President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is sure to boost the trafficking of migrant children with its decision to stop DNA testing adult border crossers and the children they arrived with at the United States-Mexico border, an expert witness tells the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Late last month, Biden’s DHS reportedly told Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents that all DNA testing of adult border crossers and the children they arrive with at the border would end when the agency’s contract was over at the beginning of this month.Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the plan will ultimately lead to more smuggling and trafficking of migrant children at the border.The Biden administration has also recently made the nonsensical decision to stop using DNA testing of suspected fake families at the border,” Ries said. “The results are very predictable: A return to more child smuggling, child recycling, and child trafficking. Say you’re a family and we’ll take your word for it.”In 2019, then-President Trump’s DHS deployed rapid DNA testing at the southern border to quickly decipher whether adult border crossers arriving with children are, in fact, their relatives or parents.
At the time, Kris Kobach detailed the massive fraud that occurs at the border with adult border crossers claiming to be the parents of migrant children even as they are not related whatsoever. The goal is to use the children as a loophole to get released into the U.S. interior as quickly as possible.Former Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told CBS Austin that the decision to end DNA testing “is unconscionable.”
“What this Biden administration has done like so many others, is they’ve removed every single effective tool,” Morgan continued. “What this is going to result in is more suffering and more exploitation of vital children. Not less. It makes no sense.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced legislation to require DHS to use DNA testing for adult border crossers and the migrant children they arrive with at the border.
