ICE Has Not Served Court Notices to 233,000 Migrant Children

From fiscal 2019 through 2023, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred 448,820 unaccompanied migrant children⧉ into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which places most of them with sponsors while their immigration cases proceed.▸ ICE keeps legal responsibility for those cases after release -- but its own inspector general found the agency could not confirm workable release addresses for 31,322 of those children. A related, narrower count tells its own story: among children who crossed the border since January 2021, ICE still had not served the court filing that starts an immigration case on more than 233,000 of them, as of January 2025. Auditors also found the ICE officers responsible for these cases are stretched thin: at one field office, ten deportation officers split an average of 30,000 non-detained cases apiece, more than half of them unaccompanied children's cases alone.

Once Border Patrol apprehends an unaccompanied child, ICE transfers custody to HHS's Office of Refugee Resettlement, which places the child in a shelter and, in most cases, with a sponsor -- typically a parent or relative already in the country -- while an immigration judge decides the case.▸ ICE keeps the legal file. Under a joint agreement between the two departments, HHS's shelter providers are supposed to send ICE the child's discharge paperwork within 24 hours of release, including the sponsor's name, address, and phone number. DHS OIG⧉ found that address was blank, undeliverable, or missing an apartment number for 31,322 of the 448,820 children ICE transferred to HHS over the five-year period -- about 7% of them, by the report's own address-quality review of ICE's full dataset.

The bad addresses weren't abstractions.▸ At one location auditors visited, officers estimated that addresses were wrong roughly 80% of the time; when the audit team went looking for two addresses where HHS had released children most frequently, neither existed. HHS had sent 34 children to those two addresses in fiscal 2023 alone. Separately, HHS reported roughly 600 children as having fled its custody outright between fiscal 2019 and 2023 -- including one who ran five times in a single year, and another, wanted on an international arrest warrant for a killing in their home country, whom ICE still had not located as of August 2024.

A Notice to Appear is the document that formally starts a child's removal case and puts a court date on the calendar -- and, OIG notes, gives ICE a reason to check on the child again.▸ As of January 2025⧉, ICE had not served one on more than 233,000 unaccompanied children who crossed the border on or after January 1, 2021. That is down from more than 291,000 unserved as of May 2024, after ICE prioritized clearing the backlog -- but more than 49,000 of what remained, 21% of it, belonged to children who crossed in 2021 and still, four years later, have no court date.

Serving the notice doesn't close the loop, either.▸ OIG reported in August 2024⧉ that more than 32,000 children who had been served notices failed to show up for their immigration hearings; by October 2024, that number had grown to more than 43,000, and ICE lacked complete addresses for over 3,600 of them. Officials told auditors that children who miss court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor -- the same risks the monitoring system is supposed to catch.

OIG traced the breakdown partly to staffing.▸ ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations reported more than 1,000 deportation officers across 25 field offices responsible for monitoring over 7.5 million non-detained cases -- adults, families, and unaccompanied children combined -- as of September 2024. At one field office auditors visited, ten deportation officers were managing 300,000 non-detained cases as of February 2024: an average of 30,000 cases per officer per year, of which 17,000 -- 57% -- were unaccompanied children's cases alone. A previous DHS OIG audit found ICE officers had, on average, just three minutes per case, per year, to spend on it. Nationwide, ERO had only 100 officers formally designated to coordinate unaccompanied-children's cases and issue notices to appear as of August 2024.

Beyond the paperwork, OIG⧉ found HHS placed more than 14,500 children with unrelated sponsors or distant relatives in fiscal 2023, and more than 9,600 in fiscal 2024 -- among them three children released to spouses, one of whom was 40 years old.▸ HHS's own referrals show why oversight matters here: it reported more than 570 incidents of suspected human, drug, or weapons trafficking involving unaccompanied children to ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit between fiscal 2019 and 2023. Separately, ICE data show roughly 600 children released to sponsors were later arrested in the United States as of October 2024 -- under 1% of everyone transferred, but, OIG wrote, evidence of why consistent monitoring matters both for the children and for the communities they're released into.