America's Talking - Senate Republicans: Biden ‘Created Largest Child Trafficking Ring in US History’

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

U.S. Senate Republicans launched a video on Wednesday claiming that President Joe Biden has “created the largest child trafficking ring in U.S. history.” The video quotes Republican senators at hearings expressing concern about the extraordinary number of unaccompanied minors being trafficked to and through the U.S. southern border. In one clip, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, says “Biden does not care about the 300,000 plus unaccompanied children that have been placed with sponsors since he became president.” Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I am Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me today, as he does every week, is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. We are recording this on Friday, July 14th. Casey's still a lot of stuff going on with the border crisis. Senate Republicans this week turned up the heat on President Joe Biden, essentially saying he has created the largest child trafficking ring in U.S. history. Now, is that pretty much political hyperbole? Is there some truth to that? Help us out here. I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, you know, making it personal, laying it explicitly only at President Biden's feet is probably a little bit of hyperbole because this is a problem that's been building for years across several administrations.

A lot of people reporting out it. We've been reporting on it at the center square.com that this problem has been going. But it's definitely true that under the Biden administration, this problem has gotten much, much worse. And in particular, the child trafficking element has gotten worse. And I want to address something you said in your opening before you dive into this, which is you called it a border crisis, Dan. Now, some of our listeners might be tempted to say it's politicizing it to call it a crisis. But actually Gallup just released polling.

I think it was today or maybe it was yesterday, but I believe it was this morning, that showed the majority of Americans, regardless of how they want to address the problem and where they fall politically, think that we are definitely in a crisis at the southern border. So this has become pretty much a bipartisan fact that the southern border is in crisis. And I think that's important to note that your average American, regardless of what they think about what we need to do, think that what we're doing now is not working. And you laid out some of the reasons for that. I can give a few facts to kick us off.

You know, this is reporting from different places like an Axiost in investigation. But, you know, initial reports show that there are more than 40. thousand children. You know, Axios looked at just a few months in early 2022, and they found 45,000 missing children. Since they did that, that number is more than doubled. So we're not talking about a few hundred, you know, every day, maybe, you know, every week, one or two kids. We're talking about tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of kids since Biden took office, right? And unaccompanied minors have been a huge problem using falsified paperwork, you know, coming over here for work.

If somebody comes over, especially if they're a teenager and they're not accompanied, there's no real way to know if they don't have the paperwork to verify their age, right? So you could easily have like a 15, 16-year-old kid come across the border and we don't even know, you know, and they say they're 19. I mean, how can we disprove that, right? So because of the lack of paperwork and then also, and I'll hand it back to you after this, the worst part of this is how many people are being taken advantage of by the cartels, by kind of corrupt coyotes.

The cartels will just are more brutal and take advantage of people. but coyotes might lie to you and say, hey, you pay me this amount of money, I'll get you over there. And then they separate them. They sell the kids into trafficking and then they take the money and run or something, right? So people are very vulnerable when they come across. Yeah. So just to emphasize your point, there's been at least 85,000 children who crossed the border under the Biden administration, just two and a half years that are now missing. And those are the ones we know about.

Yeah, exactly. Who knows how many that actual number is. But under Biden administration policies, there have been more than 8 million encounters at the border in two and a half years since January 2021. Biden's administration ended the remain in Mexico policy, which essentially meant migrants who seek to cross the border, who have crossed the border for humanitarian reasons and are seeking asylum in this country. Under the Trump administration, they were sent back to Mexico as their asylum cases were heard in U.S. courts. That's not the case anymore. under the Biden administration, they cross the border, they apply for asylum, and they're released into the United States until their hearing. And those hearings sometimes are scheduled three and four years down the road.

Well, you know, who's going to show up to a hearing three or four years later? You're going to disappear into the country. And when it comes to these underage children, as you said, the cartels, essentially it's like modern day slavery. They agree to help people cross the border, including unaccompanied minors. and those people are indebted to the cartels for getting them into the United States. So they have to work. Some are put into the sex business to pay off those debts to the cartels. And the Biden administration has also created significantly easier ways for migrants who want to get into the U.S. to do so by this app that they created.

Essentially, migrants who want to cross the border and stay in the United States apply through this app, They go to a point of entry in the country. They're processed by border patrol, and then they're allowed in the country on their own. And, you know, I understand there are certain humanitarian concerns for these, many of these folks who are fleeing radical countries, oppressive countries. But at what point U.S. taxpayers are, of course, on the hook for these millions of people who have crossed the border since the Biden administration? And what happens with them? I mean, that's what we don't know, particularly when we're talking about these 85,000 children, the federal government lost crack of. Yeah, it's really, really sad. And I just want to point out that these are not some

kind of, you know, right-wing conspiracy reports. I mean, I referenced Axios, which is a mainstream left, definitely liberal paper. The New York Times is reported on this at length about the unaccompanied minors and then being placed with human traffickers and how they're being exploited. And this is a quote, unquote, brutal jobs across the U.S. So that's the New York Times. So, This isn't some anti-immigrant conspiracy. It's really a sad, a sad situation. And as the Gallup holds showed, I mean, what Americans would call a crisis. And it's not surprising.

We know from history and from other things that have happened around the world, any time you have mass migration, any time you have a refugee crisis, right? There are many, many people who are exploited, who are taking advantage of, who are trafficked, children go missing. It happens every time. And so the way that we have left, kind of a power vacuum, the way that, the federal government has stepped back so much at the border, pulled back. We don't track down people and deport them. You know, if they have a really bad criminal record, we might go after them, but even then,

not all the time. Because there, you know, the, there's not really a wall that's securing everything. There's a power vacuum at the southern border and it's being filled by the cartels. It's being filled by traffickers. Anytime there's this much money and this many people, someone is going to, you know, take control and govern that area. And because, you know, the U.S. and in government aren't really governing it. It's being left open to those who want to take advantage of the situation. Yeah, and just one final point. Border Patrol agents, since President Biden took office, have apprehended more than 300 known or suspected terrorists trying to get into the country illegally. And that's just the ones they apprehended. There are plenty U.S. Border Patrol

uses the phrase gotaways, those who are spotted, whether it's through drones or satellite or even eyes illegally crossing the border who they are unable to apprehend who make their way into the U.S. There's hundreds of thousands of those people that we just don't know who they are and they've made their way into the country with more than 300 apprehended suspected, known or suspected terrorists being apprehended. Who knows how many of those gotaways are on that same watch list. Yeah, that's right. I think my big takeaway from this reporting is, you know, many people who want to open the border say, do want to do that in the name of compassion. The way things are being handled right now, there's nothing compassionate about it. People

aren't being left better off by the way that the trafficking, especially your children, is happening. So Gallup shows Americans think it's a crisis. The data shows that children are being trafficked in mass because of the kind of anarchy down there. And as you said, with the gotaways, I mean, we really don't even know how bad the problem is. We only know about the people, you know, border patrol agents see they get away. And we don't even know the scope of the problem of those who are never detected. Well, we'll leave it at that this week. Casey because we are out of time, but at the Center Square, we have comprehensive coverage of the border crisis, and I will use the word crisis because of what we just talked about. Readers can

keep up with our ongoing Border Crisis coverage at the Center Square.com for Casey Harper. I'm Dan McKaleb. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe.