Guatemalan President Says Biden‘s Border ‘Confusion’ Is Encouraging Smugglers To Exploit Children
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei spoke one-on-one with The Daily Caller News Foundation about his concerns with the Biden administration’s messaging on immigration and the border.
Giammattei also spoke about his meeting with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about the need for better intelligence sharing to combat crime crossing their borders.
“There are many things to be done still,” Giammattei said.
WASHINGTON, D.C.– The Biden administration’s messaging on immigration has created “confusion” that human smugglers and traffickers have exploited, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.
Giammattei said smugglers know it’s easier to get people into the U.S. illegally under the Biden administration as a family, and that smugglers have used children, whether biological or not, in order to get their clients across the border. He mentioned the Biden administration’s effort to codify the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which prevents migrants brought to the U.S. as children from being immediately deported, as exacerbating the problem.
“Right now there has been confusion with the messages. When they say we are going to codify all the children who have their parents here, what the coyotes say there is not convenient for them [the migrants]. ‘Let’s see. Grab the children and come,’ That child may be related, he may not be related. Wanting a child is the coyotes misinterpreting way of manipulating people,” Giammattei told TheDCNF.
The Biden administration in May 2021 reversed DNA testing of migrants, a policy Trump introduced in September 2020, according to CNN. When the policy was introduced it intended to expand biometric and DNA testing that “guards against identity theft and thwarts fraudsters who are not who they claim to be,” former Deputy Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Ken Cuccinelli said.
Giammattei said smugglers are exploiting the lack of checks on families, bringing in people who aren’t related as family units when they cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
In 2019, Cucinelli said that a pilot program for DNA testing of migrants had found about 30% of families to be “fake” and not actually related, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/06/30/guatemala-trafficking-smuggling-migrants-biden/