According to The Washington Post, the U.S. lost track of 1,475 immigrant children last year.

From October to December 2017, HHS called 7,635 children the agency had placed with sponsors, and found 6,075 of the children were still living with their sponsors, 28 had run away, five had been deported and 52 were living with someone else. The rest were missing, said Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary at HHS.

HHS does not track unaccompanied minors who fail to appear at their immigration court hearings. Sponsors are meant to ensure that minors go to immigration court hearings.

Once a child is released to a parent or sponsor the HSS does very little to follow up, they no longer have any responsibility for that child.

FYI, another point about this: we do not know how many of these children weren’t located because they and their relatives in the US (who might even be their parents!) made the decision to go off the grid to reduce deportation risk.

— Dara Lind (@DLind) May 26, 2018

Some argue that these children are missing because they have chosen to “go off the grid”, others worry that these children are victims of human trafficking.

These Guatemalan teens were forced by a third-party contractor to work against their will at Trillium Farms in Ohio — one of the country’s largest egg producers.

Their families raised $15,000 to help smuggle the teens into America, even selling their house notes. Once the boys made the dangerous trip across the border, they were detained by U.S. border patrol and sent to HHS as unaccompanied minors.

Instead of being safely settled in America, they were brought to Ohio, and forced to live and work in virtual slavery to pay off their debts.

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View from the Mexican side

A post shared by JR (@jr) on Sep 8, 2017 at 9:34am PDT

The alleged masterminds of the trafficking scheme (Ana Angelica Pedro Juan, 22, of Guatemala, and Her co-conspirators, Aroldo Castillo Serrano, 33, of Guatemala, and Conrado Salgado Soto, 53, of Mexico) are now in federal custody.

Trillium Farms itself has not been charged with any wrongdoing, but they have announced that they had no knowledge of trafficking teens working at their company.

When I say cursory I mean cursory. We’re talking about phone calls. Phone calls!! Like, no door knocks. No checking school records. They called. They didn’t find answers.

— josie duffy rice (@jduffyrice) May 28, 2018

“It’s just a system that has so many gaps, so many opportunities for these children to fall between the cracks, that we just don’t know what’s going on — how much trafficking or abuse or simply immigration law violations are occurring,” Republican chairman, Sen. Rob Portman

The Trump administration is actively seeking to criminally prosecute everyone that crosses the US-Mexico border, including parents. The policies are likely to separate many families as well as establish another prison pipeline.

These children will be placed inside the hands of the HHS who may quite possibly lose track of them.

The Trump’s administrations treatment and rhetoric about undocumented children is appalling considering that about 19 percent of unaccompanied minors are missing in the United States.