Homan Says 157,000 Once-Missing Migrant Children Found, 140,000 Still Unlocated

White House border czar Tom Homan says the government has located 157,000 unaccompanied migrant children who disappeared from federal oversight after crossing the border and being handed off to sponsors. Homan made the claim in an interview with Jan Jekielek for The Epoch Times' "American Thought Leaders," which aired September 26, 2026.

According to Homan, roughly 140,000 children remain unaccounted for. He says the administration intends to keep searching through the remainder of President Donald Trump's term, according to NTD.

How the Kids Went Missing

Homan told The Epoch Times that just under half a million children were "smuggled" into the country as unaccompanied minors during the Biden administration. He says officials at the Department of Health and Human Services at the time were proud that children weren't held in detention long.

"They weren't [held] very long, but the problem is they released them quickly because the sponsors weren't properly vetted," Homan said. He says the combination of rushed releases and sponsors who later stopped responding to check-ins caused the government to lose track of nearly 300,000 children.

Those figures come from Homan himself, not from an independent audit cited in these reports. No inspector general report or outside verification of the exact headcounts is referenced here, so the numbers should be read as the administration's own accounting of a system it says it inherited.

Homan said Trump gave him three directives on returning to government for the second term: secure the border, run deportation operations, and find the missing kids. He said he was far more confident about the first two than the third, because locating adults is comparatively easy.

"We can find you, we can find me. We own homes, we own cars, we have credit cards. We can find us because we all have a digital footprint. Children don't," Homan said.

Fake Addresses, Fake Names

When officials began the search, they found many sponsors had supplied false information. Some listed home addresses that turned out to be supermarkets, parking lots, or churches, according to The Epoch Times. Others gave false names, complicating efforts to trace where children actually ended up.

Of the 157,000 children located so far, Homan said more than 20 have died, some from natural causes and others from drug overdoses or violence. Homan also said he intends to keep searching for children even after they've turned 18 or 19, warning that some who aged out of the system may be in forced labor situations, though he did not cite specific cases or numbers to support that claim in these reports.

The Democratic Pushback

The search-and-locate effort has run into political friction over what happens next. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to HHS in June objecting to administration plans to deport some located children back to Mexico.

"You have been entrusted with the care and safety of the children placed within the [Office of Refugee Resettlement] network," Wyden wrote. "Proceeding with this plan knowingly endangers their lives and violates your duty to these vulnerable children."

Wyden's concern deserves to be stated plainly: these are children who, in many cases, fled dangerous conditions in their home countries, and deporting them without a documented safety review of what they'd be returned to is a legitimate child-welfare question, separate from the politics of border enforcement. Whether the administration is conducting that kind of review before removals, and how it screens for trafficking or abuse risk on the U.S. side, isn't detailed in Homan's account or in these reports.

At the same time, the scale of the original failure is not in serious dispute. Sponsors giving addresses that turn out to be supermarkets and parking lots isn't a minor bureaucratic hiccup. It's a vetting system that let hundreds of thousands of children vanish from federal tracking. That happened under the prior administration's watch, according to Homan, and it's the reason there are 140,000 children left to find in the first place.

What isn't resolved is the fate of those still missing or a clear public accounting of how many of the 157,000 located children have been reunited safely with vetted sponsors versus placed into deportation proceedings. Homan's interview, and the coverage built around it, focuses on the search effort and the count. None of the sources reviewed here provide a breakdown of outcomes for the children once found, which is the next question Congress and child-welfare advocates are likely to press the administration on.