Border surveillance camera operators in Arizona captured video showing a group of migrants illegally crossing the border. The migrants then pile into a vehicle and drive away.
Yuma Sector Chief Patrol Agent Chris T. Clem tweeted a video showing a group of migrants who had just illegally crossed the border from Mexico into Arizona on Sunday. As the migrants approach the highway a vehicle approaches and stops alongside the roadway.
The group of six migrants pile into the vehicle and the driver moves back onto the roadway.
Border Patrol agents teamed up with Yuma Police Department officers to interdict the attempted human smuggling incident. Law enforcement officials stopped the vehicle and placed the driver and six migrants into custody.
Elsewhere in the neighborhood, Yuma Station agents found a five-year-old boy who had been abandoned along the border. The human smugglers wrote a phone number in black marker on the child’s arm. Agents processed the child and turned him over to U.S. Health and Human Services.
Marking the children like cargo is not an uncommon practice with human smugglers.
El Paso Sector Chief Patrol Agent Glori I. Chavez tweeted a photo of a young girl found after smugglers abandoned her at the border. The smugglers printed the girl’s shirt with personal information.
So far this fiscal year, Border Patrol agents apprehended or found more than 14,550 unaccompanied minors, Chavez tweeted.
A dramatic shift in migrant demographics took place in January 2021 when President Joe Biden took office and changed many of the immigration and border security policies of the Trump administration, Breitbart Texas reported. In December 2020, President Trump’s last full month in office, agents apprehended less than 5,000 migrant children traveling without a parent or guardian. By February 28, President Biden’s first full month in office, that number jumped to more than 9,400. It doubled the next month to nearly 19,000.
Since February 2021, the Biden administration reported the apprehension of more than 220,000 unaccompanied children — an average of nearly 14,000 per month.