The flood of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” may hit 88,000 this year, according to Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt.
Officials are “anticipating as many as 88,000 will come to the border by themselves by the end of September,” Blunt told other Senators during a June 19 markup at the Senate Appropriations Committee. Thirty percent of the children are aged 12 or below, while the majority of 70 percent are teenagers 13 and above, he said.
The 2019 UAC inflow is a massive increase over prior years. Roughly 180,000 children and youths were brought into the U.S. via the UAC pipeline from 2013 to 2018. The 90,000 who are expected in 2019 would allow the total of 270,000-plus UAC children to fill half of all the school seats in the four large school districts in the Washington, D.C. region — at a colossal annual cost of roughly $3.5 billion to taxpayers plus much classroom dysfunction for American public-school kids.
The UAC inflow may rise again in 2020 — even if President Donald Trump manages to block the catch-and-release loopholes created by Congress and the courts — because many UACs are being imported from Central America by their recently arrived illegal-alien parents and relatives.
“Unaccompanied minors: They’re coming here, sent probably by their parents,” GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham told Blunt and other Senators at the markup. The parents know that “if you can get here as an unaccompanied minor under our laws, if you are from Central America, 98 percent stay,” he said.
The 2019 flow of almost 90,000 UACs is hidden in the bigger inflow of perhaps 900,000 economic migrants from Central America who use the asylum catch-and-release loopholes to get into the United States.
The UAC inflow of youths and children enters via a different loophole in a 2008 law which was passed to help “Unaccompanied Alien Children” escape severe trafficking by criminal gangs and labor traffickers, typically for prostitution and sweatshops. But coyotes, cartels, migrants, and immigration lawyers use those laws to help transport migrants’ foreign children from Central America to the migrants’ homes in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and many other cities.
The pipeline usually starts with the arrival of a single illegal migrant, male or female, with or without a child, in an American city. Often, the spouse travels separately through the asylum loopholes and quickly joins the first migrant in the city, usually while carrying a second child to help claim asylum.
The vast majority of these adult migrants take jobs at low wages to pay off their debt to their coyotes, each of whom is a subcontractor in the cartels’ $2 billion-a-year labor-trafficking business. Once the debts are partway paid to the cartels, the settled migrants must decide whether to keep sending money home or to import their other children or even relatives’ children.
Many parents rationally choose to smuggle their other children into the United States. The reasons include getting their children into American schools or getting their youths into U.S. jobs. So the parents hire cartel-backed coyotes — often the same trusted smugglers who helped them get into the United States — to accompany their child or teenagers to the U.S. border.
At the border, the smugglers relay the children and youth to U.S. border officers. For more than a decade, officials have classified the waves of children and youths who are carefully dropped off at the border as “Unaccompanied Alien Children” who are eligible for the legal benefits in the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
That see-no-coyote policy requires border officers to relay the supposedly-unaccompanied youths to American escorts hired by the Department of Health and Human Services. The escorts then accompany the Unaccompanied Alien Children to HHS shelters where they are constantly accompanied by HHS carers and medical aides.
The HHS shelters are crowded with UAC children and youths, so the government allows “sponsors” to host and accompany the Unaccompanied Alien Children until a judge can hear their claims for asylum.
Federal agencies fully know the sponsor is usually the child’s parent — or a close relative who is living in shared accommodation with the illegal-immigrant parents. In 2017, for example, 46 percent of sponsors were the parents or legal guardians of UACs, according to HHS data provided to Breitbart News. An additional 38 percent were siblings, aunts, uncles, or grandparents, the HHS data showed.
So agencies know that this HHS handoff of the “unaccompanied” youth to the sponsor effectively completes the smuggling contract with the cartel-backed coyotes.
Media reports almost universally ignore the semi-hidden role of the parents who pay smugglers to carefully deliver their “unaccompanied” children to the border agencies. A reporter for the Washington Post, for example, visited a reception center in McAllen, Texas, and wrote June 12:
Diapers, juice boxes and cookies were stockpiled throughout the facility, and in one area of the warehouse, outside the chain-link fence, a uniformed Coast Guard officer and a team of child care contractors knelt on a carpet with toddlers who had arrived lacking parents. “Despicable Me” was playing in Spanish on a television.
Democrats, however, recognize the reality of the government-run smuggling process and are working hard to ensure its continued operation. For example, Democrats are trying to prevent the deportation of the parents who ask to sponsor children at HHS shelters.