Report: Justice Drafts Plan to Shrink ‘UAC’ Child-Smuggling Pipeline

Central American migrants look through a border fence as a US Border PatRol agents stands
GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Justice Department officials are drafting plans to fast-track the asylum claims by the huge wave of migrant youths who claim to be “unaccompanied,” according to Buzzfeed.

Buzzfeed reported:

A Department of Justice draft regulation would put a two-month deadline for unaccompanied children to apply for asylum with US Citizenship and Immigration Services officials — a major shift in the current procedure, which does not put a timeline for children to file an application.

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Under the draft proposal, if a child does not apply for asylum with USCIS within two months after appearing before a judge for an initial hearing, the [immigraton] judge will move forward with the case, as opposed to continuing it until a later time and waiting for USCIS to resolve the filing.

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The proposal would also make another switch: It would instruct immigration judges to determine whether an individual appearing before them claiming to be an unaccompanied minor and requesting asylum is in fact qualified to be labeled as such.

The changes could speed up the two-year legal review of asylum claims by many of the roughly 386,000 “UACs” who have entered the United States since 2011.

The vast majority of UACs are not “unaccompanied” and are either the children or the close relatives of illegal immigrants from Central America who hire coyotes to accompany their children up through Mexico to the U.S. border agencies.

In turn, the smugglers pass the migrant youths to the border agencies, who pass them to the Department of Health and Human Services. This federal relay ends when HHS officials pass the UACs to volunteer “sponsors” in the United States who are usually the parents and relatives who paid the smugglers.

Staffers and legislators in Congress created this huge UAC pipeline in 2008 via unanimous votes in the House and the Senate. The loophole was quickly spotted by pro-migration lawyers and promptly exploited by allied cartels and coyotes.

The numbers quickly climbed from roughly 8,000 per year to 13,600 in 2012, 39,000 in fiscal 2013, 69,000 in 2914, 40,000 in 2015, 60,000 in 2016, 41,000 in 2017, and 50,000 in 2018. Almost 73,000 UACs walked across the border in 2019.

Congress’s careless and unanimous vote for the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 has delivered more than one-third of a million — or 386,000 — “unaccompanied” youths to American schools and rental apartments, and some, to the nation’s jails as MS-13 members.

The federal cooperation in this cartel-backed youth-smuggling pipeline has been an open secret for at least six years. GOP legislators openly acknowledge the federal role in the trafficking system, while Democrats each year fight to get spending rules that bar enforcement officials from using HHS data to reveal the illegal migrants who import their children as UACs.

Many UACs do not file for asylum, but few of the UAC asylum applicants have been sent home.

According to the Department of Justice, almost 91,000 UAC asylum cases are pending. Only 331 have been allowed to stay, and 7,500 were ordered home by the third quarter of 2019. But nearly 5,600 of the 7,500 rejected applicants — or 75 percent — skipped their court decisions to hide among the nation’s growing population of illegal aliens.

Many UACs try to get legal status by using the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status loophole in the 2008 law. Officials at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service have tried to narrow this loophole but are being delayed by pro-migration lawyers.

Democrats — such as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker — have tried to accelerate the award of the SIJS status by state judges, some of whom are pro-migrant. In September 2019, KUOW.org reported from Seattle, Washington:

Judge [Mafé] Rajul, who offers teddy bears, says that while the history of each of these children is harrowing, she tries to find a way to connect with them when they’re in her courtroom.

An immigrant from Colombia herself, Rajul reckons with the fact that her decisions impact migrant children and their path towards a legal, permanent status.

“I always want to have them walk away with a positive experience,” she says. “So I always offer them a teddy bear or ask them about their school, what they like … just a way to make them feel not as scared.”

Meanwhile, Americans deal with the resulting wave of migrants and the growing number of illegal aliens, most of whom will gladly work in low-wage jobs that would otherwise be automated or performed by better-paid Americans.

For example, in Worthington, MN, “more than 400 unaccompanied minors have been placed in Nobles County [over six years] — the second most per capita in the country,” says a report in the Washington Post. The report merely noted that the town’s meatpacking industry employs migrants but declined to connect those migrants to the inflow of youths:

Their arrival has helped swell Worthington’s student population by almost one-third, forcing administrators to convert storage space into classrooms and teachers to sprint between periods, book carts in tow.

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School districts don’t track immigration status but they do keep tabs on English language learners (ELL), who are generally more difficult and costly to educate.

The number of ELL students in Worthington has nearly doubled since 2013, to 35 percent of students. In the high school, where most unaccompanied minors are placed, it has almost tripled.

“They arrive every day, all year long,” said Julie Edenborough, director of migrant services for Guymon Public Schools in Texas County, Okla., the only place to receive more unaccompanied minors per capita than Nobles County. “We’re talking about kids who couldn’t write their own name, who couldn’t hold a pencil.”

The Post declined to describe the harm to young Americans at the local high school. But the school ratings sites say the test scores by the school’s college-bound kids have dropped below the level of nearby Minnesota schools. “Worthington Senior High is ranked 248th within Minnesota,” says USNews.com. “The AP® participation rate at Worthington Senior High is 22% … [and] 60% of students are economically disadvantaged.” The school’s college-bound students now rate at just a 53.7 percent score.

Some of the UACs are imported for cheap labor. The Post said:

One 17-year-old asylum seeker from Guatemala said he cleaned a meatpacking plant by night, attended class by day and milked cows in the afternoon before grabbing a few hours of sleep.

But he could never fully repay the Worthington relative with whom he was living. Now 18, he’s dropped out of school, moved to another state and works construction. His asylum hearing is scheduled for March in Minneapolis but he fears he won’t have the money to attend, forfeiting his already uphill battle for asylum.

Many progressives praise the cartel-tied UAC pipeline amid the plentiful evidence of the cartels’ role and the impact on Americans. For example, Buzzfeed’s report hid the scale of the migration, downplayed the parents’ role, and suggested the Central American youths and children are traveling through Mexico on their own:

If enacted, the change could represent the latest attempt by the Trump administration to try to deter unaccompanied children from coming to the country and applying for asylum … by children who arrived in the country without a guardian.

Immigration Numbers:

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or a university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.

But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of about 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers. The government also prints more than one million work permits for new foreigners, and rarely punishes companies for employing illegal migrants.

This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth and stock values for investors. The stimulus happens because the extra labor ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.

The federal policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts wealth from young employees toward older investors. It also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.

The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and it sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with drug addictions.

The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.

But President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” policy is boosting wages by capping immigration within a growing economy. The Census Bureau said September 10 that men who work full-time and year-round got an average earnings increase of 3.4 percent in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291. Women gained 3.3 percent in wages, to bring their median wages to $45,097 for full time, year-round work.

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