President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is sure to boost the trafficking of migrant children with its decision to stop DNA testing adult border crossers and the children they arrived with at the United States-Mexico border, an expert witness tells the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Late last month, Biden’s DHS reportedly told Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents that all DNA testing of adult border crossers and the children they arrive with at the border would end when the agency’s contract was over at the beginning of this month.
Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the plan will ultimately lead to more smuggling and trafficking of migrant children at the border.
“The Biden administration has also recently made the nonsensical decision to stop using DNA testing of suspected fake families at the border,” Ries said. “The results are very predictable: A return to more child smuggling, child recycling, and child trafficking. Say you’re a family and we’ll take your word for it.”
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In 2019, then-President Trump’s DHS deployed rapid DNA testing at the southern border to quickly decipher whether adult border crossers arriving with children are, in fact, their relatives or parents.
At the time, Kris Kobach detailed the massive fraud that occurs at the border with adult border crossers claiming to be the parents of migrant children even as they are not related whatsoever. The goal is to use the children as a loophole to get released into the U.S. interior as quickly as possible.
Kobach noted in 2019:
The Department of Homeland Security has discovered hundreds of cases of adult illegal aliens travelling in the company of unrelated children and claiming them as their own. More than 300 are already being prosecuted. But the total number is doubtless in the tens of thousands, because the fraud goes undetected. [Emphasis added]
In late April 2019, the Border Patrol began a small pilot program at one Border Patrol station using so-called rapid-DNA tests on arriving illegal aliens claiming familial relations with minors in their custody. The program has proven successful, showing that in about 15% of the cases, illegal aliens were fraudulently claiming the children as their own. A total of 109 cases of fraudulent parental claims were discovered through the rapid-DNA pilot program, according to statistics made public by DHS. [Emphasis added]
But the true percentage is likely higher than 15%, because illegal aliens use different tactics to gain release in different sectors. Rapid-DNA testing was also deployed in the El Paso Border Patrol Sector, albeit for only one day. According to Border Patrol sources, the tests revealed that approximately 25% of the asserted family relationships were false. Inexplicably, the El Paso rapid-DNA program was terminated a day later. [Emphasis added]
Former Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told CBS Austin that the decision to end DNA testing “is unconscionable.”
“What this Biden administration has done like so many others, is they’ve removed every single effective tool,” Morgan continued. “What this is going to result in is more suffering and more exploitation of vital children. Not less. It makes no sense.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced legislation to require DHS to use DNA testing for adult border crossers and the migrant children they arrive with at the border.
“What we have learned from border patrol is that as many as 30 percent of all the children that arrived at the southern border are being trafficked,” Blackburn said. “There is no family relationship.”
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Sens. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Thom Tillis (R-NC), John Hoeven (R-ND), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Cindy Hyde-Smith, Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Steve Daines (R-MT), J.D. Vance (R-OH), and Joni Ernst (R-IA) are cosponsoring the bill while Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) introduced an identical bill in the House.
Biden’s ending DNA testing at the border comes as a widespread labor trafficking pipeline of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) has taken hold throughout the U.S., as detailed by multiple media outlets. Many of those UACs, tens of thousands, have gone missing in the country with Health and Human Services (HHS) not being able to locate them.
In Biden’s first two years, close to 300,000 UACs arrived at the border and were released into the U.S. interior with adult sponsors, only a fraction of which were their biological sponsors.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.