Under the Biden administration’s current border policy, illegal immigrants who come with families with children are often treated more favorably and have an advantage over adults going alone.
Tom Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told Epoch Times on March 30 of this year, “We did criminal investigations where smuggling rings would rent children to pose as immigrant families. And once they are released, (the children) are sent back to Mexico to be re-rented again. That happens all the time.” He criticized the Biden administration for not implementing widespread DNA testing to date.
According to public cases in 2019, one Honduran man purchased a 6-month-old baby in Guatemala to pose as a family member and attempt to use it to obtain priority release in the United States. Another case found that criminal groups constructed a mechanism to repeatedly rent and recover children between Houston and Mexico. And the cost of renting a child ranged from less than $100 to more than $1,000.
In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security set up rapid DNA testing, which showed that up to 30 percent of immigrant families in the El Paso (Texas) and Rio Grande Valley (Texas) boroughs were impostors.
In 2014, less than 1 percent of all adult men arrested by Border Patrol had children with them, but by 2019, 50 percent did, said Rodolfo Karisch, chief agent of the Rio Grande Valley Sector’s Border Patrol. During May 2019, the height of the crisis, the Border Patrol apprehended more than 84,000 illegal immigrants as a family unit.
And by March 2021 there were already more than 170,000 immigrants crossing illegally, many in family mode, the highest number in a month in 15 years.
Mark Morgan, former acting director of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), said he believes there are already children being rented to adults, but the situation will get worse. Morgan is currently a senior fellow at the Federation-for-American-Immigration-Reform.
According to Kevin McAleenan, who was acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at the time of the 2019 border crisis, “Everyone knows that if they bring their children, they will be allowed to stay in the U.S. They call it the ‘immigration passport ‘”
McAleenan said at a congressional hearing on July 18, 2019, “What this tells me is that we may have only scratched the surface of this problem, and the actual number of children at risk may be higher.”
Morgan predicted that once the government stops deporting illegal immigrant families under Title 42 of the U.S. Code (Title 42) public defense emergency restrictions, which are still in use at some borders, illegal immigrant families will continue to grow.
Morgan said we’ll have to devote the same amount of resources as we did in 2019 to actually find and identify counterfeit families, saying, “What it comes down to is that they can’t determine exactly who these people are every time.”
Says Homan, “I’m tired of them saying they’re humane. When you release the triggers and put the most vulnerable people into the arms of criminal groups, it’s pretty dangerous. And no one is looking forward to the beginning of this presidency more than the criminal groups in Mexico.”
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