As everyone knows by now, the new Biden administration has opened the gates to a flood of migrant asylum seekers on our southern border. The flood is coming both from new migrants being lured across the border by Biden’s campaign promises and also from those that up to now had been held in Mexican border camps under the provisions of the Trump Remain in Mexico agreement. Since that agreement’s annulment on “Day One,” Mexico has since begun closing its camps and dropping off the migrants on the U.S. side of the border, for us to care for and deal with.
Many of these migrants are Unaccompanied Children, or UACs, which require special treatment and cannot legally be held for longer than three days in the warehouse-like facilities operated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) along the border. (These are the shelters pro-migrant commentators used to call “cages” during the previous administration.) By law, UACs must be transferred after 72 hours to more suitable facilities operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which are designed to provide such amenities as bunk beds, video games, classrooms, medical facilities, and playing fields. There the migrants are to await eventual placement with a sponsor somewhere in the U.S.
Unfortunately, due to the crush of hundreds and thousands coming across daily, those more comfortable shelters are already at near-full capacity. This has forced DHS to illegally retain growing numbers in their bare-bones shelters near the border.
The solution, according to the Biden people, is to accelerate the young migrants’ placement with sponsors.
Unfortunately for that plan, a 2018 policy from then-President Trump until recently stood in the way. That policy empowered U.S. immigration authorities to vet tentative sponsors before placing UACs with them, to prevent abuse. Now, to expedite placement, the Biden administration has terminated Trump’s 2018 directive, deploring its “chilling effect” on placement. That announcement was made in a March 12 statement made jointly by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and DHS.
In doing so, the Biden government has become part of a vast child labor racket.
The 2018 Trump policy was enacted to address the problem of foreign parents agreeing to let traffickers move their children into low-wage U.S. jobs to work off their own smuggling debts as well as those of their families.
Although the March 12 announcement insists 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,” others disagree. Most UAC migrants, who tend to be in the 16-17 age range, are being imported not to be “safely cared for” but to work. As Maria Woltjen of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights says, “Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the [migrant] teens are coming to work and send money back home.”
In a March 13 article entitled “Biden’s Deputies OK Illegals Importing More Children, Teen Workers,” Breitbart News details numerous cases of abuse.
For example, in 2018, the parents of a 15-year-old Guatemalan boy known only as “Garcia” paid a smuggler $3,000 to transport him from Guatemala through Mexico and into the U.S. To finance this illegal scheme, they took out a loan on their home. Once placed with his sponsors–an aunt and uncle–Garcia was hired through a staffing agency to work 12-hour shifts at an auto parts factory, where his relatives also worked.
Although Garcia’s job involved long hours of dirty and dangerous work, when compared to some others he made out pretty well. A Senate report in 2014 told how a half dozen migrant children were placed with a ring of human traffickers who forced them to work on an Ohio egg farm for $2 a day. A 2015 criminal indictment declared:
[T]he 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.”
Not everyone wishing to come to America–or to bring others–is motivated by that tired, old, saccharine-sweet desire to “seek a better life.” Many, perhaps most, are simply looking for cold hard cash, and they don’t care how they come by it. Nowadays, the U.S. government seems more than willing to help them get it.
For more, see Breitbart News.