DHS Seeks Contractors for 3,000-Bed Migrant Child Facility While 148,000 Kids Lost Under Biden Remain Found

The Department of Health and Human Services is looking for contractors to build and staff a facility that could detain up to 3,000 unaccompanied migrant children at once, according to a call with prospective providers reported by The Independent. The proposal calls for rooms holding up to eight children each, sharing one toilet, shower and sink. An eight-foot perimeter fence would surround the campus.

The specs obtained by The Independent include real medical and educational infrastructure: physicians, teachers, and other care staff on-site. Facilities must sit within 30 miles of a hospital, 30 miles of a pediatric care provider, and 60 miles of an airport. Quarantine wings scale with facility size, from 40 beds in a 400-bed shelter up to 300 beds in a 3,000-bed one.

Officials told contractors on the call that they want speed. Contracts should allow a minimum of 400 children to be housed within 30 days of signing, with task orders scaling up toward 1,000 beds at a time. No location has been picked yet, and contracts aren't expected to be awarded until later this year.

Unaccompanied children are already held in more than 150 shelter facilities nationwide. This would be a new, larger addition to that system, not a replacement for it, built to absorb what DHS calls border "surges."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on August 3 that the administration has located more than 148,000 previously unaccounted-for migrant children, a figure he tied to what he called "the Biden Administration's open border crisis," according to the Epoch Times. DHS data cited by President Trump showed about 12,000 of those children were found between February and July. As of July, roughly 330,000 remained missing by that count.

This traces back to a real, documented failure. A DHS Inspector General report covering fiscal years 2019 through 2023 found about 448,000 unaccompanied minors were transferred from ICE to HHS custody, and that ICE failed to issue notice-to-appear court paperwork to roughly 233,000 of them, according to that report as cited by both the Epoch Times and the Daily Wire. Another 32,000 children were given hearing dates and never showed up. Addresses on file were frequently blank or undeliverable.

The Daily Wire reported HHS is releasing a 30-second bilingual PSA this week aimed at the nearly 479,000 children who arrived alone before January 2025, directing them to the Office of Refugee Resettlement's National Call Center. John Fabbricatore, a senior HHS advisor and former ICE Denver field office director, told the Daily Wire that once a child reports abuse, Homeland Security Investigations will open an investigation "within hours." He also said the Biden-era hotline had 65,000 unanswered calls.

None of this proves 148,000 children were trafficked or harmed. It proves the government lost the paper trail on hundreds of thousands of kids and is now trying to reconstruct it. "Located" means the government re-established contact or whereabouts, not that abuse was found in each case. That distinction matters and gets blurred in some of the administration's own messaging.

The detention buildout isn't going smoothly everywhere. Breitbart reported ICE is pushing forward on new detention facilities in San Antonio and outside El Paso, while trying to work around an April court injunction blocking major renovations at a facility near Hagerstown, Maryland. New DHS Secretary Mullin has said he will review the $38 billion warehouse conversion policy set under his predecessor, Kristi Noem, and DHS's own Inspector General has opened an audit into whether the buildings were purchased cost-effectively. DHS says it won't interfere with that audit.

San Antonio's city council voted 9-2 to restrict private detention facilities through new zoning rules, though those rules can't override federal authority. Council member Jalen McKee-Rodriguez said the facility would hurt "parks, schools, and neighborhoods immediately nearby."

Elsewhere, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott announced a pause on border wall construction inside Big Bend National Park to personally evaluate the site, following bipartisan pushback from Texas officials including Republican Sen. John Cornyn, according to Yahoo News. And San Diego County supervisors voted 3-2 to end ICE and CBP training contracts at a local firing range, a move Scott called "unprecedented" and said would force 1,700 officers to train elsewhere, according to reporting carried by inkl. Supervisor Jim Desmond, who voted against ending the contracts, argued the fix for ICE overreach is "more training," not less cooperation.

No location has been chosen for the 3,000-bed facility, and no contract has been awarded. The DHS Inspector General's audit into the warehouse conversion program is ongoing, with no findings released yet. Whether the child-locator effort actually connects the remaining roughly 330,000 unaccounted-for children with safe outcomes, rather than simply closing case files, is something only future IG reporting will show.