Former border chief says agents no longer have time to vet for child trafficking

The illegal immigration surge into the U.S. is making it nearly impossible for agents to determine whether children are being trafficked and exploited, former Border Chief Rodney Scott said Wednesday during a House Homeland Security committee hearing.

Scott, who was appointed under the Trump administration, said that under the Biden administration more children are prone to exploitation when Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene questioned him on the subject. Wednesday’s hearing, which was titled “Open Borders, Closed Case” focused on building a case against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his alleged “dereliction of duty.”

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Over the last two years, the U.S. government has lost track of roughly 85,000 migrant children released from federal custody, The New York Times reported in February. Many children are being reused and taken back and forth across the southern border to create fake family units that have an easier chance of making it into the country, Scott said.

“That means a child being teamed up with a family over and over again. So he has to make that trip over and over again because that gets them to be a family unit and they get into that categorical exemption to get released,” Scott said.

“Every one of those cases was discovered by an agent interviewing the child and finding little cracks in the story. That takes time, agents don’t have that time today, those conversations are no longer going on at all, they’re being pumped through the system like fast food commodities,” Scott said.

The Biden administration is also ending DNA testing of migrants, a key tool in determining whether or not children are being used by smugglers and traffickers, the former Border Patrol chief said.

“Worse than that, now the DNA piece of it is being shut down as well. That was one of the last tools to be able to quickly be able to prove somebody was not related,” Scott said.

“That doesn’t mean that there’s not some kind of a connection there, but that gave the agents a tool. Most people broke immediately when they believed they were gonna be subjected to DNA, we didn’t even have to do it. This administration knows they’re putting children at risk everyday, they’re enticing them to come into the country and it defies common sense,” Scott said.

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