It's Worse Than We Thought: Ex-BP Agent Says No Way to Verify Parents Are Real
Other than the fact that U.S. Border Patrol and ICE agents are just flat out mean, heartless animals — as those on the left and in the establishment media would have everyone believe — why have authorities been separating parents who are caught entering the country illegally from their children?
Among the most basic of reasons that nobody who has been foaming at the mouth with outrage over the practice ever seems to consider is quite fundamental: The need to prove the adults are actually the parents of the children they bring with them.
And while it would seem like such verification would be simple — since it is relatively simple for American citizens to prove their relationship with a child — a former Border Patrol agent says it’s anything but easy in many cases when dealing with immigrants.
“You can never really verify who the parents really are,” former Border Patrol and Customs Special Agent Jason Piccolo told Katie Pavlich of TownHall.com. “Especially in light of adult males showing up with kids.”
A number of adults who show up with children have either no paperwork or paperwork of questionable authenticity to prove the children are actually theirs.
“Without doing some kind of in-depth interview or interrogation or some kind of biometrics [DNA] there’s no way you can tell if the kids are actually family,” Piccolo added.
The perception among those trying to enter the country is that families who request asylum have better odds of being released into the country than individual adults has sparked a rash of child smuggling. And indeed, at one time families from countries other than Mexico or Canada who attempted to enter the country illegally were processed and released.
That’s a loophole the smugglers capitalized on.
“When they’re presenting themselves they’d get an asylum interview and they’d get released,” Piccolo said. “It was widely known that the human smuggling cell knew that aliens coming in from South America stated that they were told if they were a family unit they would be released at the border.”
The smugglers provide adults and children are given fake documents, including birth certificates to “prove” they are “related,” Piccolo said.
“Smugglers are hired for as much as $20,000 per person and pair unrelated adults to unrelated children,” Pavlich reported. “The entire purpose is to claim asylum, valid or not, with the understanding that ‘family units’ are apprehended and then released to the interior of the United States. Since 2008, asylum claims have ballooned by 1,700 percent according to (Department of Health and Human Services) data.”
In April 2016, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley warned about catch-and-release policies enabling the smuggling industry.
“A recent Department of Homeland Security report confirmed that human smuggling rings are exploiting children in order to prevent the detention of the undocumented immigrants they’re smuggling into the United States,” Grassley said. “They are pairing children with unrelated adults, knowing adults who enter the United States with children won’t be detained.”
As asylum requests have ballooned, DHS officials have put a greater emphasis on authenticating the relationship between parents and children.
“From October 2017 to this February, we have seen a staggering 315-percent increase in illegal aliens, fraudulently using children to pose as family units to gain entry into the country,” DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Monday.
Piccolo said a more thorough vetting process is needed to verify the relationship between adults and the children accompanying them. By eliminating an opportunity for smugglers, the number of fraudlent parenting claims will decrease.
“If you really want to fix this problem you have to really vet these adults,” he said.
The notion of human smugglers using children to enhance their efforts to enter the United States should outrage everybody. But for open border advocates and enemies of the current administration, the more the merrier when it comes to children entering the country, because those kids make for a powerful propaganda tool to use against the president and Republicans.
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