By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2024-11-26 02:16:33 | Updated at 2024-11-26 04:18:16
2 hours ago
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas are not monsters.
But their immigration policies are monstrous.
The latest evidence of this is the toddler from El Salvador in a pink jacket found by Texas authorities Sunday on the border near Eagle Pass.
Who hands their toddler over to strangers to take her more than 1,500 miles to the US border, with only a phone number contact scrawled on a yellow Post-It note?
People lured into doing so by the Biden administration’s border and immigration policies, that’s who.
This isn’t to absolve the parents for their reprehensible conduct. They are apparently illegal aliens in the US who thought this was a good idea.
But the only reason it might seem like a good idea is that a huge number of other unaccompanied alien children (UACs) have been let in and released, without any legal consequences for the illegal-alien parents or other relatives paying to have them smuggled.
Over the past four years, more than half a million unaccompanied minors have illegally come across the border. Some of them are 16- and 17-year-olds simply coming to work.
But a shocking number are like the toddler in the pink jacket, exposed to great danger on their way north, and to potential trafficking and exploitation once in the US.
Biden’s policies aren’t the only reason for this. In 2008 Congress passed a law intended to protect underage illegal aliens from sex- and labor-trafficking.
In a tragic irony, the law has actually incentivized more trafficking. Specifically, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) said that illegal alien minors who were not from next-door countries (i.e., from everywhere but Mexico and Canada) could not simply be returned to their home countries.
Instead, they had to immediately be handed over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services, which was to place them with a “sponsor” in the United States while their cases were considered by immigration courts.
The result? An explosion in the number of unaccompanied illegal aliens from Central America and beyond.
In 2008, before the law was passed, the Border Patrol apprehended about 8,000 unaccompanied minors, mostly teenagers from Mexico.
By 2014, the number had ballooned to more than 60,000, mostly from Central America. And the list of sending countries is growing; over the last year, more than 15% have come from neither Mexico nor Central America.
Even President Obama realized this was getting out of hand and asked Congress to plug the next-door-country loophole.
But, as the Washington Post noted at the time, “Faced with opposition from Democrats, he backed down days later.”
Biden hasn’t even tried to plug the loophole, and has chosen not to do even those things within his power to stop this.
As a federal judge has noted, there’s nothing stopping the government from arresting the adults (often relatives) who are paying to have these children smuggled.
Rather, the judge wrote, the federal government has “completed the criminal conspiracy, instead of enforcing the laws of the United States, by delivering the minors into the custody of the parent living illegally in the United States.”
The Biden administration is also culpable for abuse within the US HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra has been so determined to release children to “sponsors” as quickly and with as few strings as possible, that many have been handed over to forced labor and sex slavery.
The reason we don’t know exactly how many have suffered that fate is that HHS has lost track of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of these children.
It has expedited their release, and not inquired too closely into who the “sponsors” are — all in order to keep the migrant flow going.
In essence, Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, et al. have decided that unlimited immigration is worth some migrant children being brutalized and exploited — you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
Maybe they really are monsters after all.
Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
