Texas authorities announced that dozens of migrant children were encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in one day.
Thirty-one migrants claimed to be under the age of 18. There were 16 males and 7 females, all unaccompanied.
Two boys, ages 5 and 7, each carried a note with an address to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, shared Chris Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The encounters with the group of children comes as a group of 88 migrants crossed private property in Maverick County, Texas.
“Troopers arrested 38 single adults from Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, & the Dominican Republic for criminal trespass,” Olivarez wrote on X.
More than 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children have entered the United States illegally since 2021.
Because of the alarming statistic, made worse by the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s (ORR) weak policies, U.S. Senators Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and 44 Senate colleagues introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to overturn a policy that threatens the safety of unaccompanied migrant children.
The senators claim the ORR’s rule “codifies inadequate sponsor vetting requirements, undermines state licensing requirements and jeopardizes the health and well-being of unaccompanied children, and infringes on conscience and religious freedom protections by prioritizing transportation for abortion.”
The rule enables the exploitation of migrant children, the senators declare, by codifying practices such as “optional sponsor vetting,” “refusal to consider a sponsor’s criminal record,” “refusal to share a sponsor’s immigration status,” and restricting whistleblower’s rights, among others, the senators explain.
Between October 2023 and April 2024, 67,558 unaccompanied migrant children have been released to sponsors.
Texas has the greatest number of released migrant children, with 8,847, followed by California, with 7,069, and Florida, with 6,898 released unaccompanied migrant children.
In fiscal year 2023, there were 113,495 unaccompanied migrant children released to sponsors throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
