A rumor circulating online in late January 2025 claimed Tom Homan, the "border czar" under U.S. President Donald Trump's second administration, located 75,000 to 80,000 "missing" migrant children out of a purported total of over 300,000. Fox News TV host Harris Faulkner originated the rumor, according to some users sharing the rumor on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Truth Social, X and YouTube.
Snopes also received reader mail asking if the rumor was true.
On the Jan. 24 episode of "Outnumbered," Faulkner spoke about the Trump administration's plans for mass deportations, then mentioned "missing" migrant children. She said, "Now, the second wave that Tom Homan, the 'border czar' for Trump, has told me about in all of this will focus on those missing children. Hundreds of thousands of them that we know. And that number has started to already come down [from 300,000]. So they found about 75-to-80,000 of those kids already."
However, Faulkner's claims lacked both truth and context.
"It's not true that 300,000 children are missing. And it's therefore totally misleading to say that 75,000 to 80,000 of these purportedly missing children have been 'found,'" Jonathan Beier, an associate director with Acacia Center for Justice's unaccompanied children program, told Snopes. "Children who were never 'missing' shouldn't be described as having been 'found.'"
As we've detailed in the article below, the "300,000" figure mostly pertained to unaccompanied migrant children who had not yet received notices to appear in immigration court — a very different matter than losing track of a person.
The Washington Post reported in December 2024, "Homan acknowledged that many of those young people are probably with their parents or other family members, but he said he wants to mobilize nonprofit groups and private contractors to carry out a more concerted effort to track them down."
We contacted by email communications personnel with Fox News and the White House to ask about this matter but did not yet receive any responses. As of this writing, the Trump administration had not publicly shared any developments related to Faulkner's claims.
300,000 'Missing' Children? That's Misleading
The figure of over 300,000 "missing," unaccompanied migrant children originated in a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report authored by the Office of Inspector General and published in August 2024, during the final months of Biden's administration. The document covered October 2018 through September 2023 — a time period including over 27 months of Trump's first presidential term and more than 32 months of Joe Biden's term.
The report did not lay out findings specifically regarding "missing" or "lost" children. Rather, it said that, for the October 2018 through September 2023 period, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had not served notices to appear in court to more than 291,000 unaccompanied, migrant children. Also, 32,000 unaccompanied, migrant children who received notices failed to appear for immigration court hearings. The 291,000 and 32,000 numbers totaled 323,000 children — a number similar to the ones cited by officials associated with Trump's administration.
In October, Beier told The Associated Press, "This is not a 'missing kids' problem; it's a 'missing paperwork' problem." In our correspondence with him, he also told us of the "very narrow focus" of the information cited in the report, "That one set of records is a far cry from the federal government's total contact with these children across various agencies. After identifying the gaps in ICE's record-keeping, the IG did not report taking any of the obvious next steps to see if other government records could illuminate what was happening with these children."
Remarks from Vance, Trump and Homan
During the October U.S. vice-presidential debate, then-U.S. Sen. JD Vance said, "We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost. Some of them have been sex trafficked, some of them hopefully are at homes with their families, some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules."
Trump also made similar remarks during his Time magazine 2024 person of the year interview, misleadingly placing full blame on Democrats and also claiming the children existed as "slaves, sex slaves or dead."
The authors of Time magazine's fact-check article reported, "There is no evidence that 325,000 immigrant children are slaves, sex slaves, or dead." They also referenced the facts from the DHS report, including the time period featuring Trump's first term and Biden's term. The article continued, citing reporting from The Associated Press, "Experts say this doesn't necessarily mean the children are 'missing' or exploited. Rather, this is likely a bureaucratic failing. Nevertheless, the report says, children who are unaccounted for are at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation or forced labor."
In The Washington Post's December 2024 interview with Homan, he further said, regarding the claim of 300,000 "missing" migrant children, "I think some of these children will be in forced labor, and some will be in the sex trade," then continued, "I think some will be perfectly fine. We just want to make sure."
For further reading, we previously reported in February 2024 about the true rumor claiming more than 7.2 million migrants illegally crossed into the U.S. over the Southwest border during Biden's administration — a number higher than the individual populations of 36 states.