Ted Cruz Echoes Trump’s Dubious Claim of 300,000 ‘Lost’ Migrant Children

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) used part of his questioning time during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to repeat a misleading claim made by Donald Trump that the Biden administration has “lost” hundreds of thousands of immigrant children.

Cruz echoed Trump’s assertion from a Time magazine interview, where Trump alleged that “325,000 children” had been lost under the Biden administration, with many of them now “slaves, sex slaves, or dead.” Cruz expanded on this during his remarks on Wednesday, addressing nominee Pam Bondi for the Department of Justice.

“One statistic every American should know is the number 300,000,” Cruz said. “There are over 300,000 children that this administration has lost. Little girls and little boys who came here unaccompanied were in this administration’s custody. They handed them over to adults. Many of them are not blood relatives. They don’t know where they are. I’ve never seen a single Democrat on this committee ask one question about the 300,000 children.”

However, the claim misrepresents the situation, conflating procedural gaps with outright disappearance or harm. An August report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for lapses in monitoring unaccompanied migrant children after they were released from federal custody. The report noted that over 32,000 minors failed to appear for immigration court dates.

Importantly, these issues were not exclusive to the Biden administration. Nearly half of the unaccompanied minors who failed to appear did so during Trump’s presidency. Trump’s own policies, such as “zero tolerance,” led to family separations widely condemned as inhumane. After Biden took office, a task force was created to identify approximately 5,000 children separated under Trump’s policy, which the president called a “moral failure.”

As the Washington Post noted in a fact-check, “The children aren’t missing — and they aren’t dead. In effect, they haven’t responded to phone calls from a government agency.” Experts have echoed this clarification, emphasizing the issue lies with tracking and paperwork, not physical disappearance.

“This is not a ‘missing kids’ problem; it’s a ‘missing paperwork’ problem,” Jonathan Beier of the Acacia Center for Justice told CBS News. Stephen Miller, a key architect of Trump’s immigration policies, including the controversial ICE procedures, is expected to return in the new administration, potentially reigniting debates over immigration enforcement and child welfare.