Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) argued in a hearing Wednesday that people often overlook the humanitarian concerns caused by smugglers exploiting women and children through the U.S. asylum process.
After DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen faced harsh questioning from Democrats regarding the separating of children from their parents at the border, Crenshaw noted, “a lot of questions have come up about the humanity of our policies, as they should. There’s some rightful anger about family separation but unfortunately it’s myopic because nobody ever talks about the other issues that we might have when it comes to our humanity.”
Crenshaw shared a discussion he'd had with a woman who told a heartbreaking story of kidnapping and sex trafficking.
“There was a young woman in my office yesterday, she’s from Mexico, she’s about eighteen years old. She was taken across the border, kidnapped about five years ago," he said, "they were turned back twice by border patrol, on the third attempt they made it through and she was brought to New York city where she was raped approximately 30 times a day for five years.”
“I don’t know why nobody talks about that kind of stuff,” Crenshaw said.
He went on to relate what he had seen at his own visit to the border in McAllen, Texas.
“In one location, 16 kids came across with adults that were not their parents,” he recounted. “Further questioning and follow-through led to a stash house of fifty-four people kidnapped inside in Houston.”
“Nobody talks about that humanity,” he lamented.
Crenshaw argued that those incidents are “direct results of the fact that our asylum laws are taken advantage of," and "of the fact that that woman in my office was allowed to walk straight across the border, nobody stopped her, there’s no wall nothing.”
He said that walls work and provided the example of Brownsville, Texas which has 35 miles of border fencing and about six percent of illegal apprehensions as compared to the 94 percent that occur in McAllen, Texas where there is no wall.
Crenshaw also highlighted the fact that, under current asylum law, “if you bring a child with you, it’s your ticket into the United States, all you have to do is claim asylum.”
Townhall’s Katie Pavlich has repeatedly called attention to the fraudulent parent issue along the border.
"You can never really verify who the parents really are," former Border Patrol and Customs Special Agent Jason Piccolo told her. "Especially in light of adult males showing up with kids."
“Would you agree that our asylum process is completely taken advantage of?” Crenshaw asked Nielsen.
Nielsen agreed and called on Congress to fix the problems with current U.S. asylum law.
“There is nothing humane about a system that contemplates what we see today, that contemplates 60,000 children coming across the border unaccompanied, that contemplates the rape and abuse, the trafficking and child exploitation, the 70,000 Americans who died last year from drugs,” she said. “I’m asking Congress to work with me to change the law so that we can have a safe and orderly flow.”