The Trump administration said Thursday that nearly half of the children ages 5 and under who were separated from grown-ups at the U.S. border can’t be reunited with their parents, mostly because many of the adults are violent criminals – and some lied about being the minors’ parents.
President Donald Trump had claimed Tuesday that illegal immigrants and human traffickers were ‘using children’ to manipulate America’s immigration system and make it easier for adults to enter the U.S. without papers and remain there.
Of the 103 minors in the youngest age group, the administration has reunited 57 with parents, but the other 43 are ‘ineligible,’ the Justice and Homeland Security Departments reported.
Eleven of the adults have ‘serious criminal histor[ies], the agencies announced, including charges or convictions for child cruelty, kidnapping, murder, human smuggling and domestic violence.
Seven more were ‘determined not to be a parent’ at all.
Authorities determined that one adult was alleged to have abused the child he was trying to claim.
Another told the government that if his child were returned to him, he planned to house the youngster with an adult who has been charged with child sex abuse.
Eleven are in state or federal custody for other reasons.
Twelve of the adults have already been deported. One presented a falsified birth certificate, and another has a contagious disease.
The shocking statistics will heap fuel on Trump’s fiery argument that his political foes should take a more flexible approach to changing immigration law.
‘Democrats in Congress must no longer Obstruct – vote to fix our terrible Immigration Laws now,’ Trump tweeted Tuesday. ‘I am watching what is going on from Europe – it would be soooo simple to fix.’
‘Judges run the system and illegals and traffickers know how it works,’ he claimed. ‘They are just using children!’
Federal Judge Dana Sabraw showed no patience with the administration on Tuesday, declaring that federal agencies had to provide good reasons for not reunifying every family.
‘These are firm deadlines. They’re not aspirational goals,’ Sabraw said.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that illegal immigrants and human traffickers are taking advantage of weaknesses in U.S. immigration law, ‘using children’ to gain access
The president’s shocking tweet comes as his administration is flouting a court-ordered deadline to reunite young children with their border-jumping parents
The Department of Homeland Security says there have been ‘many instances where human traffickers have used children to cross the border to gain illegal entry to our country’
The president’s accusation came as his administration was struggling to meet court-ordered deadlines for reuniting thousands of minors with the grown-ups – often, but not always their parents – who jumped the U.S.-Mexico border with them.
As a caravan of asylum seekers made its way from Central America to the U.S. in April, the Department of Homeland Security expressed skepticism that all the children traveling with it were related to the adults.
‘Unfortunately, we have seen many instances where human traffickers have used children to cross the border to gain illegal entry to our country, as they know they are unlikely to be detained,’ DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton said then.
‘This is one of the very loopholes we would like to see Congress end in order to gain operational control of our border.’
Walter Armando Jimenez Melendez, an asylum seeker from El Salvador, arrived Tuesday with his four year-old son Jeremy at a shelter after being reunited after 3 months apart
Ever Reyes Mejia got his 3-year-old son back on Tuesday at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office building in Grand Rapids, Michigan