Sunday, March 6, 2022

How the U.S. Federal Government Fuels Child Smuggling and Trafficking: For the right price, the cartels will transport people to the U.S. southern border and present them to the Border Patrol as children

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How The U.S. Federal Government Fuels Child Smuggling And Trafficking:
For the right price, the cartels will transport people to the U.S. southern border and present them to the Border Patrol as children.
I was part of a large political team in the Trump administration that tried to stop cartel-driven human smuggling and trafficking into the United States. We learned federal agencies and bureaucrats were more interested in preserving a broken system than preventing the abuse of children, and they were using your tax dollars to do so. The Biden administration continues to fight for that broken system, which also continues to put Americans at risk of great harm.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is statutorily responsible for handling the housing and resettlement of dependent foreign nationals who enter the United States, including so-called unaccompanied alien children, or UACs. A UAC is a child whom employees of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) encounter at a U.S. port of entry or along the border not in the custody of a verifiable parent or guardian.
Once DHS identifies a child as a UAC, that child is transferred to an appropriate private facility funded by HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). In theory, each child is then cared for by that ORR-funded facility until he or she can either be placed with an appropriate sponsor who is already in the United States (ideally, an actual family member with appropriate resources) or returned to his or her home country.
This is how the process is supposed to work, according to current federal law. What we found really happening was quite disturbing.
Mexican cartels have known for years that our southern border and immigration system could be manipulated for substantial profit. These cartels have developed an admittedly impressive business model that can get children and even adults from anywhere in the world into the United States by presenting them as children at our overwhelmed southern border.
For the right price, the cartels will transport customers or their human parcels to our southern border and present them to the Border Patrol as children. Some of these are actual innocent minors—and many of them are horrifically abused on their journey before they reach our border—but many are not innocent, and some are not even children.
Some are technically minors but also very violent members of Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, or other violent gangs or criminal organizations that wreak havoc in our hemisphere. Others are adults but might appear young enough to pass as teenagers. Sometimes the cartels try to pass these individuals off as part of fictional family units.
You might think that DHS would conduct due diligence in every instance to determine the ages and identities of these individuals, but sadly, it does not. In our engagement on this subject during the Trump administration, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel refused to conduct any systematic inquiry of people who presented themselves as minors at the border, even when they had good reason to believe they were being given false information.
This does not mean CBP personnel never followed up in situations of concern, and some individuals who were adults pretending to be children were identified. But some CBP personnel balked at an across-the-board approach. To paraphrase a couple of the men and women who talked to us behind the scenes about this problem, the volume of border encounters was just too high, and management had prioritized speed over accuracy.
Read the rest from John A. Zadrozny HERE

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