Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said that within the first few days of implementing its DNA testing program program, 24 cases of false parental claims were discovered at the U.S. border.
McAleenan spoke to Hill.TV and said, “One of the things we’re most concerned about is the increasing incidence of adults bringing across children that are not their own. I had a gentlemen in Guatemala last week tell me that everybody knows that bringing a child is a passport for migration right now.”
He noted that in the first few days of testing, “24 people that were fraudulently claiming to be parents of a child they were crossing with.”
Within the first four weeks, DHS “identified 180 cases of false paternal claims under different identification methods, 360 fraudulent documents, and over 300 prosecutions of people purporting to be parents,” writes the Hill.
In April, Border Patrol Sector Chief Anthony Porvaznik explained to The Epoch Times how children were essentially being “rented” to migrants so they could gain easier entry into the U.S.
“And so those are kids that are being rented, for lack of a better word, to an adult to format a fraudulent family unit so that they can be released in the United States and then that child will be recycled back to its country of origin—usually Guatemala, in our case here in Yuma,” he said.
Porvaznik said adults are also changing their birth certificates so they appear to be minors, making it easier for them to stay in the United States.
“So there’s a huge fraud problem that’s going on with this process,” said the sector chief.
Yesterday, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) announced that illegal immigrant apprehensions for the month of May rose 32 percent since April.
CBP released statistics showing 144,000 migrants were taken into custody last month.
The Washington Post reports, “Of the 144,278 taken into CBP custody, 132,887 were apprehended after crossing illegally by Border Patrol agents, and 11,391 were deemed “inadmissible” after arriving at U.S. ports of entry.”
Acting CBP Commissioner John Sanders said, “We are in a full-blown emergency, and I cannot say this stronger: the system is broken.”
The Post notes that the May 2019 figure represents a 182 percent increase over May 2018 and “a sixfold leap from May 2017, when border arrests were near their lowest level in half a century and U.S. authorities detained fewer than 20,000.”
