President Joe Biden and his administration have brought chaos to the U.S.-Mexico border (and beyond) since taking office and, in addition to a lack of action to address the crises arising from the southern border, the immigration action Biden has taken only end up making things worse.
As an example, the Biden administration chose to discontinue the practice of conducting rapid familial DNA tests for alleged "family units" presenting themselves to border agents, screening done to confirm that a child is, in fact, related to the adult claiming to be their family unit.
Townhall spoke with Republican U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee on Wednesday, who just introduced the End Child Trafficking Now Act to restore the familial DNA testing requirement to confirm family unit relation at the border and apply stiffer penalties for those seeking to exploit Biden's border crisis to engage in child trafficking.
"The DNA testing is a 45-minute test," Blackburn explained, "and it may be what saves a child from a life of endangerment, a life of servitude or slavery, and we need to make certain that we do it."
When the testing was conducted previously, the senator explained, it was "something that helped us protect children that were being trafficked." As Blackburn noted, according to reports from border officials, "as many as 30 percent of the children coming across the border are being trafficked."
The full number of child trafficking victims is difficult to discern due to the chaos at the border, part of the crisis that means the Biden administration has literally lost track of at least 85,000 children. "HHS cannot find them, the Office of Refugee Resettlement can't find them," Blackburn emphasized. "They may have been put in sex trafficking rings or put with gangs. We know the gangs like to take kids that are younger to do the carjackings and window smashing because juveniles have a different penalty system," she explained. "We know that some of these children are being put into work crews."
"The fact that they cannot find these children is unbelievable, they don't know if they're dead or alive," said Blackburn. "I asked both [Health and Human Services] Secretary Becerra and [Homeland Security] Secretary Mayorkas for an answer to this and did not get a satisfactory answer from either."
To address this facet of Biden's out-of-control border crisis, Senator Blackburn's End Child Trafficking Now Act will require a number of changes in how the federal government handles children who arrive at or are apprehended after illegally crossing the border. "What my bill does is require immediate deportation of anybody that refuses a DNA test," Blackburn said. "It requires a ten-year mandatory sentence for people found guilty of trafficking a child. It requires DHS to treat these children as unaccompanied alien children — they need to find the parents, find the next of kin, make certain the child is in a safe environment," the senator added.
Implementing Blackburn's legislation, the senator emphasized, "would criminalize this 'child recycling' program that the cartels use in order to get their cartel members — dangerous people — into the country." This program means a cartel member has "a child put with them, they present as a family unit, they file for the paperwork, they get their Notice to Appear [NTA], and they move on into the country, and then these groups send the child back to the cartel." That system, Blackburn added, currently has "no criminal statute...at this point in time" to penalize those caught using children to make their way into the United States as part of a fraudulent family unit.
Blackburn explained another way in which child traffickers are taking advantage of Biden's border crisis is to bring an increasing number of young boys into the United States to aid their illicit businesses. "They're going to these gangs, they're the mules for the drug dealers, they're carrying out some of this street crime and things you see happening in cities," she added.
As Townhall has reported for more than two years, the Biden administration has continued to fly illegal immigrants — including now-unscrutinized groups claiming to be family units — from cities along the U.S.-Mexico border to other states and cities around the country. When asked whether that means President Biden is facilitating the cartels' human trafficking, Blackburn responded "of course they are" before explaining further.
"See, this is one of the problems — the cartels have started to forge documents," Blackburn said of reports she's gotten from Border Patrol. "Cartels are very good at this," she said. "If they think the U.S. is going to just take a paper document and not require a DNA test, they've gotten in the business of creating these falsified documents." That means, since Biden ended familial DNA testing at the border, cartel members and the children they traffic can just "present and say, 'Here's a birth certificate, here's a national ID, here's a passport,' and all of a sudden it looks like they're a family unit and they are not."
The cartels' document forging business and "child recycling" program are concerning beyond just child trafficking, too. "When you've got people from 176 different countries coming in, when you have people abusing this system at the border so they can get in and create a new identity for themselves, this should cause everybody concern," Blackburn told Townhall. "We know that they have apprehended terrorists, they've apprehended MS-13 gang members, they've apprehended all these people — yet this administration does nothing about any of that."
What Blackburn called a "really dangerous situation for our country, as well as a humanitarian crisis for people that get caught up in this," is the result of the same border policies President Biden and his administration call a "humane" response. But Blackburn isn't buying the administration's spin. "There is nothing humane about a policy that subjects 85 or 90 percent of the women and girls coming across this border to sexual assault and abuse," she reminded.