The AMBER Alert system has saved countless lives, but its strict, outdated criteria mean it fails the vast majority of missing youth. Currently, an AMBER Alert is strictly reserved for confirmed, endangered abductions of children under 17. If a 14-year-old flees a dangerous home, or an 18-year-old vanishes without explicit proof of a physical kidnapping, a broadcast alert is never sent to the public.

The public wants to help find missing people, but they cannot look for someone they do not know is gone. By restricting mobile phone alerts to a tiny fraction of abduction cases, we are leaving hundreds of thousands of missing runaways and young adults under 21 completely invisible. We have the technology to push localized, instant text alerts directly to millions of citizens' cell phones, yet we let bureaucratic red tape stand in the way of a child's survival.

We demand that the FCC and the National AMBER Alert Coordinator create a secondary, automated mobile alert tier, a Universal Youth Missing Alert.

Whenever any person under the age of 21 is reported missing, regardless of whether they are classified as a runaway or if there is immediate proof of foul play, a localized emergency notification must be pushed to all mobile devices within a specific geographic radius. This system will instantly mobilize the eyes and ears of entire communities, bypassing strict abduction requirements while avoiding nationwide "alert fatigue" by keeping the notifications hyper-localized to where the person was last seen.