What We Know About Unaccompanied Children Arriving at Southern Border; Deaths of migrant children in US custody highlight border perils

What We Know About Unaccompanied Children Arriving at Southern Border:

A 10-year-old girl from Honduras arrived at the southern border unaccompanied by adults. She told Sheena Rodriguez that she hoped to stay in America, and wanted to “color and get to know my father.”

The Honduras girl is like so many other unaccompanied alien children, says Rodriguez, founder and president of Alliance for a Safe Texas.

These kids arrive at the border with “pieces of paper with handwritten numbers on it,” she says, “and these children are going to people that they have never even spoken to.”

About 85,000 migrant children have entered the U.S. and been placed with a sponsor, but the federal U.S. government now doesn’t know the children’s location or status. Through her work at Alliance for a Safe Texas, Rodriguez seeks to raise awareness about how the border crisis has led to the exploitation of children, and to offer solutions to lawmakers who are trying to fix policies that led to the current situation.

Rodriguez’s desire to find out what was really going on at the southern border began about three years ago. She says she needed to see the situation for herself, so she planned a trip. Rodriguez left her home in North Texas and arrived around midnight in Laredo, about 160 miles south of San Antonio on the Mexican border.

“We encountered about 60 different men, all young men, to the one Border Patrol agent,” Rodriguez says, adding: “And he looked at me, didn’t know me from anywhere, and said, ‘I need help. We’re being invaded.’”

At that moment, Rodriguez says she committed to doing something to address the border crisis.

Since that first trip, Rodriguez says, she has taken nearly three dozen trips to the border and spoken with many illegal aliens, including unaccompanied migrant children.

Rodriguez joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to share stories of these unaccompanied children and explain what we know about how minors are arriving alone at the border. —>READ MORE HERE

Deaths of migrant children in US custody highlight border perils:

Two underage migrants have died in federal custody in the last week alone, according to Border Patrol officials.

The latest death was an 8-year-old girl who was with her family in Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) custody in the Rio Grande Valley Sector in Texas. The agency said in a statement that the child experienced a medical emergency at the Harlingen Texas station and was transported to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. She is believed to be the first death of a child in CBP custody since 2019.

Last week, a 17-year-old unaccompanied minor died while in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Florida. The teen was found unconscious at the Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services shelter, which is currently unlicensed by the state due to a dispute between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the federal government.

“While encounter numbers have been slashed in half — six straight days of decline since the end of Title 42, yesterday, CBP encountered just over 4,000 people. It doesn’t mean the humanitarian crisis doesn’t remain,” said Douglas Nicholls, the mayor of Yuma, Arizona. —>READ MORE HERE

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