President Trump signed an executive order this week allowing adults who illegally enter the United States with children, claiming to be family units, to be detained together in federal facilities.
The question of a valid parental-child relationship is at the center of how the Department of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services handle detainment.
Because of fraudulent documentation, profits to smugglers, and false asylum claims, there is essentially no way to prove or verify adults traveling with children are indeed their parents.
In
April 2016, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley warned about catch-and-release policies enabling the smuggling industry. In the past, any non-Mexican or Canadian individual illegally crossing the border with a child was considered a family unit, processed and released into the interior.
Current zero-tolerance policies require they be detained until prosecution.
"A recent Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report confirmed that human smuggling rings are exploiting children in order to prevent the detention of the undocumented immigrants they're smuggling into the United States.
They are pairing children with unrelated adults, knowing adults who enter the United States with children won't be detained," he said.
"At least one Honduran interviewed by DHS officials reported that
children are kidnapped or adopted then smuggled with their unrelated adult "family member" to the United States. This smuggling practice has bolstered an underground market for counterfeit birth certificates according to the report, which was prepared by the DHS Human Smuggling Cell. Once in the U.S., these children are vulnerable to labor or sex trafficking," he continued.
Fast-forward to 2018 and this is still the case.
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