The Biden administration has reverted to the Obama era open border policies for child migrants that turned the U.S. government into the largest human trafficker of children in the world.
A migrant girl jumps to cross the Rio Bravo to get to El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on February 5, 2021, by
Herika Martinez, AFP/Getty Images.
News reports this week show that thousands of migrant children are being let across the U.S.-Mexico border by the Biden administration and then placed in government shelters that are being overwhelmed. The children are eventually resettled in the interior by the government, usually with family members, making the Biden administration the delivery agent of the human trafficking cartels that charge extortionist fees to smuggle the children to the border. The surge started after Biden carved out an exception on Trump border policy to now allow unaccompanied children to cross the border at will and be taken care of by the federal government.
The increasing number of migrant children taken into custody along the southern border in recent days has severely strained the U.S. government’s ability to house them, according to data obtained by CBS News.
Last week, U.S. border agents apprehended more than 1,500 migrant children, according to government statistics reviewed by CBS News. On Sunday, an additional 300 minors were taken into custody.
Due to the steady increase in border crossings by unaccompanied children, nearly 90% of the 8,000 available beds administered by the federal agency charged with housing these minors are being occupied. On Monday, the number of children housed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), reached 7,100, leaving fewer than 900 empty beds.
…While it continues to expel most single adults and families under the Trump-era CDC order, the Biden administration carved out an exception for unaccompanied minors after an appeals court lifted a November ruling by a federal judge that had blocked the practice.
The policy change, formalized by CDC director Rochelle Walensky earlier this month, means that border officials will transfer most unaccompanied children to the refugee agency going forward.
While the move was praised by advocates, it has required the refugee agency to look for ways to expand its bed capacity, which was reduced due to COVID-19 mitigation measures. The office has more than 13,200 taxpayer-funded beds but says it can currently use fewer than 8,000 of them.
…The agency (HHS) is charged with placing unaccompanied children with vetted sponsors, who are typically family members in the U.S.
…”It’s within their legal right to seek protection,” the (HHS) official said, adding later, “We need to treat these kids how we would want our own kids treated.”
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday on the border crisis (Link behind paywall.)
As TGP reported earlier Tuesday, migrant children will be warehoused by the Biden administration while being processed for release.
The Biden administration opened a gated migrant facility for illegal immigrant children this past weekend in Carrizo Springs, Texas. The camp will hold up to 700 illegal immigrant children.
The facility was open for one month during the Trump years and then it was shut down. Democrats were very, very upset about caged kids during Trump’s tenure. They completely ignored it under Obama.
Excerpt from 2016 Washington Post article on the Obama administration aiding human traffickers by placing smuggled migrant children in the U.S. interior:
The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.
And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) initiated the six-month investigation after several Guatemalan teens were found in a dilapidated trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm. The boys were among more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have surged into the United States since 2011, fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
The Biden administration must be held to account for this deliberate act of flooding the U.S. with migrant children. It is bad policy all around. The vulnerable children are placed in the dangerous, predatory hands of criminal cartels to get to the border and as noted above, the migrant children and their families will be indebted and likely enslaved to the cartels for getting them here. The thousands of migrant children will require care and resources that should be going to American children during the twin crises of the pandemic and economic turmoil. Rather than focusing on stopping cross border drug and weapons smuggling by the cartels, Border Patrol and ICE will be diverted to doing the work of the cartels by taking care of smuggled migrant children.
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