Broken Border: Unaccompanied Immigrant Children Entering US at ‘humanitarian crisis’ Levels

More than a quarter of a million unaccompanied children have walked across the U.S.-Mexico border in President Joe Biden’s first year and a half in office — an unprecedented figure.

Eight in 10 children were released into the interior of the United States, prompting new challenges at the border and in communities nationwide.

“If anyone had any doubt about whether the chaos ensuing for the last 18 months at the Southwest border was a full-blown humanitarian crisis, they need only take one look at the staggering number of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) who have crossed the border illegally,” said New York Rep. John Katko , the most senior Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, in a statement to the Washington Examiner.

The initial surge of unaccompanied children to the border grabbed the nation’s attention in March 2021 as 18,700 children came across that month — more than all of 2010.

Under Biden, the federal government has averaged more than 10,000 children in federal holding facilities daily. Each day, another 250 to 600 children are apprehended at the border, typically facilitated by smugglers paid by the family.

“Incentivized by President Biden’s weak, open border policies, children are being sent on a traumatic journey exposed to the elements and placed in unimaginable danger by human smugglers who don’t see a person, but, rather, only dollar signs,” Katko added.

In all, 262,756 minor children crossed the border alone since February 2021 — Biden’s first full month in the Oval Office. Of those, 40,319 were Mexican and would have automatically been returned south under a 2008 trafficking law that protects children from removal when they are from countries other than Canada and Mexico, leaving about 85% of remaining children detained and discharged into the U.S. to adults, according to Border Patrol data.

The trend of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern border began in the early 2010s. The Obama administration faced record-high child arrivals in 2014 as more than 68,000 children were apprehended.

The numbers then dropped for several years, but in February 2021, Biden instructed officials not to turn away children who came over the border alone — as had been the policy during the pandemic. Children from noncontiguous countries would be taken into custody on the basis that they may be trafficking victims and protected from removal by a 2008 federal law.

“Perceptions that Biden is more welcoming than his predecessor have also driven migration, some observers say,” Council on Foreign Relations researchers Amelia Cheatham and Diana Roy wrote in a report published last December. “Many children hope to reunite with relatives in the United States. Others have deliberately left their families behind, fleeing domestic abuse, criminal gangs, or local corruption. Some migrant parents send their children across the border alone to avail themselves of asylum protections for unaccompanied minors.” —>READ MORE HERE

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