Maybe We SHOULDN’T Reunite Children With Parents Who Send Them Across The Border Alone

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Does that sound cruel? I don’t think it is. Here’s why…

These parents are making terrible decisions and putting their children at risk in their pursuit of a “better life.” It’s selfish, dangerous, and frankly, it makes them bad parents.

The job of a parent is to care for, nurture, and raise their child, not send them off to a foreign country alone where they don’t even speak the same language.

We’ve got several issues here, so I’m going to clarify that I’m discussing children under the age of 13 being sent across the border alone. The majority of “unaccompanied minors” crossing now are — by the co-President’s own admission — are 16- and 17-year-olds. As reported by several members of Congress, most of them are male. That’s a whole other issue that needs its own opinion piece.

The stories of these kids who make the trek are disturbing — they want to reunite with a father that wasn’t there for their birth or a mother they don’t remember. Their parent may have made the journey alone and wants reunification by having their child take the perilous journey that they did. Sometimes, in the case of older teens, they’re close to becoming adults and just want a shot at the American Dream, but want to jump the line and avoid the long, complicated, and very expensive legal process.

Now I know that the bleeding hearts will clutch their pearls and say something like, “But it’s dangerous where they live and they’re only coming here for a better life!”

My knee-jerk reaction to that would be to ask if they believe that there are some “sh!thole countries” that people should be fleeing from…but perhaps that’s just being petty.

I would follow that by saying that I am thinking of the children which is in stark contrast to their parents, “open borders” activists, most of the corporate media, and the President of the United States.

The bleeding heart libs make a reasonably good show of caring, but it always seems rather superficial. It seems to be more about the optics of caring. Incentivizing families to send minors to make the dangerous trek across the border is the antithesis of caring about children. A 9-year old girl died this month when her family tried to cross the Rio Grande into Texas.

The President cannot possibly think that a mother would send her 9-year-old child to walk from Honduras to Texas without an adult to assist her. How would she know where to go? Just to put this in context, that’s a Fourth Grader — she doesn’t even have all of her permanent teeth yet. It might be a “gut-wrenching” decision, but it’s also a calculated one.

These “unaccompanied minors” are coming across the border with coyotes — paid human traffickers that don’t give a damn about the safety of the people that they help violate immigration law. We saw that earlier this month when they crammed 25 illegal aliens into a Ford Explorer and 15 people died when it was involved in a crash on a California highway. And yet, since the Obama administration, parents from Central America are paying thousands of dollars to cartels to take their children across international borders, and they’re trusting the cartels to keep their kids safe.

These are the same cartels that abandon children in the desert and toss children into the Rio Grande to escape capture by CBP officers.

Riddle me this: if times are so hard for these desperate people as President Biden claims, and they can’t afford food, how are they able to pay $6,000 to some coyote for safe passage? (That was the rate in 2019, according to Rep. Micheal McCaul (R-TX), it could have gone up since then.)

If a parent did something similar across state lines, Child Protective Services would get involved.

There are some very dangerous neighborhoods in some cities in this country where violent crime is a real problem. What if a parent decided to pay known gang members thousands of dollars to take their child to a different “safer” state where they’ll eventually follow so that they can “start a better life” later? What do you think would happen? Once law enforcement got involved, that parent would likely be deemed unfit and have their child taken from their custody, and that’s crossing state lines not an international border.

According to a 2018 Child Protective Services Guide For Caseworkers, CPS should intervene if the basic needs of the children aren’t being adequately met by parents.

A safe and permanent family is the best place for children to grow up. Every child has a right to adequate care and supervision and to be free from abuse, neglect, and exploitation. It is the responsibility of parents to see that the physical, mental, emotional, educational, and medical needs of their children are met. CPS should intervene only when parents request assistance or fail, by their acts or omissions, to meet their children’s basic needs adequately, cause physical or emotional harm, or fail to keep them safe.

Does paying human traffickers — who are known to rape women and girls as part of their “fee” — to smuggle their unaccompanied minor children across the border in a dangerous, possibly deadly journey, fall in the category of failing to keep them safe? What about using them as a ticket into the country, or “renting them out” for other people to use as tickets into the country by posing as a family unit — isn’t that exploiting their children?

I think so.

These parents are willingly putting their children into the hands of cartels that traffick human beings as well as illicit narcotics and they think that this is…a good thing?

Back during the Trump administration, there was a hullabaloo by the Democrats and the corporate media about the number of children that hadn’t been reunited with their parents. Here’s the thing that nobody wanted to say…there are many parents that don’t want to be reunited with their minor child that they’ve sent across the border with human traffickers.

In October, the partisan, corporate media reported that there were 545 children still waiting to be reunited with their families because the Trump administration could not locate the parents. This was in response to an ACLU court filing on behalf of children separated from their parents at the border. During the presidential debate, then-candidate Joe Biden called it “criminal.”

The thing is, that 545 number is just a wee bit disingenuous. It seems that out of that 545, parents of 485 minors had been located, but didn’t want their children returned to Central America. They were holding out hope that if they kept their kids in the United States, reunification could happen on the American side of the border. Besides, the Biden-Harris administration is going to expand DACA to include parents which leads to chain migration. That might not even be needed since the Biden-Harris administration has been dangling the ultimate prize — amnesty.

So, what do we do about this?

Here’s my two-point solution for how to immediately end the “challenge” of thousands of undocumented minors crossing the border:

1. Don’t reunite children with their unfit parents. These are people who are treating their children as a one-way ticket into the United States with no regard for their safety. One option is to take the children into custody in the U.S. as wards of the state. The other is to work with the governments and Child Protective Services organizations in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries in Central America to investigate such parents and take those children into foster care in their home countries. Have this system working in conjunction with a well-respected international humanitarian organization (not the U.N.!) to provide oversight and accountability. Providing funding for this framework would cost less than housing and processing tens of thousands of migrant children crossing illegally every year with traffickers.
2. Deny parents the ability to claim amnesty. Bar any parents who have made any sort of deal with human traffickers to smuggle their children across the border the ability to apply for asylum or even enter the United States… permanently.

That should do it.

You’d find far fewer children under-13 crossing the border “unaccompanied.”

If you hold parents accountable for risking the lives of their children and denying them their guaranteed ticket into the United States — that is, take away the incentives — they’ll stop sending them.

It certainly wouldn’t be worth the risk or the $6,000.