(NewsNation) — Federal immigration agents are being tasked by the White House to track down and remove about 600,000 children who entered the United States illegally and without their parents or other adults since 2019.
But the targets of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement search are, in many cases, teenagers who now may be scattered across several states. Roughly 61% of those being sought by federal agents are young men between the ages of 14 and 17, data shows, the majority of whom are from Guatemala (32%), Honduras (20%), Mexico (20%) and El Salvador (8%).
“Now, the pressure is on to identify these individuals and not to take it for granted that just because of their age, they’re good to go,” Victor Avila, a former special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, told NewsNation.
In many cases, Avila said that some of the unaccompanied minors who entered the U.S. lied about their age because assistant U.S. attorneys would decline to prosecute them because of their age in the past.
The White House directive to ICE is part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation mission. A memo sent to ICE agents outlines an unprecedented push to target migrant children, which will be carried out in four phases, the memo said.
During his first term, Trump introduced a “zero tolerance” policy that led to the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border. The children were sent to children’s shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a government agency housed within the Department of Health and Human Services, while their parents were detained or deported.
Of the 540,000 unaccompanied minors who entered the United States illegally during the Biden administration, about 470,000 were released to sponsors. According to data reviewed by NewsNation, about 3,000 migrant children who were released to a family member or a sponsor are living in Texas. The data shows that California and New York are also popular destinations.
Congress has said that about 320,000 of the migrant minors are unaccounted for, meaning that phone calls placed to family members or sponsors were not answered or addresses provided for these migrants were not accurate. About 6,000 migrant children are in Health and Human Services custody and are spread out through 297 facilities.
Individual ICE field offices will determine “how to best locate, make contact, and serve immigration documents as appropriate for individual targets when conducting enforcement actions” involving unaccompanied children, the memo said.
As well as enforcing immigration laws, the memo, entitled the “Unaccompanied Alien Children Joint Initiative Field Implementation,” said the initiative aims to ensure that children are not victims of human trafficking or other exploitation. The memo said the children would be served a notice to appear in immigration court or deported if deportation orders were pending against them.
Reuters contributed reporting to this story.