USCIS Chief: Government Helps Illegals Smuggle Children into U.S.

AP Photo/Cedar Attanasio

The U.S. government works with human traffickers to smuggle children into the United States, citizenship chief Ken Cuccinelli told the Texas Public Policy Foundation on August 22.

Cuccinelli is the acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency. He told his audience that Trump’s deputies are facing the fact that government agencies help illegal immigrant parents smuggle their children from Central America into the United States via the “Unaccompanied Alien Child” legal loophole. He said:

One of the things we’re circling back on is where these kids have parents in the country. And realize how this has worked, folks. The federal government has been the final chain in the human trafficking effort. The federal government has been the final link in the human trafficking effort up to this point. People put children in this pipeline with a certain degree of confidence — they’re obviously willing to risk their children –– that they will end up with the parents in the end. We are helping them pull this off.

The UAC smuggling starts in the United States when illegal immigrant parents or close relatives of the children work at jobs to earn the funds needed to hire coyotes.

The coyotes then accompany the children, ranging from toddlers to teenagers to young men who say they are teenagers, up to the border and relay the children to U.S. border agencies. The coyotes use some of the parents’ money to pay the cartels for safe passage through their border zones.

Early in his tenure, President Barack Obama and his deputies decided to treat the accompanied children from Central America as “Unaccompanied Alien Children.” This decision triggered a 2008 law that requires the UACs to be transferred from the border agencies to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Since then, HHS has accepted the children and sheltered them at large camps or in childcare houses. But HHS also transfers the vast majority of UACs to “sponsors,” who agree to shelter the UACs until they get a court date to plead for asylum. Very often, the “sponsors” are the parents who paid the coyotes and cartels to bring the children to the U.S. border agencies.

In some case, the sponsors have been illegal immigrant labor brokers who smuggled young men into the country to work in U.S. jobs.

Read the rest from Neil Munro HERE.

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