The White House has dramatically raised the number of migrant youths and children it expects to welcome into the United States’ economy this year.
The new goal is 117,000 youths and children, up from the 30,000 “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) migrants who were brought to the border by coyotes during 2020, and well above the record inflow of 76,000 delivered in 2019.
The goal of 117,000 was leaked to Axios as part of a media campaign in which administration officials argue they have no moral choice but to let the migrants into the United States. The campaign is also intended to fend off theatrical criticism from the left, whereby progressives say the youth and children do not need to be kept in the shelters where they are provided with health screens and the legal paperwork needed to get jobs and residency.
Axios reported March 2:
DHS currently projects there will be 117,000 unaccompanied child migrants crossing the border this year, according to information on the slides.
- A large number of them are teenagers. Just last month, some 6,000 migrants aged 16 and 17 were caught, according to the slides.
- HHS is expected to reach its shelter capacity later this month, according to the two sources.
What to watch: The administration is looking at ways to reduce the shelter populations by accelerating the release of children to sponsors already in the U.S., the sources said.
The report said officials want to have shelters for 20,000 migrants at a time.
“This is exactly their intention — getting alien minors into the country,” said Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. “They’re encouraging the trafficking of these children … and have no respect or compassion for Americans who lose economic opportunities because of their policies on legal and illegal immigration,” said Law, who worked as policy director in former President Donald Trump’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.
The Axios leak also shows the federal government’s growing cooperation with the coyotes and cartels who deliver the youths and children to the U.S. border, under contracts from the illegal-migrant parents in the United States, said Law:
With the level of coordination that seems to be going on right now, it’s hard to know where we’re one end stops and the other one begins, The language coming out of the Biden administration is no different than the seductive terminology that the cartels and the coyotes use to get people to fork over money they don’t have to take the dangerous journey north to a place that they have no lawful basis to be.
In 2013, a federal judge noted that border agencies helped to smuggle a child from El Salvador to her parent in Virginia under an $8,500 contract: “Instead of arresting Salmeron Santos for instigating the conspiracy to violate our border security laws, the DHS delivered the child to her — thus successfully completing the mission of the criminal conspiracy. It did not arrest her. It did not prosecute her. It did not even initiate deportation proceedings for her. The DHS policy is a dangerous course of action,” the judge wrote.
Since 2010, more than 300,000 youth and children have been escorted by coyotes through the cartels’ roadblocks and then passed to federal agencies. The relay process was created by the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act that says federal agencies should relay the underage migrant to sponsors, the vast majority of whom are parents or in-laws of the migrants.
In 2020, Trump used federal law to break the coyotes’ conveyor belt by sending thousands of young migrants back to their extended families in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The Associated Press reported January 29, 2021:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s stay of a lower court ruling allows President Joe Biden’s administration to resume expulsions begun by former President Donald Trump under a public health policy citing the COVID-19 pandemic. The appeals court issued a stay that had been requested by the Trump administration shortly after a federal judge in November barred the practice.
…
At least 8,800 children were known to have been expelled prior to the federal court order. They included children as young as 9 who were denied the chance to request asylum or other protections under U.S. law.
Most of the migrants expelled by Trump were teenagers seeking low-wage work in the nation’s growing child-labor workforce. Others were young children seeking to join their parents who had earlier trekked across the border seeking to get jobs in American cities.
But Biden’s deputies are determined to restart the policy of extracting migrants from Central American for use in the U.S. economy as low-wage workers, taxpayer-aided consumers, and high-occupancy renters.
The young migrants are coming to escape crime and poverty, say Biden’s progressives. “We are not apprehending a 9-year-old child, who has come alone, who has traversed Mexico … whose loving parents sent that child alone,” insisted Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “We’re not expelling that 9-year-old child to Mexico when that child’s country of origin was Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador,” Mayorkas said March 1.
“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the [migrant] teens are coming to work and send money back home,” Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told a reporter for ProPublica. “They want to help their parents,” she told ProPublica for a November 2020 article that reported:
Around Urbana-Champaign, the home of the University of Illinois, school district officials say children and adolescents lay shingles, wash dishes and paint off-campus university apartments. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, an indigenous Guatemalan labor leader has heard complaints from adult workers in the fish-packing industry who say they’re losing their jobs to 14-year-olds. In Ohio, teenagers work in dangerous chicken plants.
…
Though most of the teens interviewed for this story are now 18, they agreed to speak on the condition that they not be fully identified and that their employers not be named because they feared losing their jobs, harming their immigration cases or facing criminal penalties.
Some began to work when they were just 13 or 14, packing the candy you find by the supermarket register, cutting the slabs of raw meat that end up in your freezer and baking, in industrial ovens, the pastries you eat with your coffee. Garcia, who is 18 now, was 15 when he got his first job at an automotive parts factory.
The youths’ journey can be very dangerous. On January 30, the Los Angeles Times reported the death of roughly 13 teenagers who entered the progressives’ Hunger Games obstacle course, including 15-year-old Robelson Isidro. Gunmen reportedly killed the victims and left their bodies in burned-out pickup trucks:
The [Guatemalan] community has a long history of sending migrants to the United States, and [Isidro] had uncles who lived there. They had indoor kitchens. They didn’t have to cook outside under a tarp.
“He was ashamed,” his mother said in a phone interview. She said he told her: “I’m going to fight to make my dreams come true. I have to get my siblings ahead in life. I’m going to get them out of poverty.”
His uncles [in the United States had] wired him money to make the journey north.
Biden and his deputies want to create a large illegal population for a future amnesty, said Law. He continued:
The goal is to get them here because once they’re here then they’re never going to leave. And the results will be substantial taxpayer resources that are drained, and schools overwhelmed by children who don’t speak the language. and aren’t at the appropriate educational level.
An appendix to the January DHS report shows that 315,000 UACs were accompanied from Central America to the border by coyotes from 2013 to 2020.
The vast majority of UACs were the children of illegal migrants who had earned enough money in U.S. jobs to hire coyotes to escort their children to U.S. border officers, who then deliver the young migrants to their parents. Only about 15,000 of these younger migrants have been sent home by early 2020, while roughly 90,000 were allowed to stay — even though many were coming to work as child laborers in jobs that would have been held by Americans.
Mayorkas’ claim that children travel alone to the border “is absolutely appalling,” Law said, adding:
The deception that this administration uses with language is to obscure the heinous nature of what these parents are doing. They know what’s going to happen on the journey. The kids have no say in the matter, and they will be harmed, some far worse than others. [Illegal migrant] parents want their families to live with them illegally in the United States instead of the parents going back to the home country where they actually should be.
The Biden administration has the legal authority to repatriate the migrant youth and children when they are delivered to the border, Law noted:
There is no obligation to accept the kids. It is a policy choice by this administration to disregard the enforcement tools that are available to control the borders and to end future flows of child trafficking. They’re choosing to make business great for the coyotes, to increase the likelihood of trauma and harm to an entire generation of Central American minors who would not otherwise be subjected to this …. There’s absolutely nothing compassionate about being engaged willingly and intentionally in the trafficking of children.
The establishment media is allowing itself to be used, he said. “The media has been complicit … They were willing to buy any narrative that came out of the Obama and Bush administrations. They bought it hook, line and sinker, and they still don’t press the question, they refuse to connect the dots,” he said.
For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.