By Jennie Taer | New York Post
Border Patrol agents are warning that kids as young as 8 are being drugged and smuggled into the US by traffickers posing as their parents or family members — and nobody knows how common the horrifying practice is.
Authorities have rescued children caught up in two different instances of such smuggling in recent weeks — including one instance where the alleged traffickers had birth certificates for multiple kids who they weren’t related to, according to the Border Patrol.
Border Patrol sources have told The Post they’ve observed increasing numbers of smugglers posing as family units in order to “recycle” children.
“A few years ago when they were coming in en masse, we had to let family units in. People kept coming in and after awhile we noticed the kids were the same, but the parents were different. They were recycling the kids,” one Border Patrol source told The Post.
“I hate thinking about it because there were thousands of kids and who knows where they all ended up,” the source explained.
Authorities say it’s not clear what is happening to the children once they are smuggled into the US — but many are vulnerable to being exploited for child labor and child sex trafficking.
The cases have horrified leaders in the Border Patrol.
“Sometimes we encounter criminal actions so horrendous they defy human decency,” said Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief of California’s El Centro sector in the southeast of the state, in response to the case.
In one case, border agents rescued a child at the California border who had been “heavily dosed with sleep aids to prevent him from talking” to authorities, Bovino said Friday.
Those agents found that the traffickers had birth certificates for more children.
Just weeks earlier, on Aug. 29, officers manning a port of entry in San Luis, Arizona, caught Marlen Contreras-Lopez — a 28-year-old US citizen and Arizona resident— with two young children in her car who had been drugged with sleep aids, according to federal prosecutors.
At first, Contreras-Lopez claimed she was related to the children, who she tried to wake during the officers’ questioning, according to court documents.
Then, when she got out of the car for further inspection, officers observed that one of the kids had to be carried, while the other “struggled to walk,” according to the court documents.
“The woman had difficulty waking the children. Officers observed that the children remained extremely groggy. While interviewing the children, officers soon discovered there was no family relationship between the woman and the two minors, ages 11 and 8,” said Executive Assistant Office of Field Operations Commissioner Diane J. Sabatino in a post on X.
Contreras-Lopez also handed officers birth certificates that were legitimate — but did not belong to the minors, Sabatino said.
The children informed officers that they were given sleep aids, which were found in the car, “in order to avoid detection,” per the court documents.
One of the kids told officers she and the other child, who she said was her brother, hailed from the southern Mexican state of Michoacan, according to the court documents. From their hometown, the two kids took a bus to the Mexican border town of San Luis Rio Colorado, where Contreras-Lopez picked them up.
The child said their mother was still in Mexico and that the two were being sent to their mother’s boyfriend.
Contreras-Lopezas has since been hit with a smuggling charge, per the court documents. The two children were handed over to Mexican authorities.
Under the Biden-Harris administration, the number of children crossing illegally into the US alone and without relatives has skyrocketed.
Thousands of those children have also gone unaccounted for after they’ve been released to sponsors, who whistleblowers say aren’t properly vetted, in the US.
As of May 2024, there are 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children who were released to sponsors, but never told to appear in court — meaning federal authorities have lost contact with them.
There are an additional 32,000 children who had been released into the US, later failing to appear in court, according to the 14-page report — which tracked a period from October 2018 to September 2023.