They built a hotline for children in danger — then stopped picking up the phone.
The Biden administration created a migrant child abuse hotline meant to be a lifeline for unaccompanied children in distress. Instead, according to the account now spreading, more than 65,000 desperate distress calls went unanswered. Sixty-five thousand cries for help — from children — met with silence.
Let that number sit for a moment. These were not bureaucratic complaints or paperwork mix-ups. These were distress calls. Children calling about abuse, about danger, about the worst moments of their lives — and nobody on the other end of the line.
The scale of the underlying crisis makes the failure even harder to stomach. Record numbers of unaccompanied children poured across the southern border during the Biden years — hundreds of thousands of minors arriving alone, handed off to a system that was never built to absorb them. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the HHS agency tasked with caring for these children, was overwhelmed from the start. Kids were released to sponsors with vetting so thin that exploited children ended up in brutal labor conditions — a scandal The New York Times itself documented in 2023, reporting that migrant child labor had exploded across the country.
And through all of it, the hotline that was supposed to catch the falling children rang and rang into the void.
The Biden administration's defenders will say the system was drowning — that no call center could have kept pace with the historic surge, that the real failure was the unprecedented wave itself. There's truth in the overwhelm. But a hotline exists for one reason: to answer. Setting one up and then leaving 65,000 calls in the dark is not a resource problem — it's an accountability problem. The administration that prided itself on compassion built the symbol of a safety net and never bothered to staff it.
The contrast with the current administration could not be sharper. President Trump's team made the missing migrant children a mission from day one — border czar Tom Homan has repeatedly said that locating the unaccompanied children lost in the system is a top priority, treating every missing child as a rescue operation, not a statistic. Where the last administration built a hotline nobody answered, this one is out looking for the children themselves.
That's the difference between performing compassion and practicing it. One administration set up a phone line for the cameras. The other is knocking on doors.
Sixty-five thousand unanswered calls. Each one was a child asking for help. The Biden administration's legacy on migrant children isn't the hotline it created — it's the silence on the other end of the line.