Alejandro Mayorkas’ 2014 border crisis returns in 2021

OPINION:

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas should resign effective immediately.

In less than three months, since President Biden took office, there has been a 92% increase in unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. border without proper documentation. The children are placed in cages built under the Obama administration during the DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — crisis in 2014.

In July 2014, I spoke twice to the deputy Homeland Security secretary, Mr. Majorkas, over the phone concerning the border crisis in McAllen, Texas and Southern California. He was well aware then it was an insurmountable crisis. According to a 2014 USA Today media report, more than, 63,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America were smuggled across the U.S. border under the pretext of DACA created by the Obama/Biden administration. 

DACA was an incentive/administrative relief-from-deportation program targeting Central and Latin American adolescents that failed to fulfill its promise: To protect eligible immigrant youth who had entered the U.S. before 2014 without documentation when they were under the age of 15. 

That same year I risked my life several times searching for the smuggled children at the Mexico-California border who were at risk of being trafficked for sexual exploitation; to be used as mules for drug trafficking; and to be slaughtered like calves for organ harvesting. On Aug. 12, 2014, I reported the heart-wrenching story in the Financial Times.

In contrast to the USA Today release, the migration policy report published an in-depth study in October 2014 revealing more accurate numbers. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of unaccompanied children smuggled into the U.S. from Central America in 2014 surpassed 80,000. Seven years later, most of the same individual children remain unaccounted for and unidentified inside the United States. 

The minors in 2014 were smuggled primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Fewer from Mexico. They were smuggled illegally by polleros, coyotes and human traffickers paid anywhere between $9,000 and $10,000 USD per child to cross the minors into the U.S.

Also in 2014, during the first reported border crisis, I spoke to the ambassadors from Guatemala and Honduras to the U.S. Both diplomats blamed President Obama’s administration in delivering the wrong message to their people in Guatemala and Honduras. The diplomats claimed the administration was miscommunicating DACA’s objectives. 

The ambassadors also faulted DACA’s incentives for the crisis. They said Mr. Obama’s message was at best unclear. The miscommunication incited the U.S.-Salvadorian cartels and their cliques in the U.S. and El Salvador — and encouraged Central American parents to hand over their young to complete strangers to smuggle them into the U.S.

So, the question is not whether Mr. Biden or former President Trump are to blame, since the responsibility of this never-ending policy disaster falls clearly on Mr. Obama and his then-Vice President Joe Biden for ineffectively communicating the DACA program across all audiences. The question we need to ask is what should the Biden administration do to control illegal immigration from our southern border and stop unaccompanied minors and adult migrants from illegally entering the U.S. I propose they follow the previous administration’s immigration policies. 

It is clear as daylight that the person responsible today for implementing and executing the disastrous and dangerous Biden immigration policy is Alejandro Majorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security and former deputy secretary of Homeland Security under the Obama administration. 

Three vital questions remain: Why are the same retreads that failed to control the 2014 border crisis again leading Homeland Security? Were the 80,000 unaccompanied minors that entered the U.S. in 2014 processed? And where are those children today?

In 2014, when I visited the southern border, Impala and Calexico, California, what I found was shocking. Ten young children, boys and girls, hidden inside two extra-large dryer tumblers in a public laundromat. 

Seven years later, in March 2021, I returned to California to find that Central American and Mexican unaccompanied minors are again at risk of being exploited. They are being trafficked for sex, as mules for drugs and victims of organ harvesting. The children are smuggled illegally across our borders by the very same cartels and their cliques working together with child sex traffickers, polleros and coyotes that earn handsome fees for the illicit crossings.  

• Conchita Sarnoff is the executive director of the Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking.