Door knocks and DNA tests: How the Trump administration plans to keep tabs on 450,000 migrant kids

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration is conducting a nationwide, multi-agency review of 450,000 migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without their parents during President Joe Biden’s term.

Trump officials say they want to track down those children and ensure their safety. Many of the children came to the U.S. during surges at the border in recent years and were later placed in homes with adult sponsors, typically parents, relatives or family friends.

Migrant advocates are dubious of the Republican administration's tactics, which include dispatching Homeland Security and FBI agents to visit the children. Trump’s zero-tolerance approach to immigrants in the U.S. illegally, which has resulted in small children being flown out of the country, has raised deep suspicion his administration may use the review to deport any sponsors or children who are not living in the country legally.

Trump officials say the adult sponsors who took in migrant children were not always properly vetted, leaving some at risk for exploitation. The Department of Justice has indicted a man on allegations he enticed a 14-year-old girl to travel from Guatemala to the U.S. and then falsely claimed she was his sister to gain custody as her sponsor.

Trump officials expect more problematic sponsors will surface as the administration conducts door knocks and interviews to check on cases in which complaints — about 65,000 of them since 2023 — have been filed. This year, about 450 cases with complaints have been referred to federal law enforcement officials, according to a senior Health and Human Services official who was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the review and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“We’re combing through every report, every detail — because protecting children isn’t optional,” HHS said in a social media post on X. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared to reference the review during a Cabinet meeting with Trump on Wednesday, saying his agency was trying to “find the children.”

For at least a decade, the federal government has allowed adults to apply to house migrant children who crossed the border without a parent or legal guardian. The program, however, was plagued with problems during the Democratic Biden administration years as officials struggled to process an influx of thousands of children. Federal officials failed to conduct background or address checks in some cases before placing children with sponsors. In other instances, sponsors provided plainly false identification, a federal watchdog report last year concluded.

After that report was issued, the Biden administration said it had already worked to improve the issues through “training, monitoring, technology and evaluation.”

But thousands of children were also placed with legitimate families, some of whom now fear they'll be swept up in the Trump administration's review and targeted for deportation, said Mary Miller Flowers, the policy director of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.

The center is assigned to work with some of the most vulnerable children who cross the border. Flowers said that many children have been placed with their parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts or uncles.

In some cases, children may arrive at the border separately from their parents who already live in the U.S. and reunite with them through the program.

“Now you have a situation where the government is checking on the wellness of children and encountering their undocumented parents and deporting their parents," Flowers said. "I don't know what about that is good for children.”

So far, about 100 kids in the past two months have been removed from their sponsors and put back into custody of the federal government, typically in private shelters, according to the health department official.

In Cleveland, federal prosecutors allege that one man, who was living in the U.S. illegally, arranged for the 14-year-old girl to get a copy of his sister's birth certificate and then coordinated her journey from Guatemala to the U.S. He claimed to be her brother, but no fingerprinting or DNA testing was done to verify his claim, according to a senior Justice Department official who could not publicly discuss details of the ongoing case and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The man pleaded guilty to sexual battery of the child in Ohio state court in 2024 and was sentenced to eight years in prison, the official said. The man now faces federal charges including inducing illegal entry for financial gain and aggravated identity theft. Attorneys for the man declined to comment.

As part of the review, the Trump administration is working to identify the location of every child who has been placed with a sponsor, according to the Justice Department official. Investigators are going through suspicious sponsorship applications, like so-called “super sponsors,” who have claimed to have family relationships with, in some cases, more than a dozen unaccompanied children, the official said.

Videos and reports of armed law enforcement officers showing up to conduct wellness checks at the doorsteps of unaccompanied minors and their sponsors have surfaced from across the country.

In an emailed statement, the FBI said that it is conducting “nationwide” welfare checks because “protecting children is a critical mission,” adding that it would continue to work with its “federal, state and local partners to secure their safety and well-being.”

But advocates have raised doubts that children will open up about abuse or other concerns about their sponsors to armed law enforcement officers from federal agencies who are simultaneously executing mass deportation campaigns.

In Hawaii, homeland security agents have been scouring Kona for unaccompanied minors and their sponsors, with two families deported as a result and another child put back into federal custody, according to a news report from Honolulu Civil Beat. Last month, a northern Virginia attorney posted video of five federal agents visiting the home of his client, who is awaiting a green card, for a welfare check. And in Omaha, a 10-year-old who came to the U.S. unaccompanied about three years ago and was placed with his uncle was visited by armed agents in “black, tactical gear" two weeks ago, according to his attorney. He was asked a series of questions, including the status of his case and the whereabouts of his sponsor, according to his attorney Julia Cryne.

“They’re using this as a way to go after the kids,” Cryne said. Her client, she added, has recently had his application for a green card approved.

The Trump administration has dramatically altered the way the sponsorship program works. It's cut funding for the attorneys who represented the most vulnerable migrant children, leaving even toddlers or preschool aged-children with no federally-funded representation.

The administration has also rolled out a number of new rules for adults who want to sponsor a migrant child, according to guidance obtained by the Associated Press. In recent weeks, the office began requiring sponsors to submit fingerprinting, DNA testing and income verification to strengthen its screening procedures.

That could be a hurdle for many sponsors who may not have an income or might be undocumented, Flowers said. Children cannot leave federal custody until they are released to a sponsor.

“They have put in a trifecta of policies that essentially make it impossible for them to leave federal detention,” Flowers said.

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Beatrice Dupuy in New York contributed.

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This story was first published May 2, 2025. It was updated May 5, 2025,, to correct the name of Honolulu Civil Beat, not the Honolulu Civil Report.

Two walls separate Mexico from the United States along the border Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025, in Tijuana, Mexico. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Advocates for migrant rights hold signs outside the South Florida office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Enforcement and Removal Operations, following a press conference with Gov. Ron DeSantis on immigration enforcement, May 1, 2025, in Miramar, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

Migrants make their way to a Border Patrol van after crossing illegally and waiting to apply for asylum between two border walls separating Mexico and the United States, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

A screen shows an image of Maikelys Espinoza, a 2-year-old in US custody whose parents were deported separately, after a pro-government May Day rally in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, May 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

FILE - Women and children migrants walk with a larger group of migrants through Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico, in an attempt to reach the U.S. border, Jan. 20, 2025, the inauguration day of U.S. President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Edgar H. Clemente, FIle)

NEW YORK (AP) — Thousands of nurses at some of New York City's biggest hospitals could go on strike Monday during a severe flu season, three years after a similar walkout forced some of the same medical facilities to transfer some patients and divert ambulances.

The looming strike could impact operations at several of the city’s major private hospitals, including Mount Sinai in Manhattan, Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Nearly 15,000 nurses could walk off the job early Monday if a deal is not reached, amounting to the largest nurses strike in city history, according to Nancy Hagans, president of the New York State Nurses Association. As of Sunday morning, little progress had been made at the bargaining table, Hagans said. A vast majority of the union's nurses voted to authorize the strike last month.

Like the 2023 labor fight, this year's dispute involves a complicated array of issues, claims, counterclaims and hospital-by-hospital particulars. Once again, staffing levels are a major flashpoint: Nurses say the big-budget medical centers are refusing to commit to — or even backsliding on — provisions for manageable, safe workloads.

This time, the nurses' union also wants guardrails on hospitals using artificial intelligence, plus more workplace security measures. A gunman strode into Mount Sinai in November, and a man with a sharp object barricaded himself in a Brooklyn hospital room this week; both men ultimately were killed by police.

The private, nonprofit hospitals involved in the current negotiations say they've made strides in staffing since 2023. Some of them suggest the union's demands, taken as a whole, are far too expensive.

Scores of nurses rallied Friday in Manhattan, insisting their primary concern was proper caregiving and accusing the medical centers — whose top executives make millions of dollars a year — of greed and intransigence.

“My hospital tries to cut corners on staffing every day, and then they try to fight historic gains we made three years ago,” said Sophie Boland, a pediatric intensive care nurse in the NewYork-Presbyterian hospital system.

The hospitals, meanwhile, have called the union’s strike threat “reckless.” They vowed in a statement Thursday to “do whatever is necessary to minimize disruptions.”

Hagans, the union president, has also stressed that patients should not delay care during a potential strike.

Still, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul expressed concern that a strike could affect patient care, urging both sides on Friday “to stay at the table and get a deal done.”

Mount Sinai has hired over 1,000 temporary nurses and held preparatory drills for a strike that could affect its 1,100-bed main hospital and two affiliates — Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West — with about 500 beds each.

NewYork-Presbyterian said it also had arranged for temporary nurses but, if the strike happens, some patients might be moved to new rooms or advised to transfer to another facility. Montefiore posted a message assuring patients that appointments would be kept.

The same union mounted a three-day strike at the Mount Sinai flagship facility and Montefiore in 2023, when nurses emphasized their sacrifices during the exhausting, frightening height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national nurse staffing crisis that followed.

The walkout prompted those hospitals to postpone non-emergency surgeries, tell many ambulances to go elsewhere and transfer some intensive-care infants and other patients. Temporary nurses and even administrators with clinical backgrounds were tapped to fill in, but some patients noticed longer waits and more sparsely staffed wards.

The strike ended with an agreement on raises totaling 19% over three years and staffing improvements, including the possibility of extra pay if nurses had to work short-handed.

Now, the union says, the hospitals are retreating from those guarantees and falling short on other promises.

Montefiore, for example, agreed to “make all reasonable efforts” to stop keeping some emergency room patients in hallways while they wait for space to open up in other wards. Yet three years later, nurses still scramble to treat “hallway patients,” Montefiore intensive care nurse Michelle Gonzalez said Friday.

Montefiore has suggested it's made some progress: The hospital told elected officials in a letter in October that there has been a 35% reduction in the time it takes from emergency admission to a clinical unit bed.

Overall, the hospitals say they have greatly reduced nursing job vacancy rates in the last three years, and Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia Irving University Medical Center say they also have added hundreds of nursing positions.

In recent days, several smaller hospitals — including multiple Northwell Health facilities on Long Island — averted potential walkouts by striking deals or making what the union viewed as adequate progress.

FILE - A medical worker transports a patient at Mount Sinai Hospital, April 1, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)