Further Thoughts on Separating "Families" at the Border

For the past 20 years, drug cartels in Mexico and Central America have been expanding into human trafficking, acquiring many of the small-time trafficking outfits. A conservative estimate is that these larger outfits can make $500 million a year trafficking humans. This human trafficking has only increased with lax enforcement of U.S. border laws. Indeed, the human traffickers use immigration and asylum laws to their advantage. Many of the illegal immigrants being trafficked are promised better jobs, economic conditions, and safety by the traffickers. The “better” traffickers just want the money – about $5,000 per person. The “worse” traffickers smuggle these illegal immigrants into the U.S. for slave labor, drug trafficking, and prostitution. One of the reasons its important to administer proper border security is to stop such human trafficking. For many human traffickers, smuggling children into the country for slavery and prostitution is better than adults: the pay is the same but easier to transport and with larger hauls. Also, the human traffickers have realized that it’s easier to smuggle adults into the U.S. if they have a child with them. So illegal immigrants and human traffickers are incentivized to find children to help get adults into the country. Sometimes these children are legitimate to the parent, other times they belong to relatives, other times they are kidnapped, and sometimes they have been purchased. Still, at other times, teenager minors who live along the border work for the human traffickers. They pretend to be the children of an adult to get the “parent” into the U.S. After they’ve entered and been let go, the teenager sneaks back over the border, making nearly a month’s wage in a night for his work. This is how human traffickers are exploiting children using U.S. immigration and asylum laws. Up until recently, the U.S. government had not been enforcing border laws in order to account for the dramatic shift in drug cartel sponsored human trafficking. This only further incentivized the exploitation of children. The shift in policy now is to enforce those laws and determine whether the child belongs with the adult. The enforcement of these laws will be a deterrent to human trafficking, child exploitation, and illegal border crossing.