FBI, other criminal investigators drafted for welfare checks on migrant children

The Department of Homeland Security has enlisted the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in recent weeks to conduct welfare checks on children and young people who came to the United States without their parents, alarming advocates who worry it’s an effort to target them for deportation or scare them.

President Donald Trump has long accused his predecessor of losing more than 300,000 migrant children, claiming that they are now “slaves, sex slaves or dead,” though many also arrived during the president’s first term. Immigration experts have said that most of those children have been safely reunited with their parents or relatives in the United States.

Trump administration officials confirmed they are doing the welfare checks, which have gained some attention on social media, prompting questions and concern.

Unaccompanied minors have been seeking refuge at the U.S. southern border in significant numbers for more than a decade, soaring under Trump and hitting record highs under Biden. Hundreds of thousands have been released to sponsors in the United States, typically a parent or another relative, pending immigration proceedings.

Law enforcement agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Homeland Security Investigations have been given a list of questions to ask the minors and their sponsors during the welfare checks, according to a document from the DHS Center for Countering Human Trafficking reviewed by The Washington Post. The form directs agents to question sponsors about who asked them to sponsor the child, if any payment was made during the sponsor process, what information they provided in their application, whether the sponsor has ever been arrested, where the sponsors do their banking and where the sponsor works. Authorities are also asking the sponsor if the minor is working to pay off the cost of smuggling them into the country.

The questions for the minors include how they arrived in the United States; if they were hurt during the trip; if they go to school and where; if they work, where they work and what kind of work they do; information about their parents; and whom they currently live with.

Task force members were instructed to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they found children who were in danger, according to one person briefed on the work who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The idea of hundreds of thousands of lost children seems to have stemmed from an August 2024 DHS inspector general report that found ICE did not serve court notices to more than 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children from 2018 to 2023, which overlapped with the Trump administration. But legal experts say it is unlikely they are missing; instead, the minors probably did not respond to government caseworkers after they were released to their parents or guardians in the United States.

The Trump administration in January also sought to grant U.S. immigration officers access to a database maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the placement of unaccompanied migrant children with sponsors. The database included information on hundreds of thousands of immigrant teens and children who crossed into the United States without their parents.

Some within the FBI have been resistant to participate in the welfare checks, according to five people familiar with the operation. They have expressed concern about diverting agent time away from criminal investigations and toward this effort, citing unclear goals of the task forces that have been organized by the Department of Homeland Security. Some are also worried about the risks of having armed agents make unannounced visits to interrogate immigrant families, a community already on edge about the Trump administration’s goals to deport millions of immigrants.

The agents, some of whom are on a 30-day assignment, are told to check the minors’ living conditions for drugs, sex, forced labor and signs of trafficking, as well as possible illegal immigration status in the country, according to information provided to task force members. The department has set up recommended quotas for the number of children each task force team should contact per day based on the city. In medium to large cities, the expected quota is as many as 18 per day.

Locating these migrants could be challenging given that children can move around frequently and change in appearance. Law enforcement authorities are using information acquired from the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection when the children initially arrived to locate them. Many were male children and teens, and many could be adults by now, according to the former federal official.

Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, confirmed that the department is “leading efforts to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited.”

Critics have remained skeptical of Trump’s efforts to protect children since his administration forcibly separated thousands of migrant children from their parents during his first term without a plan to reunite them, drawing international condemnation and leading to a court agreement barring the government from splitting up families who cross the border illegally.

The FBI also confirmed its role in a statement, saying that the agency is assisting Homeland Security Investigations and the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the nationwide effort, which it characterized as a push to protect children living in the country without their parents, making them “vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking and violence.”

Virginia attorney James Rivera said his office received a frantic call Monday morning from one of his clients, saying that five agents were outside her house. He immediately headed there, arriving within 11 minutes, and began filming his interaction with a man who said he was from HSI — which does federal criminal investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and conducting a welfare check. As the agent insisted on talking to Rivera’s client, he offered to set up an appointment in his office instead. The agent then left.

Hours later, Rivera posted the interaction on TikTok because of “the simple fact that something happened that I had never experienced being an attorney — that HSI/ICE was now doing welfare checks.” By Thursday, he said the video had about 17 million views.

“I just wanted to get the message out there for people to be aware,” he said.

White House border czar Tom Homan has previously said that the administration’s intention is to check on the children’s safety and not to arrest or deport their families.

“This is about finding the kids,” Homan said in January. “The data won’t be used for enforcement work.”

But Homan said then that he would not rule out the use of the data for enforcement purposes in the future, and immigration officers are under pressure to expand deportations.

Homan has long expressed concerns about smuggling of migrant children, recalling a migrant child who suffocated in an overheated tractor-trailer in 2003. But Homan also signed off on Trump’s 2018 “zero tolerance” policy that forcibly separated migrant children from their parents and favored reopening family detention centers.

The University of Nevada at Las Vegas Immigration Clinic posted a message on Facebook on Wednesday warning of “unscheduled home visits and or/phone calls by FBI agents to parents/guardians of immigrant children.”

Alissa Cooley Yonesawa, managing attorney of the clinic, said that she began to hear about the welfare checks earlier this week and questioned the government’s intentions.

“It has seemed like it’s just talking and checking in on kids, but I don’t think that’s where it will end,” she said. “A lot of people who they’ve visited have been in the United States for a few years at this point or aren’t even minors anymore, so are you really checking in on them because you care about their welfare as a child?”