What will the federal government do with children for whom no DNA match can be found?

From a friend:

Government is DNA testing kids so as to reunite them only with their actual parents. I wonder how many fathers are going to find out their kid is not related to them.

Following arrests for crossing the border illegally rather than asking for asylum at an official entry point, roughly 3,000 children were separated from adults claiming to be their parents by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (source). Toronto’s Globe and Mail gives estimates of non-paternity at between 5 and 10 percent (“Mommy’s little secret”), so that would be between 150 and 300 of the 3,000 total children, assuming that all migrant claims of parenthood are sincere.

When all of the DNA testing is done and most of the children have been paired off with parents, but there are still a bunch of adults and children in the “no match found” category, what happens?

(Is 3,000 the actual number that has most of Facebook riled up? How does that compare to what goes on in local family courts? “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” finds at least 16 million children who are products of separated parents since the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement manages cashflow associated with these children. Back in 2000, Heritage Foundation:

Each year, over 1 million American children suffer the divorce of their parents; moreover, half of the children born this year to parents who are married will see their parents divorce before they turn 18. Mounting evidence in social science journals demonstrates that the devastating physical, emotional, and financial effects that divorce is having on these children will last well into adulthood and affect future generations.

The U.S. population in 2000 was 282 million. Today it 328 million. So we should expect roughly 16 percent more children today in any given category compared to 2000. (One thing that is questionable is the phrase “the divorce of their parents” since much litigation around custody and associated child support profits occurs between the never-married.)

But let’s take the Heritage Foundation’s number from 2000 and adjust it for population growth to 1.16 million. Then consider that roughly 2/3rds of children who are put through a winner-take-all family court system are permanently separated from the loser parent (data referenced within). The most heavily populated states, such as California, Florida, New York, and Texas, haven’t adopted the 50/50 shared parenting rules that prevail in, e.g., Arizona or Nevada. So let’s assume that 80 percent of children whose parents are currently separating will be in winner-take-all jursidictions and therefore roughly 53 percent of all 1.16 million children will be permanently separated from a parent by a state-run family court. That’s 612,480 children per year. If family courts operate 6 hours per day, 250 days per year, that’s 2450 children per day or 408 children per hour who are cut off from one parent for the rest of their childhood, if not life.)

Update 7/17: “With a deadline looming, the US can’t find parents of 71 children it may have separated” (CNN)