Biden’s Deputies OK Illegals Importing More Children, Teen Workers
President Joe Biden’s deputies are making it easier for U.S.-based illegal migrants to import and pick up more so-called Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) at government shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Officials told reporters on Friday they would end a 2018 policy set by President Donald Trump. The Trump policy allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to scrutinize the U.S.-based people who offered to sponsor children and teenagers being held at HHS shelters.
“There will not be any immigration enforcement consequences for a family member or a sponsor who comes forward to be united with an unaccompanied child in our care,” one of Biden’s deputies told reporters Friday afternoon.
The proposed fix to the current traffic jam at the border likely will increase the cross-border flow — because it gives the green light to illegal migrants living in the United States to import more of their left-behind children — and to traffic in more teenage workers into child-labor jobs.
In the current crush, many of the children and teenagers are overstaying the 72-hour limit in the bare-bones border facilities. During Trump’s term, such crowding prompted jeering from migration advocates about “kids in cages.” So Biden’s deputies are using the media’s narrative of “kids in cages” as an excuse to remove curbs on the movement of more children and youths into the United States.
Many illegal migrants choose to leave all or some of their children behind in their home country as they sneak across the border or jump through the asylum and Flores border loopholes. The new Biden policy allows the large population of recently arrived migrants to get their children delivered to the border by paid coyotes — and then delivered to their U.S. homes by taxpayer-funded federal agencies.
But the Trump 2018 policy was adopted also because poor foreign parents agreed to let traffickers move their older teenagers into low-wage U.S. jobs until they worked off their smuggling debts — with interest.
A March 11 report by BuzzFeed News suggests that 35 percent of the current youth migrants claim to be 17, and 24 percent claim to be 16.
Biden’s officials insisted in a March 12 statement that “the new agreement does not change safeguards designed to ensure unaccompanied children are unified with properly vetted sponsors who can safely care for them while they await immigration proceedings.”
Outside the DHS, the view is quite different.
“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.
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.
https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2021/03/13/bidens-deputies-allow-illegals-import-more-young-uac-migrants/