ICE Agent: Migrants Trade Children to Get Smuggling Discounts from Coyotes

Coyotes are giving smuggling discounts to migrant parents who lend their young children to other migrants at the border, says a report by the Center for Immigration Studies.

“The child, real parent, unrelated adult client, and smuggler often make the trip together,” said the report by Todd Bensman, a former manager at the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.” Only at the border is the child and bogus birth certificate given over to the paying migrant, who is expected to return the child days or weeks later once everyone is inside the United States,” he said.

Bensman spoke with Monica Mapel, an ICE agent in San Antonio, Texas, after she led a study into the novel child-trading scheme.

“I have current examples where they [the unrelated adult male] had never met them [the child] until the transportation to the U.S. began,” Mapel told Bensman. The adult male told the ICE agents that “I have no idea who the child is. I never met him before until I got on the transport. The child was given to me and the birth certificate was provided. The mom was on the bus,” she added.

The child-trading is made profitable by Congress’ refusal to fix the 2015 Flores Catch-and-Release loophole. The policy bars the detention of adults for more than 20 days, so the migrants and the cartel-tied coyotes have an incentive to bring and share many children so every migrant can get a child and walk through border fences via the Flores loophole.

Once through the border, the migrants are supposed to return the children to the mother, and then get blue-collar jobs to repay the cartel’s labor-trafficking business.

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Bensman reported how the child trade works:

Mapel said human smugglers or brokers in home countries cut package deals where a parent provides a child (especially if parents have more than one) to a child-less migrant for a fee or an in-kind reduction in the real parent’s own smuggling fee. Such packages can reach $7,000 for transportation, food, doctored birth certificates, and the child.

“If you have children to spare during your trip to the U.S., your trip is not as expensive,” she explained.

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“In the cases I’m looking at,” Mapel said. “the mother lost track of that child. That child is now in another person’s custody because they didn’t reunite or something, somewhere.”

Others may be abandoned in the field. Plenty of abandoned-child cases have come to the attention of federal agents, such a 3-year-old boy found recently near McAllen, Texas, crying alone in a corn field, the only tie to his family possibly the phone number written on one of his shoes. {snip}

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