What are the official CBP and ORR cumulative counts of unaccompanied children by fiscal year from 2021 through 2025?
Executive summary
Official, year-by-year cumulative counts of unaccompanied children (UAC) are maintained by HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and originate from referrals by DHS components such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP); ORR publishes detailed fiscal‑year referral and custody counts on its public data pages, but the searchable public snippets supplied here contain only partial numeric revelations—most notably ORR’s reported custody count of about 119,000 UAC in fiscal year 2023 [1]—so a complete FY2021–FY2025 table must be drawn from ORR’s facts-and-data portal rather than reconstructed solely from the secondary reporting in these excerpts [2] [3].
1. Official sources and what they report: ORR’s referral and custody data are the record
The authoritative public record for annual referral and in‑care counts is ORR’s UC facts-and-data pages and associated “Released to Sponsors” tables, which list referrals from DHS by federal fiscal year and provide daily and cumulative counts for children in ORR care and those released to sponsors [2] [3]. ORR’s Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) Bureau describes its bed management and reporting approach and highlights that historical referral counts and monthly statistics are available through those ORR pages [4]. Any official fiscal‑year cumulative counts therefore come from ORR’s posted datasets rather than from isolated media summaries [2] [4].
2. The single explicit annual figure available in the provided reporting: FY2023 ≈119,000
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), citing ORR agency data, states that ORR “cared for about 119,000 unaccompanied children” in fiscal year 2023, and reiterates that the number of referrals to ORR has risen substantially over time [1]. That ORR‑sourced GAO figure is the clearest single‑year cumulative count present in these materials and should be treated as ORR’s official FY2023 custody/referral total as reported to oversight bodies [1].
3. Why other specific FY counts are not asserted here
The supplied excerpts point readers to ORR’s “Daily Data” and release tables and note that HHS posted FY2021 data pages and state/county release tables extending through FY2026, but those snippets do not include the raw numeric totals for each fiscal year 2021, 2022, 2024, or 2025 that the user requested [2] [3] [5]. Secondary sources in the excerpts reference surges (e.g., thousands in CBP or HHS care in 2021, and more than 17,000 in HHS shelters in April 2021 in contemporaneous reporting) but do not provide the standardized fiscal‑year referral/custody totals needed for a precise FY2021–FY2025 table [6] [7]. Consequently, asserting exact cumulative FY totals beyond the GAO/ORR FY2023 figure would exceed what these supplied sources directly document [1] [2].
4. What the counts mean, and why they sometimes diverge between CBP and ORR reports
CBP apprehensions and DHS referrals feed the ORR dataset—CBP must refer eligible unaccompanied children to ORR within statutory timelines, and ORR then records referrals, placements, in‑care counts, and releases; reported “counts” can therefore differ depending on the metric (apprehensions, DHS referrals, ORR in‑care census, or releases to sponsors) and on timing and reconciliation practices that ORR acknowledges may be revised after review [2] [3]. Oversight reporting and advocacy commentary underscore how operational constraints (shelter capacity, COVID‑era bed reductions, CBP temporary housing spikes) have affected where and how children were counted in particular months, which complicates simple year‑to‑year comparisons if one relies on media snapshots rather than the reconciled ORR fiscal datasets [6] [1].
5. Recommended authoritative step to obtain the full FY2021–FY2025 table
For an exact, official fiscal‑year breakout of cumulative CBP referrals and ORR custody counts for FY2021–FY2025, consult ORR’s publicly maintained facts-and-data pages and the ORR “Released to Sponsors” tables (which span FY2014–present) where ORR posts reconciled referral totals by fiscal year; the pages referenced in these materials are the primary source for those numbers [2] [3] [5]. Note that GAO and congressional reports may cite or summarize ORR’s figures (for example, the GAO citation of ~119,000 for FY2023), and those oversight documents are useful corroboration when reconstructing multi‑year trends [1].