Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leveled a grave accusation against the previous administration during a speech Thursday at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, charging that the federal agency he now leads had once become complicit in the trafficking of migrant children. His remarks put the safety of unaccompanied minors at the center of the national immigration debate and framed the Trump administration’s enforcement agenda as a rescue mission as much as a border security effort.

Kennedy’s comments are not a small political quarrel over statistics. They rest on a documented failure that placed hundreds of thousands of vulnerable children beyond the reach of federal oversight, and they raise questions every American should be willing to ask about what happened to those children and where they are now.

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Kennedy said that under the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services became, in his words, “a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery,” and he insisted the Trump administration has ended the practice. He said federal officials are now searching “very aggressively” for the children, many of whom disappeared from the system after being released to sponsors or placed elsewhere while their cases remained unresolved.

The figures behind the accusation are substantial. Federal data reviewed in connection with the speech point to roughly 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children who either failed to appear for scheduled immigration court hearings or were never issued notices to appear at all. A 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General found that more than 32,000 children failed to appear for their immigration court hearings between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, while approximately 291,000 had not been issued notices to appear. The inspector general’s report warned that federal officials had no assurance those children were safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.

The distinction in the report matters. Children who miss a court hearing are not simply late for an appointment; they drop out of view of the very systems designed to protect them. Children who were never issued notices to appear were, in practical terms, never fully tracked at all. The inspector general’s warning that safety could not be assured is the factual anchor for Kennedy’s far stronger claim of government complicity.

Kennedy’s remarks arrived at a politically charged moment, delivered to a Republican audience months before the 2026 midterm elections. The administration has made child safety a central justification for tighter immigration enforcement, arguing that weaknesses in the Biden-era system, including overwhelmed intake, expedited releases, and limited follow-up, left children exposed to predators and labor traffickers. Kennedy’s speech was the sharpest articulation yet of that argument, elevating what had been a policy dispute into a moral indictment of the prior administration.

The framing has drawn both support and criticism. Proponents of stricter enforcement say the data vindicates years of warnings that a sprawling system of releases was placing children in harm’s way without adequate vetting of sponsors or tracking afterward. Skeptics caution that the gap between “could not be assured of safety” and “collaborator in trafficking” is wide, and that the full picture of what happened to each child is still being pieced together. What is not in dispute is the scale of the lapse, and that is precisely what Kennedy and the administration are determined to keep in public view.

Few duties weigh more heavily on a government than the protection of a child who arrives on its soil with no parent and no one to vouch for their safety. Scripture is unambiguous about God’s heart for the vulnerable, commanding His people to care for the fatherless and to rescue those being led away to harm (James 1:27; Proverbs 24:11). When children are lost from sight and federal officials cannot say whether they are safe, that is not merely an administrative failure. It is a crisis of justice and compassion, and it demands both truthful accounting and decisive action. As intercessors, let us pray for every missing child, for the officials now searching for them, and for a system that values the life and safety of the vulnerable above partisan advantage. No child should become a casualty of bureaucratic neglect, and no debate over immigration should proceed as though their safety is a secondary concern.

How are you praying about this issue? Share your prayers and scriptures in the comments below.

(Excerpt from The National Pulse. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore – https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/54820232918/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=175831357).