Biden administration holding nearly 25,000 migrant children without parents

Nearly 25,000 migrant children were in the custody of the government, apart from their families, in early May. The number of unaccompanied migrant children in the federal government's care is at an all-time high, easily eclipsing the corresponding total in 2018 when the Trump administration pursued a policy that led to the intentional separation of children from their families, eliciting major controversy.

The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal entity responsible for caring for the unaccompanied migrant children, reported on May 4 that 22,195 children were in its custody a day earlier, more than at any other time in U.S. history, including when the Trump administration separated families in 2018 and during the 2014 and 2019 surges of children to the border.

"The high number of kids in U.S. custody is a result of the pent-up demand of children fleeing danger and seeking protection in the United States who were barred from entering for one year during the Trump Administration. The Biden Administration did the right thing, albeit the harder one, in allowing these children a chance to seek safety," Jennifer Podkul, vice president of policy and advocacy for Kids In Need of Defense, wrote in an email.

The Biden administration moved quickly to put up emergency HHS facilities so that the government would not have to hold children in Border Patrol stations for weeks, as it had in 2019, but would be able to shift the children quickly to facilities staffed with child care workers.

"While the Emergency Intake Shelters that are housing unaccompanied children temporarily until they can be transferred to a fully-licensed facility or released to a sponsor are not ideal, they are a vast improvement over holding children for extended periods of time in CBP facilities which are not appropriate for children and have no staff trained to interact with children," Podkul said.

Children were being held days longer than they were supposed to early on under Biden, but over the past two months, even as more children showed up at the border, they have quickly moved children to HHS. The number of children held by the Border Patrol dropped from 5,767 on March 28 to less than 800 per day in May. But Trump officials have charged that the high number of children continuing to show up at the border is a problem of the White House's own making and that the president himself is not doing enough to address it.

The Biden administration has sped up the release of children from federal custody to an adult in the U.S. so that they can take more children from Border Patrol into HHS facilities and keep up with the flow of children arriving.

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