The Government’s incompetency not only fails to stop cartels, it even assists them. As Christians, we should hold our elected officials accountable to protect our people. 

From The Federalist. I was part of a large political team in the Trump administration that tried to stop cartel-driven human smuggling and trafficking into the United States. We learned federal agencies and bureaucrats were more interested in preserving a broken system than preventing the abuse of children, and they were using your tax dollars to do so. The Biden administration continues to fight for that broken system, which also continues to put Americans at risk of great harm.

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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is statutorily responsible for handling the housing and resettlement of dependent foreign nationals who enter the United States, including so-called unaccompanied alien children, or UACs. A UAC is a child whom employees of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) encounter at a U.S. port of entry or along the border not in the custody of a verifiable parent or guardian.

Once DHS identifies a child as a UAC, that child is transferred to an appropriate private facility funded by HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). In theory, each child is then cared for by that ORR-funded facility until he or she can either be placed with an appropriate sponsor who is already in the United States (ideally, an actual family member with appropriate resources) or returned to his or her home country….

For the right price, the cartels will transport customers or their human parcels to our southern border and present them to the Border Patrol as children. Some of these are actual innocent minors—and many of them are horrifically abused on their journey before they reach our border—but many are not innocent, and some are not even children.

You might think that DHS would conduct due diligence in every instance to determine the ages and identities of these individuals, but sadly, it does not. In our engagement on this subject during the Trump administration, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel refused to conduct any systematic inquiry of people who presented themselves as minors at the border, even when they had good reason to believe they were being given false information.

This does not mean CBP personnel never followed up in situations of concern, and some individuals who were adults pretending to be children were identified. But some CBP personnel balked at an across-the-board approach. To paraphrase a couple of the men and women who talked to us behind the scenes about this problem, the volume of border encounters was just too high, and management had prioritized speed over accuracy.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel also refused to receive such foreign individuals for temporary detention pending biometric and biographic data collection, so we could identify adults or bad actors. In theory, ICE could have been a huge asset here by receiving temporary custody of individuals whose identities or ages were uncertain and using their law enforcement and forensic resources to get some answers. But ICE career officials fought this, frequently citing resource limits, or even claiming it “wasn’t their job….”

MS-13 and other gang members who cleared the DHS gauntlet and were able to infiltrate ORR’s child-filled facilities thanks to DHS’s negligence were essentially empowered to recruit for their gangs at taxpayer expense. They were housed and fed until their claimed 18th birthday (again, based solely on the alien’s original assertion of age at the point of detention).

At that point, they were released into the United States on their own recognizance instead of being remanded to ICE for removal from the United States. In essence, these criminal organizations were shifting housing, transportation, and recruitment costs to the American taxpayer because they could rely on the U.S. government to turn a blind eye and care for their operatives with no questions asked….

In addition to the safety and security issues within these facilities, ORR did—and still does—a horrendous job vetting potential UAC sponsors and fought every effort by the Trump administration to improve the sponsor vetting process. Sponsor applicants, many of whom were also illegally present in the United States, were required to complete a “Family Reunification Application,” which sought only pro forma information from applicants and not information about true fitness or capacity to care for a child.

There were also zero consequences for an applicant if he or she provided inaccurate or untruthful information. Failure to provide information did not necessarily prevent placement….

In the first few weeks of the Biden administration, Trump administration efforts to prevent abuses of our immigration system, to improve the UAC sponsor vetting process, and shut down illicit revenue streams were pulled down, and the cartels breathed a sigh of relief….

How are you praying for our government and our borders?

(Excerpt from The Federalist. Photo Credit: Greg Bulla on Unsplash)