U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is sounding the alarm about the vast numbers of innocent children, some of them as young as eight, who ar...
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is sounding the alarm about the vast numbers of innocent children, some of them as young as eight, who are being drugged and trafficked into the United States by smugglers posing as their "parents" and other family members.
There have been at least two separate instances in recent days in which Border Patrol identified smugglers carrying birth certificates for multiple children to whom they are not related. Agents say they are seeing a rise in the number of smugglers doing this as the mules "recycle" children for trafficking purposes.
"A few years ago when they were coming in en masse, we had to let family units in," one Border Patrol agent said about the matter. "People kept coming in and after a while we noticed the kids were the same, but the parents were different. They were recycling the kids."
"I hate thinking about it because there were thousands of kids and who knows where they all ended up."
Smugglers drugged boy with sleep aids to "prevent him from talking"
Authorities say they are unsure how prevalent the horrific practice is as they struggle to keep up with the hordes of alien migrants flooding the southern border entry points.
"Sometimes we encounter criminal actions so horrendous they defy human decency," says Gregory Bovino, the chief of Border Patrol at California's El Centro sector of the southern border.
In one such case, Border Patrol agents recovered a child at the California border who had been "heavily dosed with sleep aids to prevent him from talking," Bovino revealed.
On August 29 a few weeks before that incident, Border Patrol agents manning a port of entry in San Luis, Ariz., caught Marlen Contreras-Lopez, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen and Arizona resident, trafficking two children in her car who had been drugged with sleep aids. Contreras-Lopez initially claimed she is related to the children, but that tale fell apart after officers observed one of the children having to be carried out of the car because he or she "struggled to walk" due to the drugs.
"The woman had difficulty waking the children," tweeted Executive Assistant Office of Field Operations Commissioner Diane J. Sabatino about that incident.
"Officers observed that the children remained extremely groggy. While interviewing the children, officers soon discovered there was no family relationship between the woman and the two minors, ages 11 and 8."
While the birth certificates that Contreras-Lopez handed to the officers were valid for the children, said children do not actually belong to Contreras-Lopez, who was apparently just trafficking them on behalf of someone else.
The little girl says the little boy who was with her is her brother, and that the two come from the southern Mexican state of Michoacan. From their hometown, the two kids were bused to the Mexican border town of San Luis Rio Colorado where Contreras-Lopez was ready and waiting to pick them up for further transfer.
One of the children revealed that their mother is still in Mexico and that they are supposedly now on their way to their mother's boyfriend's house somewhere in the U.S. Contreras-Lopez has since been charged with smuggling and the two children were handed back over to Mexican authorities.
As of May 2024, some 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children were released by border authorities to sponsors, only to never again appear in court. This means that federal authorities have completely lost contact with all of these children and have no idea where they are currently.
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