WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump's administration is stepping up its pursuit of parents who paid to have their children illegally brought into the United States, according to people familiar with the matter. The effort, part of a widening crackdown on illegal immigration, is aimed at discouraging families from paying human smuggling organizations.
As part of a new round of immigration sweeps, officials are targeting parents or other relatives who were deported, re-entered the U.S. and then had their children smuggled across the border. Legal experts say cases of illegal re-entry are faster and easier to prove than a smuggling charge.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said it was common for parents or family members in the U.S. to make illegal payments to smugglers to arrange for children to be taken to the border, where they turn themselves in and are often eventually handed over to their relatives. Tens of thousands of women and children have arrived at the border in the past three years, beginning with a surge of arrivals in the summer of 2014, many seeking refuge from gang violence and extreme poverty in Central America.
Immigration officials said they had arrested hundreds of people for smuggling children and referred dozens of cases to the Justice Department for prosecution, including many for illegally re-entering the country and then paying to have children smuggled across the border.
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"The risks associated with smuggling children into the U.S. present a constant humanitarian threat," immigration officials said in a statement. "The sponsors who have placed children directly into harm's way by entrusting them to violent criminal organizations will be held accountable for their role in these conspiracies."
Some children reported being raped or held hostage by smugglers for more money. Others have been abandoned by smugglers as they try to cross the border.
Immigration advocates called the new enforcement policy a heartless way to try to reduce smuggling.
"It's extremely cruel when you started shutting down refugee applicants and rescinding protections for children brought to the country at a young age, to send this kind of message to parents trying to get their kids to safety," said Chris Rickerd, policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington.
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Smuggling cases are among the most challenging to prove, and the biggest hurdle is identifying witnesses, who are likely to be undocumented and unwilling to help, according to Michael Wynne, who spent 12 years as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. Targeting parents for re-entering the country illegally, rather than trying to go after them for smuggling, presents prosecutors with a higher likelihood of success.
"It's a throwdown case," he said. "You're going to prosecute the crime where you get the biggest bang for your buck."
Earlier this year, administration officials said that the thousands of children who arrived each year as unaccompanied minors would no longer be protected against deportation, reversing a Barack Obama administration policy. John Kelly, then the Homeland Security secretary and now the White House chief of staff, wrote a memo in February saying parents would be subject to criminal prosecution if they had paid human traffickers to bring children across the border.
The children, who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol, are handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement. The office will either place the children in a shelter or release them to a family member. Immigration officials said most of the unaccompanied children apprehended at the border were eventually turned over to a family member, most often a parent, already living in the U.S.
Homeland Security officials acknowledge that many of the children are fleeing violence in their home country, but they say that paying smugglers to transport them to the border endangers the children.
Interviews with immigration officials and court documents show numerous examples of children being exploited by smuggling organizations. Mexican authorities reported in July that they had rescued 147 Central American migrants, including 48 children, found abandoned in the wilderness in Veracruz state after a truck carrying them crashed.
And officials said that some of the money paid to smugglers found its way into the hands of drug cartels. In recent years, drug smuggling organizations have diversified their activities and now get a substantial portion of their revenue from human smuggling, officials said.
The drug trafficking organizations charge smugglers to cross through their territory. In some cases, the cartels abduct the migrants and hold them for ransom from parents in the U.S. or family back home.
Even those who make it across the border face dangers, officials said.
In July, the police in San Antonio, responding to a call from a local Wal-Mart, found dozens of illegal aliens inside a semitrailer parked in heat of more than 100 degrees. Ten of the 39 people found in or near the truck died, and others were hospitalized, some with brain damage. Among those found alive in the truck were two school-age children.
A Section on 09/25/2017