Fear!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(ABC News) Â The Trump administration plans to arrest parents and other relatives who authorities believe smuggled their children into the United States, a move immigrant advocates said would send a wave of fear through vulnerable communities.
A new “surge initiative” aims to dismantle human smuggling operations, including identifying and arresting the adult sponsors of unaccompanied minors who paid coyotes or other smugglers to bring the children across the U.S. border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials confirmed Thursday.
That marks a sharp departure from policies in place under President Barack Obama’s administration, during which time tens of thousands of young people fleeing gang and drug violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador crossed the border and were placed with sponsors in communities nationwide. Sponsors — typically parents, close relatives or family friends — have been expected to care for the minors while they go to school and seek legal status in immigration court.
“Arresting those who come forward to sponsor unaccompanied children during their immigration proceedings, often parents, is unimaginably cruel,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, a nonprofit that has matched thousands of unaccompanied minors with pro bono attorneys in the last eight years. “Without caregivers to come forward, many of these children will languish in costly detention centers or be placed in foster care at great expense to states.”
The idea here is exactly to stoke fear, which will drastically reduce the number of minors being sent across the border to come live with people who are unlawfully present in the U.S. themselves.
Children whose sponsors were arrested would be placed with another verified relative or guardian, or under the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency that takes custody of unaccompanied minors, said ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez.
“ICE aims to disrupt and dismantle end-to-end the illicit pathways used by transnational criminal organizations and human smuggling facilitators,” Rodriguez said. “The sponsors who have placed children directly into harm’s way by entrusting them to violent criminal organizations will be held accountable.”
They should arrest Democrats who enable and embolden this behavior by constantly coming out in favor of illegal aliens, and end up putting children in harm’s way.
