by Jason Cohen
Former President Donald Trump committed to track down and return missing migrant children who have entered the country under President Joe Biden’s administration to their families.
Unaccompanied alien children (UACs) who cross into America typically get transferred to the Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), but a February 2023 New York Times report found that that the office lost more than 85,000 such children. “Fox and Friends Weekend” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked Trump in an interview aired on “The Will Cain Show” Monday whether Trump would commit to finding and returning these children, with the former president saying he will if he is reelected.
WATCH:
“So in just this year, fiscal year 2024, there’s been 74,000 unaccompanied children that have come across the border. In 2023, get this number, 137,275. You know, you’ve seen the images of these children … and the Joe Biden administration has lost 80,000 of them. No one can track, no one knows where they’re at … Will you commit, will the Trump administration commit to finding these children, to finding them and returning them to their families? To their countries? Because many of them have been lost into sex trafficking. It’s heartbreaking. Will you commit to that?” Campos-Duffy asked.
“Yeah, I would do that. Sure,” Trump answered. “I haven’t been asked that question, but the answer is yes. It’s a simple answer. Many of them are dead. They have done such a bad job.”
Three migrant children died in federal custody over roughly two months in 2023. Teenage migrants have also died while working in the U.S., according to the NYT.
Two illegal immigrants, Elia Antonio and Juan Carlos Rocha Mejia, were charged with multiple counts Wednesday related to an alleged sexual assault in May of a 12-year-old girl in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin. Antonio was the 12-year-old girl’s mother and she escaped after she was allegedly bound, blindfolded and assaulted.
“The level of abuse and just anger and craziness toward women … You know the mothers put their daughters in those caravans, knowing in many cases the daughter’s not coming back. Knowing for almost certainty the daughter’s being raped. They give them large like bottles of birth control pills, the mothers. Because they know they’re going to be raped on the way up all the time,” Trump continued. “And Biden thinks he’s doing a favor by allowing … All he had to do was go to the beach and let my people do the job.”
UACs who are entering the U.S. at record rates under Biden are winding up working grueling jobs all around the country in numerous sectors, according to the NYT. Parents send their kids to work and send money back to them and they do not accompany their children because they believe they have no pathway to remain in the U.S.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Jason Cohen is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
