President Joe Biden’s pro-migration policies are helping coyotes transport illegal migrants’ foreign children to destinations throughout the United States, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“We’re complicit as a nation in human trafficking,” Graham said at a March 26 press conference in Texas with 17 other GOP Senators. He continued:
What did we learn last night? There’s a trail on our side of the border with markers placed by the federal government to show illegal immigrants where to go. [We learned] that we’re transporting people — who pay [coyotes] to get here — the last mile with your taxpayer dollar.
The coyotes are boasting about their cross-border cooperation with Biden’s federal agents. “We deliver children to immigration (agents) and immigration (agents) are responsible for delivering them to their family members in the United States,” Daniel, a Guatemalan coyote, told Reuters for a March 23 article.
“It’s good to take advantage of the moment because children are able to pass quickly … That’s what we’re telling everyone,” he said.
Biden extended the invitation for child traffickers during his March 25 press conference, Graham added:
The President made the problem worse yesterday. This was a nightmare press conference. He told everybody ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got crowded facilities, we’re going to build 5,000 more beds in Texas at a military base!” So how does that play in Central America? [Coyotes will say] “They’re gonna expand the number of people they can take!”
[Biden] said when a [foreign] child has a phone number on their wrist, we’re going to call the family member, and unite that family. This is uniting illegal immigration.
In his March 25 press conference, Biden said:
And those who are coming across the border, who are unaccompanied children, we’re moving rapidly … we’re providing for the space, again, to be able to get these kids out of the Border Patrol facilities, which no child — no one should be in any longer than 72 hours … So we’re building back up the capacity that should have been maintained and built upon that Trump dismantled. It’s going to take time.
Under Trump’s 2020 policies, the waves of migrant adults, families, and single children and teenagers were quickly flown back to their home countries.
In contrast, Biden has put the border agencies into reverse and is using them to build more facilities so that more migrants can get pulled in to get the legal paperwork and work permits they need to help them stay in the United States.
The cooperative taxpayer-funded cross-border transport of claimed “Unaccompanied Alien Children” is an open secret in Washington D.C. and among the establishment media.
“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 ProPublica reporter: “They want to help their parents,” she said in a November 2020 article.
D.C. politicians also recognize that many of the teenagers who are admitted and transported under the 2008 law for “Unaccompanied Alien Children” are seeking to get jobs in the United States. Many of the teen migrants are going to work for the traffickers who paid the coyotes to relay them from Central American to the U.S. job sites, via the federal agencies.
Democrats have fought hard behind closed doors to prevent Trump’s border officials from breaking up the federal partnership with the coyotes and with the cartels who get a share of the smuggling revenues.
In 2019, for example, Democrats added a line to the annual funding bill that barred Trump’s deputies from sharing information about the U.S.-based illegal migrants who tried to pick up their children at government-run shelters.
Before that bar, Trump enforcement agents had only arrested roughly 40 of the parents, so deterring other illegal migrants from using the coyotes and federal agencies to safely and cheaply move their distant families into the United States.
In early May, Biden’s top immigration deputy, Alejandro Mayorkas, removed that deterrent. He announced that law-breaking illegals would not be arrested when they pick up their children from federal shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), even though the parents know that the coyotes are controlled by the drug cartels.
Reuters explained the logistics and economics of the growing child smuggling business:
More than half the smugglers consulted said they had transported unaccompanied minors in recent weeks, moving them by bus, car, boat and even by plane, which one well-connected smuggler called his network’s “faster new method” to bring children up from Central America. The trips cost thousands of dollars per child and are often financed by parents or relatives already in the United States.
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[Mexican scoyote] Vazquez said the cartel that controls the territory along the border in his region mandates that he and other smugglers use the migrant children as a decoy for the cartel’s own drug smuggling operations.
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Internal Mexican government assessments reviewed by Reuters also state that smugglers have been flying migrants directly to the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, or even into Houston, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona.
Biden’s team is completely aware of the hidden trade and is trying to minimize the political risk that foreign teenagers might be handed over to U.S.-based traffickers. In February 2016, the Washington Post‘s editorial board warned officials of labor trafficking:
A recently released Senate report confirmed that HHS in 2014 placed at least six children with a ring of human traffickers, who then forced them to work at Trillium egg farm in Ohio for as little as $2 a day. According to a 2015 criminal indictment, the children were subjected to inhumane treatment — forced to work six or seven days a week, 12 hours a day, and the traffickers “repeatedly threatened the victims and their families with physical harm, and even death, if they did not work or surrender their entire paychecks.” The children were housed in trailers with “no bed, no heat, no hot water, no working toilets, and vermin.”
Biden told the press conference that officials are working to confirm that the UAC children are being handed over to their parents or relatives, but not traffickers:
There have to be some certitude that this is the — actually mom, dad, or whomever. And there [are] ways to do that. There’s ways to do that — a little bit like determining whether or not you got the right code for your credit card, you know? “What was your dog’s name?” kind of a thing. I’m being a bit facetious, but not really. And also seeking harder data, from DNA to — to birth certificates, which takes longer.
However, many of the teenage migrants do not plan to work for traffickers, but to find their own jobs so they can repay the smuggling debts owed by their parents.
ProPublica cited the case of Garcia, a Guatemalan youth who used the UAC loophole in 2018:
He was 15 and he had debts to pay, starting with the roughly $3,000 he owed for the “coyote” who guided him across Mexico from Guatemala. To finance the trip, his parents had taken out a bank loan, using their house as collateral. If he didn’t repay it, the family could lose its home.
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Within a week of arriving, Garcia accompanied his aunt and uncle to the factory where they worked making auto parts. He got hired on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift, cleaning newly made screws and bolts with an airblow gun. Workers wore safety goggles to protect their eyes from the shards of metal that blew in their faces. It was a dirty job. “I didn’t like it, working with so many oily parts,” he recalled. “And it was dangerous.”
Garcia was not directly employed by the factory. Instead, he got the job through an “oficina,” the word Spanish-speaking immigrants use to describe the dozens of temporary staffing agencies that employ hundreds of thousands of workers in Illinois. In some cases, the [migrant] teens interviewed by ProPublica — all but one of them male — say they don’t even know the name of the staffing agency that employs them; it’s just the place where someone told them they could find work.
Under Trump’s low migration policy, wages climbed for Americans, especially among the lower income Americans who would lose jobs to illegal migrants.
So “who is screwed the worst by this? — American poor people,” said Ken Cuccinelli, who served as the acting secretary for homeland security in Trump’s administration. Cuccinelli, who now works at the Heritage Foundation, continued:
[Biden’s deputies] are dumping illegal labor into the low end of our labor market. At the end of 2019, Donald Trump achieved the lowest poverty rate in American history, 10.4 percent.
Deregulation and tax cuts were great for the economy, but that doesn’t do it for poor people. What really pushes poor people forward is when you do those sorts of economic stimulus things and you cut down on the illegal entrants into the labor pool at the lower end. Their wages rose by more substantial percentage than any other part of our economy, because we were attacking illegal immigration more vigorously than anybody else.
These people proclaim they’re the defenders of the poor, yet they’re screwing the poor and nobody is talking about that.