DHS Mayorkas Admits: Migrant Children Face ‘Grave Risk’

President Joe Biden’s border chief admitted Wednesday young children are being abused and killed on the trek to reach the border he has managed since February 3.

“The inhumane way smugglers abuse children while profiting off parents’ desperation is criminal and morally reprehensible,” said the March 31 statement by Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He continued:

Just this month, a young girl died by drowning, a six-month-old was thrown into the river, and two young children were dropped from a wall and left in the desert alone. There can be no doubt that children are exceptionally vulnerable when placed in the hands of smugglers. There is grave risk they will be exploited and harmed.

Despite the admission of “grave risk,” Mayorkas did not tell U.S.-based migrants they would be charged with crimes if they hire smugglers to deliver their children, and he did not even urge parents to stop handing their children to the coyotes.

Instead, he praised agency officers for reducing the damage: “I applaud our heroic Border Patrol agents who have saved lives this week and every week, while putting their own lives at risk for the greater good of the country.”

The statement comes after media reported on the episodes described by Mayorkas — and also after Mayorkas encouraged the smuggling business that has killed scores of people in the last several weeks.

For example, he and President Biden have decided to welcome nearly all of the families that migrate to the border and all of the coyote-delivered migrant kids and teenagers.

Once they reach the border, most children and teenagers without parents are allowed to file for asylum and to join illegal-migrant parents in the United States. “We are encountering many unaccompanied children at our southwest border every day,” he said March 16, adding:

A child who is under the age of 18 and not accompanied by their parent or legal guardian is considered under the law to be an unaccompanied child.  We are encountering six- and seven-year-old children, for example, arriving at our border without an adult …

In more than 80 percent of cases, the child has a family member in the United States. In more than 40 percent of cases, that family member is a parent or legal guardian.  These are children being reunited with their families who will care for them.

That was a big shift from President Donald Trump, whose deputies curbed the child-migration by flying roughly 13,000 young child and teenage migrants, back home to their extended families.

The coyote-delivered young migrants are legally dubbed “Unaccompanied Alien Children. Most are aged 16 or 17, and many are seeking U.S. jobs to repay their debts to the coyotes,

Trump’s family home-nation reunification program was stopped by a judge in late November. But an appeals court in January allowed the program to restart. Mayorkas has not taken the opportunity allowed by the appeals court, and so more child migrants are being handed over to coyotes for transportation to his agency.

Mayorkas also boosted the coyotes by announcing that he would not deport U.S.-based illegal migrants when they hire coyotes to deliver their children to his agency.

Media reports say that Mayorkas’ officials have developed fast-track plans to send children to their illegal alien parents, and blocked a proposal to reject 16-year-old and 17-year-oil migrants at the border.

In fact, Mayorkas justified his open-border accepts of the UACs while claiming that Trump sent children back into “the desert.”

“We all know what happened to [a representative] 13-year-old girl in the prior administration, she was turned away and turned into the desert of Mexico, or sent back to the very country for which she fled by reason of fear of persecution,”  he told ABC News on March 21. “We are addressing the needs of that child … We are executing on our plans,” he added.

Coyotes are using Mayorkas’ promise of acceptance to pump more children across the border, in exchange for fees of  thousands of dollars, according to a March 31 Reuters report from Guatemala’s border with Mexico:

Carlos, a smuggler who gave only his first name, chatted by phone with a colleague in the Mayan language Q’eqchi’ about an impending arrival. This transportation crossroads is also an information hub where news – both true and fake – spreads rapidly.

“Supposedly the president is letting children in,” Carlos said of Biden.

Carlos had it partly right. Biden, in a shift from the previous administration, said he would not turn away “unaccompanied minors” – kids crossing the border without parents or legal guardians. These children can now enter the United States to pursue asylum claims, in accordance with U.S. law.

But the half-open border overseen by Mayorkas and Biden is just the latest development in the multi-decade campaign by allied progressives and Wall Street investors to overcome the public’s preference for lower migration and higher wages.

That long political and legal campaign has fractured and loopholed what once was expected by the public to be an orderly legal immigration system for legal migrants from south of the U.S. border.

What is left is a de facto obstacle course migration system for blue-collar migrants — a chaotic Hunger Games trail of loans, coyotes, cartels, rape, deserts, weather, border laws, barriers, rescuers, transport, judges, and cheap-labor employers.

The casualties are piling up rapidly under Mayorkas’ watch.

Breitbart News reported March 31:

In the [Mexican] border state of Coahuila, authorities documented a total of 44 drownings since the start of 2021. According to information provided to Breitbart Texas by state officials, the drownings have taken place in Piedras Negras and Ciudad Acuna. In Piedras Negras, authorities documented 24 drownings in three months, while in 2020, they documented 28 for the entire year.

The most recent drowning took place on Tuesday afternoon when a 25-year-old Salvadoran migrant jumped into the river to escape Mexican police officers.

“So far this year, we found the remains of 18 deceased migrants,” Brooks County Sheriff Benny Martinez told Breitbart Texas for a March 30 article. “This is up by 20 percent from a year ago and follows several years of decreasing numbers of deaths.”

A migrant was killed in a Texas car crash on March 4, and eight more died in a March 15 crash in Del Rio, Texas., and Mexican cops allegedly killed 16 migrants— including about 10 Guatemalan teenagers — in Tamaulipas, Mexico.

“The trafficking and extortion of migrants is a massive criminal enterprise,” said an article in MexicoToday.com by Joy Olson:

Today, there are large swaths of the border where it is impossible for migrants to cross without paying a criminal organization. There are criminals who loan desperate Central Americans money to make the journey, in exchange for taking possession of their homes. There are those who kidnap migrants and coerce their extended families in the United States into making extortion payments for their release. At its worst there are migrant massacres, like the one earlier this month in Camargo, Mexico, of Guatemalans from a poor community who were migrating to find a better life.

… Our governments know what is happening. As they say in Spanish it is “un secreto a voces.” This enterprise has resulted in countless victims. Countless because, unless there is a massacre, almost none of these crimes are reported, no less prosecuted.

Olson is the former director of the pro-migration Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA.

Pro-migration groups recognize the death toll of migration — but prefer to blame it on Americans who refuse to open their homeland’s borders to welcome many millions of low-wage workers, many new civic problems, and much higher housing costs.