Lost in the move: when children cross border, some disappear into darkness

(The Daily Signal) – Lying among the 16 or 17 dead bodies, Tom Homan spotted the corpse of a little boy, only 5 years old. The child died inside a sweltering truck trailer in Victoria, Texas, while being smuggled into the U.S. in May 2003.

These are the memories that today’s images from the border evoke in Homan, a father himself. Children are victims here, not only of America’s broken immigration system and wide-open border, but also of the ruthless cartels that see children—particularly unaccompanied children—as a resource to exploit.

Homan was working for the newly formed Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the time that trailer was discovered. ICE is an agency he would later serve as the acting director of in the Trump administration.

At the crime scene, Homan directed the men bagging the bodies to save the child until last, because “I couldn’t deal with it at the time, because I just kept seeing my son there,” he said.

Homan later learned from survivors who were inside the trailer that the “boy begged for his life and begged his father not let him die,” Homan recalled, noting that the father was powerless to save his child.

“After talking to the witnesses and hearing the story, I just said, ‘No, this doesn’t have to happen. If we had a secure border, it wouldn’t have to happen,’” Homan explained.

Unaccompanied Minors

Children have long been some of the greatest victims of America’s border crisis, and today, the situation has only grown more dire with the implementation of policies that allow illegal immigration and provide criminal cartels with opportunities for exploitation, according to Homan. 

Releasing children to “not-properly-vetted sponsors is dangerous,” Homan said. “Letting them cross the border in the hands of the criminal cartels is [also] dangerous.”

Yet they continue to cross.

On Oct. 18, a group of 17 unaccompanied migrant children crossed the border into Eagle Pass, Texas, with a large group of 140 illegal aliens, according to NewsNation border correspondent Ali Bradley.

Two days prior, on Oct. 16, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers apprehended a group of 204 illegal immigrants in South Texas, including 57 children, ages 8-17. The children carried papers with various addresses—their intended final destinations within the U.S.

“The images of unaccompanied children show the humanitarian reality of the precarious journey these children make from their home countries to the US,” Department of Public Safety spokesman Chris Olivarez tweeted. “Criminal predators exploit these children & leverage their power & control over them.”

And on Oct. 14 Olivarez reported that the Texas Department of Public Safety apprehended 23 unaccompanied children among a large group of illegal aliens.

The Numbers 

It is impossible to know the extent of migrant child exploitation, according to Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under the Trump administration.

However, data from the Office of Trafficking in Persons at the Department of Health and Human Services shows a significant increase in the number of confirmed trafficking victims during the Biden administration.

HHS issues Certification and Eligibility Letters to victims of human trafficking to allow them to apply for services and benefits in the U.S. In fiscal year 2018, 465 letters were issued to child trafficking victims, marking the first year-over-year decrease in 12 years. In fiscal year 2019, the number of confirmed trafficked children grew to 892, then fell to 672 in 2020. In 2021, the first fiscal year of the Biden administration, child trafficking cases grew to 1,143 before rising to 2,226 in fiscal year 2022 and 2,148 in fiscal year 2023.

In August, ICE reported that it does not know the location or status of more than 300,000 migrant children. Between fiscal year 2019 and 2023, 32,000 illegal alien minors did not appear for their immigration court hearing, and an additional 291,000 were never given an immigration court date.

“ICE has no assurance UCs (unaccompanied migrant children) are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” Inspector General Joseph Cuffari’s report said.

Now, Congress is demanding answers. Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, sent a letter to ICE requesting more information.

“The Biden-Harris administration’s failure to track thousands of vulnerable migrant children is unacceptable,” he said. “Almost 300,000 children have essentially vanished under their watch, putting them at serious risk of trafficking and exploitation. This administration is sitting by and not doing nearly enough to get answers and fix this crisis.”

He adds that a whistleblower working with Congress says ICE has handed children over to “traffickers, members of transnational criminal organizations, bad actors, bad, bad, bad people.”

It’s happening, Morgan confirms. And if encounters rise, common sense suggests “you’re going to increase those being trafficked and abused and pushed into a life of sex and labor trafficking,” Morgan explained.

Nearly 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children were encountered at the southern border in December 2020, the last full month of the Trump administration. By July 2021, CBP reported nearly 19,000 encounters with unaccompanied migrant children for the month.  

Encounters with unaccompanied alien children at the southern border more than doubled under the Biden administration. In all, CBP reports nearly 235,000 unaccompanied alien children encountered at the southern border under the Trump administration and over 519,000 so far during the Biden administration.  

Exploitation

The exploitation is nothing new.

In 2023, New York Times investigative reporter Hannah Dreier blew the lid off migrant child exploitation. A 14-year-old working construction in Florida instead of going to school, and a 15-year-old girl laboring over a conveyor belt during the night shift at a factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan, stuffing bags of Cheerios into bright yellow boxes—the stories quickly captured lawmakers’ attention. Dreier was also the first to report that the Department of Health and Human Services had lost contact with about 85,000 migrant children in the U.S. 

Hearings were held on Capitol Hill and prominent government officials were grilled on how HHS could not know the status of thousands of unaccompanied alien children, at least some of whom were likely being exploited.  

It’s been more than a year and a half since the Times exposed the crisis among migrant children, but Congress has yet to act to fix two loopholes in U.S. immigration law allowing adults to exploit minors.  

The Loopholes

In 2008, Congress voted to pass the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. The bipartisan piece of legislation had the best of intentions, according to both Homan and Morgan, but contained a glaring loophole that the criminal cartels have exploited.  

Under the bill, unaccompanied migrant children from Mexico and Canada must be screened to determine if they are victims of human trafficking. If not trafficking victims, the minors are returned to their families in Mexico or Canada.   

But unaccompanied migrant children from noncontiguous nations (i.e. any countries other than Mexico and Canada) are to be screened to determine if they are trafficking victims and then released into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, which in turn releases the child to a sponsor in the U.S., making it much harder to find a child if they do not appear for their asylum hearing.   

A sponsor can be a distant relative the child has never met, or not related at all.

HHS runs the name of the sponsor through the National Crime Information Center “to make sure that the person is not a convicted murderer or pedophile. That’s it,” Morgan said. The sponsor “could be here illegally. They could live in a home that has, you know, five other gang members living there. They could have a pedophile living at the home unbeknownst to HHS.”  

After the passage of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, Morgan says “it didn’t take long for the cartels to figure out, ‘Wait a minute, a minor, other than [from] Mexico or Canada, we can get you to the border and now you’re released into the country.’ And so literally this [bill] that started out as this … protection against kids being trafficked actually incentivized more kids to be trafficked.”  

According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 81% of unaccompanied alien children are between the ages of 13 and 18. The average age of a trafficking victim in the U.S. is between 12 and 15, according to Anti-Trafficking International.   

Migrant children are “thrust into this potential cycle of which we have no visibility on whatsoever,” Morgan said. “But obviously, we know what’s happened because we have documented cases.”   

The Times reports that 13-year-old Nery Cutzal was enticed to come to America from Guatemala for a better life after meeting a sponsor on Facebook.   

Nery told the Times that his sponsor had promised to take care of him, but upon arriving in the U.S., the sponsor he met on Facebook told him he had to find his own housing and owed $4,000. The boy began working at a Mexican restaurant near Palm Beach, Florida, until 3 a.m. to pay off the alleged debt.  

In 2022, Reuters reported on multiple incidents of migrant children working in Alabama factories that supply parts for Hyundai and Kia.   

The cartels are “making a lot of money because, you know, parents and relatives of the children, they’re paying the criminal cartels to get their kids up here,” former DHS head Homan said. A parent might pay for their child to be brought to the U.S. in the hope of giving their child a better life, or perhaps because they are already in the U.S. and now want their child to come join them.  

There have also been reported instances, according to Homan, where the cartels rent children in order to form fake families—because under the Biden administration’s policy, families are generally paroled into the U.S. rapidly. Because DNA testing of all children and adult guardians at the border was stopped under the Biden administration, there is no way to know if a child is being exploited by the cartels.  

The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s research confirms this.

“Sophisticated transnational syndicates are notorious for using children to get single, adult males not just across the border, but through Border Patrol processing,” a report from 2023 reveals. “Once these men are granted a stay, they smuggle the children back across the border where they will continue to be trafficked.”

The Texas Public Policy Foundation also reports that “Studies done by the Latin American branch of the Coalition Against Trafficking In Women estimates that 60% of Latin American children who set out to cross the border alone or with smugglers have been caught by the cartels and are being abused in child pornography or drug trafficking.”

The Flores Agreement

The Flores Settlement Agreement, according to Homan, is another policy the cartels are using to exploit minors. The Flores Settlement was first implemented in the ’90s and prohibits the detention of a minor for more than 20 days.  

“It takes 20 days to ascertain who they are, and process them, and where they’re from, and get documentation, but it takes longer to see a judge,” Homan explained. If migrants are released from custody before their asylum claim is heard before a judge, removal becomes much more difficult, and, according to Homan, the criminal cartels know this. 

Failure to address immigration policy loopholes does not belong to one political party alone, according to Morgan.  

“The first two years of the Trump administration, the Republicans had the White House, the House, and the Senate, and they failed to pass a single piece of meaningful border security legislation that would address the loopholes that we had, like the Flores Settlement Agreement and like [the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act],” Morgan said.  

With increased exploitation of minors at the southern border and Congress’ failure to act, the Trump administration implemented the “Remain in Mexico” program in 2019. Remain in Mexico required illegal immigrants to wait in Mexico for their asylum claim hearings. On President Joe Biden’s first day in office, his administration effectively ended the Remain in Mexico policy.  

Finally, in May 2023, the House did take action to close the loopholes the criminal cartels use to exploit illegal alien children. It passed in a party-line vote.

HR 2, if signed into law, would reinstate the Remain in Mexico policy, end catch-and-release, restart construction of the border wall, and amend the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act to send all unaccompanied alien children, regardless of their nation of origin, back to their home county unless they are confirmed to be a victim of human trafficking.

Furthermore, HR 2 changes the amount of time a child is in Department of Homeland Security custody before being handed over to HHS from 72 hours to 30 days, giving DHS more time to process the child and hold an asylum claim hearing before the child is released to a sponsor.

The Democrat-controlled Senate has yet to take up HR 2.

Today, Morgan says, the federal government is a “part of the world’s largest human smuggling and trafficking operation, and it’s due in large part to [the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act] and the Flores Settlement Agreement.  

Unimpeded

The border crisis is worsening the child trafficking crisis, according to Selene Rodriguez, a policy analyst with the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

“Chaos provides cover for all types of criminal activity,” Rodriguez writes. “As a direct result of the catch-and-release polices implemented by the Biden administration, our international border with Mexico and our immigration process for unaccompanied alien children have devolved into total chaos. Chaos that is ripe for exploitation by human traffickers.”

But she adds, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”