Located just 70 miles from America's southern border, McAllen, Texas has been an epicenter of the nation's growing problem with a massive flood of unaccompanied migrant children overwhelming federal facilities.
"It's an absolute crisis," said a source who was in McAllen last week and revealed how a group of these children were flown from McAllen International Airport to Dallas and then to various cities across the country, including a few who ended up in Milwaukee.
Each of the more than 40 unaccompanied boys the source flew with from McAllen to Dallas was wearing identical (and seemingly brand new) coats, pants, and shoes and carrying an identical bag of supplies. They each carried paperwork and signs indicating the city to which they were traveling and that they did not speak any English. The boys ranged in age from 10 to their late teens, the source estimated.
Migrant children with a designated chaperone wait at the McAllen International Airport | Photo: Anonymous Source
"They were all wearing the exact same clothes and carrying the exact same bags," he said. "Who is paying for all of this?"
Amazingly, American taxpayers are. Because detention facilities are so overrun, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents have no choice but to help the children relocate to the interior of the United States with alleged family members or sponsors while their asylum claims are being processed.
"The only problem is that the people we're sending these kids to aren't sponsors at all; they're members of drug cartels," said a law enforcement source at the border. "We're literally releasing these kids to the custody of the drug cartels."
The source explained that the recent border surge is almost totally the result of drug cartel human smuggling operations that transport unaccompanied children from Central America to the United States for between $6,000 and $15,000 per person.
"Naturally, these families don't have that kind of money, so they become indebted to the cartels," the source said. "The girls are usually trafficked for sex and the boys become street-level drug dealers in whatever city the cartel wants them in. They have to work off their debt, and of course they never can."
This indentured servitude, another law enforcement source said, amounts to "modern-day slavery, right here in the United States."
And the U.S. Government has been facilitating it through decades of lenient immigration policy that culminated in a flurry of Biden Administration executive actions that directly led to the current surge. Chief among those orders was a reversal of the Trump Administration's Migrant Protection Protocols, which required that asylum seekers remain in Mexico while their claims were processed.
"Because the President and our administration has made a decision that the way to humanely approach immigration is to allow for—you know, for unaccompanied minors to come and be treated with humanity and be in a safe place while we’re considering—while we’re trying to get them into new home—into homes and sponsored homes, that some more may have come to our border," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a press briefing last week. "And there have been, of course, a large flow of children across the border. We recognize that, but that is—that—we made a policy decision because we felt it was the humane approach."
Both Psaki and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have claimed that the border remains closed to new asylum seekers because of COVID-19 precautions, but law enforcement agencies across the southern border dispute this.
"Border Patrol has now been turned into by this Administration the Uber for the cartels to get to where they need to go in the United States," Yuma County, Arizona Sheriff Leon Wilmot told the Real America's Voice Network in an interview last week. "Every bit of what we're seeing here along the border is being controlled and orchestrated by the drug cartels in Mexico. There is no doubt about it. Each one of those people who are coming across the border are paying the cartels $6,000 to smuggle them across to go to where the cartels dictate that they go."
At the McAllen International Airport last week, a source said the 40 unaccompanied boys held signs indicating that they were going to such cities as Boston and Chicago. Three ended up on his flight from Dallas to Milwaukee. One boy was no older than 12, the source said.
A young migrant waits to depart on a flight from Dallas to Milwaukee | Photo: Anonymous Source
Under the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement is required to house and care for unaccompanied minor children until they can be placed with sponsors. Customs and Border Patrol agents are required by both a 2008 law and internal policy to transfer these minors to the Office of Refugee Resettlement within 72 hours.
"Detainees should generally not be held for longer than 72 hours in CBP hold rooms or holding facilities," a 2015 CBP National Standards manual instructs. "Every effort must be made to hold detainees for the least amount of time required for their processing, transfer, release, or repatriation as appropriate and as operationally feasible."
In recent weeks, law enforcement sources say, this has meant a mad rush to release as many migrant children into the interior of the United States as possible. Since they are no longer forced to remain in Mexico and cannot be held for more than 72 hours, CBP has no choice but to turn them over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which works as quickly as possible to get the children to their "sponsors," even if those sponsors aren't proven family members or even adequately vetted or even identified.
Making matters even worse are the sheer numbers of child migrants who have flooded the detention facilities. The CBP's detention center in Donna, Texas--just 14 miles from McAllen--is holding 729 percent of its capacity. Due to COVID-19 limits, the facility can hold 250 migrants, but it is currently housing more than 1,800.
"Some of the boys [there] said that conditions were so overcrowded that they had to take turns sleeping on the floor," immigration attorney Neha Desai told Yahoo! News. "One of them shared that he could only see the sun when he showered, because you can see the sun through the window."
Many of the boys, she added, never got to shower in the seven days they were held there (far longer than the 72-hour limit). Documents obtained by CBS News last week showed more than 1,400 children were held for longer than 72 hours. On Saturday, the Biden Administration authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to assist in sheltering the unaccompanied children who have flooded across the border since Biden's executive orders in late January. A record 3,200 children are now in Border Patrol custody, and nearly 170 are under the age of 13.
Crowded facilities and even more children coming in each day have forced officials to even more rapidly release both asylum seekers and illegal border crossers who claim to be trying to reunite with family members already in the United States. Many of them, however, tragically aren't. They have paid drug cartel-backed coyotes thousands of dollars to get them across the border, and now that they are, they are expected to work off their debt.
"And we're just letting them in and turning them right back over to the cartels," a law enforcement source said. "It's absolutely shameful."