As the Times noted, the additional clarifications on the situation of these unaccompanied minors makes it clear that they were not separated from their families during border crossings under a Trump administration policy announced this month. The administration was also reportedly considering housing immigrant youth on military bases.

Previously...

The federal government lost track of 1,475 immigrant children last year, according to an April report from the Associated Press.

The children, who were placed in the homes of adult sponsors in communities across the country, were first reported missing by The New York Times based on what a Health and Human Services Department (HHS) official told a Senate subcommittee during an April 26 testimony. The HHS realized that the almost 1,500 children couldn’t be found after attempting to make follow-up calls to check on their safety, an agency official told the Associated Press.

The shocking figure comes after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new policy that all attempted border crossers would be prosecuted, and that the U.S. government would separate children from their parents during the prosecution. Further reports showed that the government planned to house them on military bases. As PBS’s Frontline noted, many critics of these plans fear that the children would be susceptible to trafficking or abuse following the separation.

A 2016 Senate committee report argued that HHS places unaccompanied minors in homes to protect them “from human trafficking and other forms of abuse.”

However, the same report found that “over a period of four months in 2014, however, HHS placed a number of UACs [Unaccompanied Alien Children] in the hands of a ring of human traffickers who forced them to work on egg farms in and around Marion, Ohio, leading to a July 2015 federal criminal indictment. According to the indictment, the minor victims were forced to work at egg farms in Marion and other location for six or seven days a week, twelve hours per day.”

“The traffickers repeatedly threatened the victims and their families with physical harm, and even death, if they did not work or surrender their entire paychecks,” the report continued. “The indictment alleges that the defendants ‘used a combination of threats, humiliation, deprivation, financial coercion, debt manipulation, and monitoring to create a climate of fear and helplessness that would compel [the victims’] compliance.’”

Senators have criticized the agencies who assumed responsibility for the migrant children. “You are the worst foster parents in the world. You don’t even know where they are. We are failing. I don’t think there is any doubt about it,” Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) told the HHS on April 26. “And when we fail kids that makes me angry.”

According to a 2016 AP investigation, “more than two dozen” unaccompanied minors were placed with foster parents just like the ones Heitkamp was referring to: the children “were sexually assaulted, starved, or forced to work for little or no pay.” Many of the adults didn’t undergo any background checks and were rarely checked on. Since then, the HHS has increased outreach to at-risk children, and offered post-placement services to unaccompanied minors, according to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

But advocates say this won’t work, because it’s difficult to tell which minors might be placed in dangerous conditions. Between October and December 2017, HHS contacted 7,635 children who had been living with sponsor parents the agency had placed them with — of that, “6,075 children were still living with their sponsors, 28 ran away, five had been deported, 52 were living with someone else,“ and the rest were missing, Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary at HHS, told the AP.