Trump Administration Moves to Protect Children, Not ‘Tear Families Apart’
The Trump Administration is reportedly considering a policy change that will protect children being endangered by illegal immigrant parents and families. Administration officials believe parents who turn their children over to cartel-connected human smugglers put them in grave danger. Left-of-center media outlets decry the policy change being discussed as one that would “tear families apart.”
The Huffington Post reported on Friday, “Trump Administration Considers Tearing Families Apart in New Immigration Crackdown.” The policy, if approved by new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kerstjen Nielsen, would end the practice of placing parents who cross the border illegally in the same detention facility as their children. It would, instead, place the children in protective custody in a separate facility.
Acting DHS Press Secretary Tyler Houlton put a more realistic perspective on the proposed policy change.
“It’s cruel for parents to place the lives of their children in the hands of transnational criminal organizations and smugglers who have zero respect for human life and often abuse or abandon children,” Houlton said in a written statement. She explained the administration is committed to exploring “all possible measures” to protect children.
Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) are again crossing the border in increasing numbers after declining earlier in the year. Most of these children are turned over to ruthless cartel-connected human smugglers who have little if any, regard for the care and safety of the children they are trafficking across the border and into the U.S.
Breitbart Texas has reported frequently on children and minors who are abandoned by their smugglers and left to die in the fields of South Texas and deserts of southern Arizona.
In April 2016, Border Patrol agents in Brooks County, Texas, reported finding one 13-year-old girl and her 15-year-old sister who were left in the brush for five days without water. The younger sister was near death and required extensive medical treatment to survive, Breitbart Texas’ Ildefonso Ortiz wrote.
“These heartless criminals take ruthless steps to exploit the multitude of poor immigrants from Mexico and Central America trying to reach the United States at any cost and the problem is getting worse,” Chief Patrol Agent Manuel Padilla, Jr. said at the time. “No one wants to see their loved ones being violated or abandoned in this manner.”
Just one year ago, agents in the Rio Grande Valley Sector rescued a group of 11 illegal immigrants that included several small children after human smugglers capsized the raft being used as a distraction so they could escape back to Mexico.
After the human smugglers detected the approach of Border Patrol agents, they quickly gunned the engine of the truck tied to the raft, jerking it up out of the water and tossing the occupants into the river. The action by the smugglers caused the migrants to be violently tossed into the air, Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Marlene Castro noted at the time.
Other agents jumped into the water from the riverbank to assist the struggling children. Agents later determined that five of the seven children were under the age of nine, including one child that was only one-year-old, Castro stated.
“Due to the heroic actions of these selfless Border Patrol agents, no lives were lost last night and no one was injured,” Rio Grande Valley Sector Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Raul Ortiz said in the written statement. “These agents risked their own lives to save these helpless individuals left to die due to the actions of ruthless smugglers. I commend their actions and am extremely proud of them.”
These are the stories the left-media do not tell because it would expose the dangerous conditions the children are placed in by their families.
In Houston this week, Child Protective Services officials were called in to take custody of a four-year-old toddler whose mother left him with another woman in a feces-infested house being used to sell methamphetamines, Breitbart Texas reported. Was this child in any more danger that these immigrant children who are left in the hands of ruthless drug and human smugglers?
Other adult migrants use the children as “shields” to help keep them from being deported if captured.
“Historically, some criminal smuggling organizations have paired non-relative children and adults with each other to minimize the chance of being detained if caught being smuggled across the border,” ICE spokeswoman Liz Johnson said in the HuffPost article.
Open borders advocacy groups ignore these abuses and try to pull on the public’s heart-strings by claiming the Trump Administration is simply trying to “rip families apart.”
“Donald Trump’s war on immigrants has reached a sad new low. Separating families who are fleeing gang violence is unconscionable. And yet we find ourselves in the position of once again issuing a statement that we are against proposals that are clearly inhumane — just days before Christmas no less,” Jen Smyers, director of policy and advocacy for the Church World Service’s refugee resettlement program, to the news outlet. “People have the right to seek asylum and it is fully within U.S. and international law. Especially as we prepare to celebrate Christmas, we are painfully aware that these families are seeking safety just as Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus did long ago.”
Trump Administration officials believe that, in addition to protecting children from life-endangering conditions, the new program will deter the surge of FMUA and UAC border crossing which increased last month for the seventh straight month.
“People aren’t going to stop coming unless there are consequences to illegal entry,” one DHS official told the Washington Post.
“The administration is committed to using all legal tools at its disposal to secure our nation’s borders, and as a result, we are continuing to review additional policy options,” Houlton told the newspaper. He said some of the program changes have been approved but did not specify which ones. They plan “to implement them in the near future.”
As for the children, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said they would be “well cared for as we deal with their parents,” when he was evaluating the proposals as then-DHS secretary.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX, GAB, and Facebook.
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