In a primetime speech on the second night of the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, September 10, 2026, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused the prior administration of running a trafficking operation. “They somehow lost 360,000 children and they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history,” he said. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that.” He promised: “We're very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”
The claim rests on a real report, and the real concern in it deserves to be stated first. In August 2024 the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general reported that more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children had failed to appear for immigration court hearings after release from custody between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, and that 291,000 had not been served notices to appear. The report said ICE had “no assurances” these children “are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.” Outlets across the spectrum, Fox News among them, reported it at the time as ICE losing track of tens of thousands of children.
What the report did not say is what Kennedy said. CNN's fact check found no basis for the claim that Democrats “lost” that many children or that the federal government ran a trafficking operation. The report did not say the children were all lost and did not definitively assert that any were trafficked. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council put the distinction plainly: “32,000 kids missed court. That doesn't mean they're missing.” The remaining 291,000, he said, are cases where ICE had not filed the paperwork to start their immigration court cases. The period the report covered also includes two years and four months of Trump's first term.
CNN flagged several other claims in the same speech as false or unsupported: that Democrats “cancelled their own convention” in 2024 (it was held in Chicago); that “they closed every church in our country for a year” (a Pew analysis found 15 states, several with Democratic governors, let religious gatherings continue without size limits); that “President Trump has ended nine wars”; and that the administration had “reversed a 30-year decline in longevity,” which CNN said was unclear, since U.S. life expectancy had risen for decades before the pandemic and reached a record high in 2024, before the second term began.
Kennedy delivered the speech as a sitting cabinet secretary responsible for the office that places unaccompanied children with sponsors (see The Agency That Cares for Migrant Children Fed ICE 460,000 Leads, and More Than 12,000 People Were Arrested, Reuters Found).