ICE officers have slashed the cross-border smuggling of migrant children and youths by arresting the U.S.-based illegal migrants who fund the smuggling, often with wages from U.S. jobs.
The Associated Press (AP) reported on September 2 that the illegal migrant parents of smuggled children have been arrested when they try to pick up children from government shelters:
Neha Desai, managing director of human rights at the National Center for Youth Law, said the change provides U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a “built-in opportunity” to arrest parents — something she said has already happened.
The arrests are deterring migrants from using the government-run “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) smuggling route, which ferried more than 500,000 migrant youth and children northwards during President Joe Biden’s term.
The AP reported:
Mary Miller Flowers, director of policy and legislative affairs for the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, said she knew of a case in which immigration officers arrested the father of a child under the age of 12 who had shown up for an identification check. “As a result, mom is terrified of coming forward. And so, this child is stuck,” Miller Flowers said.
In July 2025, border officials picked up just 515 children and youths at the border, down from 7,501 in July 2024. The arrival numbers show a 93 percent drop in the inflow.
The decline will help children in schools, many of which are still overcrowded by the massive smuggling levels encouraged by Joe Biden and his pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
The pro-migration policies pushed by Mayorkas may have killed thousands of migrants and damaged many poor countries.
The child-smuggling shutdown came after President Donald Trump’s deputies adopted a series of anti-smuggling measures that clearly identify the people who choose to sponsor the children as they are being settled in the United States. The government now requires sponsors to provide fingerprints, DNA tests, and income-related submissions.
Trump’s deputies are also trying to prevent the youths from getting green cards after they turn 18, via the “Special Immigrant Juvenile” court hearings.
The “Unaccompanied Alien Children” smuggling route was created in 2008 by a unanimous vote in the Senate and a voice vote in the House. It was sold to legislators as a way to protect kids and teens who were being smuggled for prostitution, but it was quickly converted into a lucrative smuggling scam by coyotes who moved more than 500,000 young people into the United States by early 2025.
Under President Joe Biden, officials helped to triple the northward flow of children to labor traffickers and to families in the United States.
A majority of the youths were delivered by coyotes to labor traffickers in the United States. Most were assigned to tough jobs where much of their pay was taken by coyotes and cartels. Some girls were transferred from Biden’s deputies to pimps operating prostitution rings.
Many of the younger children were the left-behind children of illegal migrants. Typically, the migrant paid coyotes to smuggle their children past the cartels and into the safe arms of the U.S. government for subsequent handover to parents or labor traffickers.
The coyotes would accompany the children and youths to the border, then hand them over to the U.S. Border Patrol. In turn, the children would be accompanied by U.S. government officials to shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services, where they would be accompanied for several months by social workers until they were transferred to their traffickers or to their illegal migrant parents.
Democrats and progressives have consistently supported the multinational exploitative scam, even as they also used it to portray themselves as noble protectors of children.
For example, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) won passage of an amendment in 2019 that made it difficult for ICE officials to arrest migrants who smuggled their children through the UAC route.
The Associated Press article lists several elite-funded, pro-migration groups that object to Trump’s anti-smuggling policies. For example, it cited Jennifer Podkul, the “chief of global policy at Kids in Need of Defense, [saying] some officers lack language skills, trauma-informed interviewing techniques and knowledge of the reunification process.”
The AP article hides the corruption, scale, and damage caused by the smuggling strategy.
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