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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. detailed new information on migrant children allegedly lost under the Biden administration, accusing officials of putting “speed over safety” in a rush to process minors.
“What we’ve discovered is there were 476,000 unaccompanied children who were lost during the Biden administration,” Kennedy said during a “Fox & Friends Weekend” interview on Sunday.
“They wanted to show, above all things, that they were getting the kids out of the cages, so they were not doing security checks on the people who came to pick them up.”
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He accused Biden officials of neglecting basic safeguards—failing to conduct DNA testing, fingerprinting, identification checks, and other measures to verify adults claiming to be children’s parents.
Under the Trump administration, however, Kennedy said those practices have been overhauled.
“We’re doing income verification, we’re doing DNA testing, fingerprinting on everybody who comes in and says that they’re a parent. We are knocking on doors, trying to find the kids who are lost,” he shared.
So far, Kennedy claimed, federal officials have knocked on about 82,000 doors and recovered roughly 22,000 children.
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“We’re going to keep doing that for the next three-and-a-half years and try to find every kid that was lost,” he added.
Fox News Digital reached out to a representative for former President Joe Biden for comment.
Kennedy’s remarks echoed broader Republican criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of unaccompanied minors.
According to an August 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied migrant children to HHS between fiscal years 2019 and 2023.
The report found that ICE was unable to fully monitor the whereabouts of many of those children after release and noted lapses in tracking and follow-up, including failures to ensure court appearances.
However, an Associated Press report from last October noted that the findings did not mean the children vanished or were trafficked but rather reflect systemic breakdowns in record-keeping and follow-up processes.
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