CBS: Cartels Succeed in Record Delivery of Youth, Child Migrants in 2021

Neil MunroDecember 23, 2021

President Joe Biden and his pro-migration progressives admitted at least 40,000 coyote-delivered, work-ready young male migrants in 2021 under the excuse of saving “unaccompanied alien children.”

“What the advocacy groups are saying is that open borders is ‘For the children,’ when in fact, they’re talking about [admitting] 17-year-old construction workers,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “In other contexts, they’d call it the ‘White Savior Complex,’” he added.

The 2021 numbers were announced by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to a friendly CBS reporter:

The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) shelter system received 122,000 migrant children [and youths] who were taken into U.S. custody without their parents in fiscal year 2021, an all-time high that shattered previous records, according to new government figures obtained by CBS News.

“The record number of shelter transfers was fueled by the unprecedented arrival of 147,000 unaccompanied children to the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2021, which ended in October,’ said CBS.

The government-aided labor trafficking was sketched in November 2020 by ProPublica, a left-wing, non-profit website:

“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the teens are coming to work and send money back home,” said Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a national organization that advocates for immigrant children in court. “They want to help their parents.”
[…]
Some began to work when they were just 13 or 14, packing the candy you find by the supermarket register, cutting the slabs of raw meat that end up in your freezer and baking, in industrial ovens, the pastries you eat with your coffee. Garcia, who is 18 now, was 15 when he got his first job at an automotive parts factory.

The youth inflow adds to the other inflows of legal and illegal migrants, which total about 1.5 million in 2021, atop the population of roughly 45 million resident foreign-born people.

The nation’s huge and growing population of legal and illegal migrants helps to drive down Americans’ wages, reduce high-tech investment, push up housing prices, distort national politics, and give politicians an excuse to avoid difficult domestic problems, such as fentanyl deaths, low wages, expensive housing, poor productivity, and civic demolition.

The UAC catch-and-release loophole was inadvertently created by Congress’ Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.

The 2008 law sought to protect trafficking victims, such as child prostitutes and child labor, while the traffickers were prosecuted. But it is now used by the cartels to deliver young workers to U.S.-based labor brokers and to deliver the children of illegal migrants to the parents’ addresses in the United States.

‘The stated intentions were honorable … if a 10-year-old kid is found wandering around near the border, we want to make sure that we deal with that kid properly,” said Krikorian. “The problem is that, like any of these policies, it’s immediately seized on by smugglers as an opportunity to get more illegal aliens of the United States.”

The migrants are not thinking about the progressives’ “For the children” pitch or U.S. laws, Krikorian said.

They’re simply using the system that we set up. They’re gaming the system that [Congress] put in place. It’s our responsibility to fix that. There’s no reason that unaccompanied minors shouldn’t be expeditiously sent home … Unless they’re lying about their age or lying about other things; how can you condemn them and not condemn the lawmakers and the advocacy groups that created these loopholes? It’s like criticizing somebody for using a tax shelter — as long as they’re not lying and breaking the law, the problem may be the tax shelter, not the person taking advantage of it.

The unspoken migration is bad for the sending countries, he added.

This is an issue that transcends the unaccompanied minors issue, but it’s not a viable development strategy to export your young people and hope that they send some money back. What kind of development is that? … The deadbeats aren’t leaving — it’s the ones who want to work and earn some money. I’m not saying we should strip-mine this [human] resource for us to use for ourselves — but if you’re in Guatemala, your young people with get-up-and-go should be staying to work, not getting up and going to the United States.

The young migrants are accompanied to the U.S. border by contract coyotes, who also pay off the cartels to get routine access to the border.

The coyotes hand off the youths and children to DHS agents at the border, who then pass the migrants to the HHS shelters. The shelter officials then transfer the migrants to the coyotes’ customers, who are labeled as “sponsors” by the HHS.

In 2019, 80,634 young migrants got across before Trump, and his deputies bypassed opposition from progressive judges and pro-migration groups. In 2020, Trump and his deputies allowed just 33,239 young migrants across the border, mostly very young children.

The 2021 inflow of 146,925 young migrants is double the 2019 number and almost five times the 2020 inflow.

Most of the children and youths from Mexico are sent back, but UACs from Central America are welcomed by Biden’s deputies.

In 2021, government officials welcomed 114,211 coyote-delivered Central American UAC migrants, almost seven times the 2020 inflow of 15,687 Central American UACs. Those nations provided 92 percent of the young migrants.

Most of the young migrants are being transported to their parents or relatives living illegally in the United States.

HHS reported; “In more than 80 percent of cases the child has a family member in the United States. In more than 40 percent of cases that family member is a parent or legal guardian.”

Democrats and Republicans in Congress barred Trump’s enforcement officials from deporting illegals who paid to get their children delivered.

The delivery of the children helps persuade resident adult illegals to stay working in the U.S. economy. Without the deliveries, many migrants would return home to their families.

The pipeline also reduces the burden and cost of illegal migration because strong adult migrants can sneak over the border, work for a year or two, and then order their children to be delivered via the government-cartel delivery system.

The UAC loophole is only for migrants younger than 18. Roughly one-third claim to be age 17. Almost four-in-ten claim to be aged 15 to 16. However, border agents are under pressure to accept whatever age is offered, giving the cartels an open door to maximize the number of migrants who pay transit fees on their way to a U.S. job.

One-third of the arriving young migrants are female; two-thirds are boys and men.

The government-backed cartel delivery service is so efficient that the illegal-migrant customers complain when their foreign children are not delivered fast enough.

“During the ten days that Andrea’s 6-year-old son, Juan, was held in government custody after crossing the southwest border with his grandmother, the Venezuelan mother who lives in California said she called government officials several times a day, trying to arrange his release,” said a Washington Post article from April 20. It continued:

“How can they do this to a child?” said Andrea, 37, who goes by her middle name and did not want her last name used because she did not want to jeopardize her asylum case. “He’s never been separated from his family.”

Pro-migration groups prefer to ignore the labor trafficking, the cartels’ role, and the economic damage to Americans. So the establishment media usually describe the massive inflow as a logistics problem, not as disruptive migration and economic turmoil. For example, CBS devoted much of its article to praising HHS for importing so many youths and children:

At the largest site, a tent complex inside the Fort Bliss Army base in Texas, migrant teens reported mental health distress, inadequate services and prolonged stays. Children there were constantly monitored for escape attempts, panic attacks and self-harm. After the conditions were publicly reported in June, HHS took remedial measures.

…

More than 107,000 migrant children in HHS care were released to sponsors during fiscal year 2021, another record. The states with the highest number of placements were Texas, Florida, California and New York, which collectively received more than 45,000 unaccompanied children.

“The exploitation of this loophole is something that Congress never really was thinking about when they passed this legislation,” said Krikorian. “It was clearly a mistake — we’ve seen the consequences of it, and we need to fix it.”