Obama’s Inaction on Immigration Loophole Separated More Than Quarter Million Child Border Crossers

President Obama’s inaction on closing a legal loophole in the immigration system led to more than quarter of a million child border crossers being sent to the United States and separated from their foreign families.

The 2008 law known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) allows unaccompanied minor children to permanently remain in the U.S., leaving the vast majority of them in child care centers run by the Department of Health and Human Services and in homes with sponsors.

These unaccompanied minors are generally sent by their families in Central America to cross into the U.S. so that they can be permanently resettled in the country.

Between Fiscal Year 2010 and Fiscal Year 2016, the Obama administration apprehended more than a quarter of a million unaccompanied minors at the border, and almost all of these minors were eventually resettled across the U.S. with sponsors.

The TVPRA loophole — which still exists as Obama did not correct it and the current Republican-controlled Congress has yet to close it — has caused a surge of Central American families choosing to self-separate from their children by sending them with human smugglers and child traffickers to get across the southern border.

Back in 2014, Politico noted that this deadly journey to the border by unaccompanied minors — enabled by TVPRA — often involves these children being raped and sexually assaulted.

Politico reported:

Young Central American and Mexican migrants have been coming to the United States for decades in search of family, work and refuge. They do this knowing the journey north is perilous and that they could die en route: An analysis last year by the human rights group the Washington Office on Latin America found that there were at least 463 migrant deaths at the U.S. border in fiscal year 2012. And that’s only counting those who make it that far. During the journey, migrants often witness or experience violence from ruthless smugglers, corrupt border guards and criminal gangs, not to mention hunger, illness and exposure to the elements. NGOs in the United States, Central America and Mexico have reported that many young migrants are kidnapped by cartels that extort money from their families or traffic them for sex and labor. Of the 40 young people I interviewed, nine—seven boys and two girls—told me they were captured by the Zetas cartel in Mexico on their way to the United States. Rape is so common that many migrant girls get birth-control injections before they leave home. [Emphasis added]

Despite establishment media silence on the southern border crisis, Breitbart News noted that the same detention facilities that unaccompanied minor border crossers are being held in are the same facilities used by the Obama administration.

For weeks, the establishment media has referred to the detention facilities where federal immigration officials are holding child border crossers as “cages” and one Senate Democrat even called the facilities “dog kennels.”

Images from 2014 reveal how the Obama administration used the same so-called “cages” to detain child border crossers.