Fake Families
Excerpt from Chapter 7 of Todd Bensman's book, "OVERRUN - The Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History"
By Todd Bensman on March 3, 2023
Purchase his book here.
By Todd Bensman on February 28, 2023
Townhall, February 28, 2023
Policies that created special rights for people who cross the border with children naturally elevated the value of children among those without special rights. In that environment, children became a rare-earth commodity for barter, sale, rent, or trade.
They were visas, permission slips, crossing passes. Any parent with more than one found that they could defray thousands of dollars in smuggling costs to get the whole family in.
We first saw the advent of “fake families” during the 2018–2019 Trump-era crisis when nearly a million family group members rushed in to exploit the recently discovered Flores loophole’s twenty-one-day detention-and-release provision. Among them were adults bringing in children who were not theirs. Quite a few iterations of “kinship fraud,” as the government calls it, arose in the new black market for kids-as-visas.
Monica Maple, a retired assistant special in charge of the San Antonio office of ICE Homeland Security Investigations who managed the agency’s response, told me about the most common one. Most typically, human smugglers or brokers in home countries would cut package deals with a parent of two or more children.
Strangers would pay to take one over, defraying the cost to parents who would keep one child to take over themselves. Parents who agreed to do this could have most or all of their huge smuggling fees waived to bring the whole family over.
https://cis.org/Bensman/Fake-Families
