Has Trump’s homeland security found 145,000 missing migrant children?
Executive summary
The short answer is: no—there is no reliable evidence that the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration “found 145,000 missing migrant children” in the sense that conservative outlets and some officials have implied; the underlying August 2024 DHS Office of Inspector General audit documented tracking gaps and specific categories of children who lacked court notices or did not appear for hearings, but it did not show 145,000 children were missing and then located [1] [2]. Independent fact-checkers and major outlets warn that the headline numbers have been repeatedly taken out of context and amplified across partisan channels [3] [4] [2].
1. What the DHS inspector general actually reported
The DHS Office of Inspector General’s August 2024 management alert found that ICE and related agencies could not consistently monitor the location and status of all unaccompanied migrant children after release from federal custody; the report identified roughly 32,000 children who failed to appear for immigration court hearings between fiscal years covered, and noted that about 291,000 children had not yet been issued notices to appear as of May 2024—not that all of those children were “missing” [1] [2] [5].
2. How advocates, lawmakers and pundits transformed those figures into talking points
Multiple actors—campaign surrogates, Republican lawmakers, and media commentators—have aggregated parts of the audit and other HHS/ORR data to produce larger totals (e.g., “320,000” or “325,000”) and described them as children “lost” or “missing,” language that fact-checkers say misrepresents the audit’s findings and the types of data gaps identified [3] [4] [6]. Congressional press releases and partisan statements have also cited raw counts from HHS custody transfers and FOIA disputes to bolster political claims [7] [8].
3. The claim that 145,000 were “found”: source and credibility
Reports circulating that the Trump administration “found 145,000” (or similar totals like 129,143) appear in partisan and tabloid outlets and in campaign-style messaging; at least one later Newsweek piece reported a 2025 figure of 129,143 located children, but that is separate from the 2024 OIG audit and relies on administration claims rather than an independent, transparent accounting that reconciles who was previously “missing” and by what definition [9]. Fringe sites have amplified an exact “145,000” number without providing primary documentation; those pieces lack corroboration in the DHS OIG report or the nonpartisan fact checks compiled here [10].
4. Why “missing” is a misleading frame and what the data actually show
Experts and fact-checkers emphasize that the OIG’s deficiencies related to monitoring, notice-to-appear issuance, and record-keeping—not a documented mass of children abducted or trafficked—so statements that “hundreds of thousands” were mysteriously missing conflate administrative tracking lapses with criminal victimization [2] [3] [5]. The OIG flagged failures in monitoring and filing, and counted categories with different meanings (e.g., no notice issued yet vs. failed to appear), which political messaging has flattened into a single, alarming figure [1] [2].
5. Political incentives, disagreements and the limits of public reporting
Republican oversight offices and some GOP members have used the audit to press for policy and to delegitimize prior administration practices, while critics say the rhetoric inflates harm for political gain; HHS and DHS have been subject to FOIA disputes and selective disclosures that complicate independent verification, and major fact-checking outlets caution readers about conflating different datasets [7] [6] [3]. Where later administration claims of locating large numbers exist, they are reported by outlets but are not yet traceable to the same audit metrics that produced the “320,000” talking point [9].
6. Bottom line
There is no uncontested, documented trail in the public record showing that Trump’s DHS “found 145,000 missing migrant children” as a direct reversal of a verified count of missing children; the core OIG audit showed monitoring failures and particular subcounts (about 32,000 who missed hearings and hundreds of thousands without notices), but those findings have been widely simplified, politicized and sometimes misreported into claims that exceed what the audit supports [1] [2] [3]. Public reporting and partisan statements are fragmented and sometimes contradictory; absent a transparent, reconciled dataset and methodology from DHS/HHS that matches “missing” to “located,” the 145,000 claim remains unsubstantiated in the available reporting [9] [10].