Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said on Sunday that he is “aware of reports of children being trafficked,” but that stopping it is “outside the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security.”

More than half a million illegal immigrant children have been knowingly let into the country in recent years — about 120,000 a year — under a policy shielding “unaccompanied alien children.” The New York Times found that one-third could not be located thirty days later.

Mayorkas shrugged aside the high numbers of children that disappear, saying some could just be illegal immigrants refusing to cooperate with the conditions they agreed to. “Individuals do not comply with the reporting obligations, or otherwise, I think it is inaccurate to say that all of them are trafficked or victimized,” he said on Face the Nation.

Mayorkas declined to take responsibility despite his agency’s official watchdog, the DHS inspector general, in August, issuing a report saying Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of DHS, “must take immediate action to ensure the safety of UCs residing in the United States. … Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”

It said DHS had not been able to find, or simply didn’t bother trying to find, about 300,000 children to give them court papers. “At one location we visited, 34,823 (84 percent) of 41,638 UCs in the local area had not been served NTAs,” the inspector general wrote, referring to Notices to Appear. In other cases, they found the children, and they appeared to be being exploited, but DHS did nothing. Agents “had identified UCs in unsafe conditions but were unable to intervene… One ICE officer expressed concern with not being able to take action in a case involving a UC whose sponsor claimed the UC was in an inappropriate relationship with her husband,” the report said.

The loophole that gives preferential treatment to children if they come to the border alone—the preservation of which was a plank in the 2024 Democrat platform—has incentivized the separation of families, with children leaving their families behind and making the perilous journey with coyotes. The children are disproportionately from Guatemala, coupled with alleged extensive advertising by cartels there. 

When the children are apprehended by DHS, they are turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which identifies “sponsors” for the children to live with the in U.S. The sponsors are almost always fellow illegal immigrants and do not have to be related.

Remarkably, the head of Joe Biden’s HHS, Xavier Becerra, has repeatedly said that what happens to the children after they are released to sponsors is not his responsibility, either. “Our responsibility is to provide care while they were in our custody,” he told Congress in November.

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HHS never meets the sponsors before releasing the children to them, instead verifying their identities only by having them text screenshots of foreign IDs via WhatsApp, then paying a transportation contractor to take the children to them. Its only follow-up was a call thirty days later, at which point one-third of the sponsors would not answer or refused to put the child on the phone, according to The New York Times. The Times found that many of the children were being forced to work in dangerous factories, and there is evidence that others have been sold into the sex trade.

Becerra told Congress last month that they now make three attempts to contact the sponsors, but admitted that HHS has no authority whatsoever to do anything if the results of such check-ins go poorly. “We try to reach the child and the sponsor the times by phone to check in. The child and the sponsor are not obligated to return our call, we can’t require them to do so. And by the way, even if they don’t call back that doesn’t mean a child is lost,” he said.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-California) lashed out at Becerra at the November hearing, saying, “You have dropped them off at a sponsor’s house, you now can’t get a hold of them … You shrug your shoulders and then send another batch of kids out. That’s frightening to me.”

Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said finding the missing vulnerable children will be a top priority.

Related: ‘Rape Trees’ And Discarded Passports: Congress Hears Horrors Of Migrant Child Trafficking