A growing number of illegal immigrants are posing as children in an effort to avoid deportation — with close to 700 juvenile impostors nabbed in the El Paso, Texas, area alone since October, the Border Patrol said.
In the last week, 10 illegal immigrants claiming to be under 18 have been caught by the feds, the agency said Friday.
Illegal immigrants try to pass themselves off as children, knowing that unaccompanied minors who reach the US’s southern border don’t get deported immediately.
Instead, they are placed into the care of the federal government until the minor can be reunited with family in the US or eventually sent back to their home country if they don’t have family here.
The child impostors were sniffed out in three separate incidents last week in the El Paso area, officials said. In one case last week, two underage-wannabes were actually smuggled into the country with a group of real children. When agents detained the group at the border Wednesday, they believed they had eight minors from Guatemala. As agents interviewed members of the group, they realized one was actually a 22-year-old man and another a 19-year-old woman. --->READ MORE HERE
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| AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills |
Border Patrol agents say they’re seeing a surge of adult illegal immigrants pretending to be children as they try to take advantage of the Biden administration’s more relaxed border policies — including one 26-year-old man who claimed to be a juvenile.
Agents in the El Paso, Texas, region said they’ve caught 10 adults trying the tactic over the last week.
“These individuals pose as minors in order to avoid expulsion,” agents said in a statement describing the tactic.
Under Biden administration policies, children who show up at the border without parents are not subject to the Title 42 border shutdown, which allows agents to quickly expel some illegal immigrants because of the risk of spread of COVID-19. Adults will try to pretend to be unaccompanied children in order to take advantage of that loophole.
Those who show up as single adults had about a 50% chance of being expelled under Title 42 in July, while children who showed up as families had just an 18% chance. Unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries aren’t expelled at all.
Border Patrol agents described one group of three adults posing as children who jumped the border on Aug. 16: one 21-year-old woman, a 22-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man. They were part of a group of 13 people, all from Guatemala, including nine actual unaccompanied juveniles and one adult who did not try to pose. --->READ MORE HERE
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