Customs and Border Protection officials reported two recent cases of children being rescued who had been given drugs by traffickers attempting to smuggle them into the United States.
Diane Sabatino, executive assistant director for the Office of Field Operations, posted a video to social media on Thursday announcing that Border Patrol agents in San Luis, Arizona, arrested Marlen Contreras Lopez, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen who lives in Arizona.
“Sometimes we come across such horrific criminal acts that they ignore human decency.”
When she was stopped at the border on Aug. 29, Contreras Lopez presented officers with the birth certificates of her two children, ages 8 and 11, who were asleep in her car. She claimed the minors were part of her family.
During the first screening by Border Patrol agents, Contreras Lopez was unable to wake her children up, so she was sent for a second screening, where she also “had difficulty waking them up,” she said.
The officer who examined them said the children were in a “very sleepy state.”
Court records obtained by the court New York Post One of the children had to be carried and the other was “struggling to walk,” he said.
While questioning the minors, agents reportedly discovered they were not related to Contreras Lopez, and while their birth certificates were legitimate, they did not appear to belong to children of Mexican nationality.
“The children told CBP officers they were given sleeping pills to avoid detection,” Sabatino said.
According to court documents, one of the children told officers that the other child was her brother and that he had taken a bus from his hometown in Mexico to the border town of San Luis Rio Colorado, where he was picked up by Contreras Lopez, the Post reported. The girl reportedly told investigators that her mother was still in Mexico and that she was being taken to her mother's boyfriend in the United States.
The children were handed over to Mexican authorities.
Gregory Bovino, the head of the Border Patrol's El Centro Sector in California, told The Washington Post about another similar incident in the past few weeks in which Border Patrol agents in California rescued a child who had been “highly drugged to the point of being unable to speak” to law enforcement officials.
Bovino said investigators found that the smugglers in the case had birth certificates for several unrelated children.
“Sometimes we come across horrific criminal acts that ignore human decency,” Bovino told the Post.
In 2019, former President Donald Trump Rapid DNA testing A pilot program aimed at further preventing traffickers from smuggling children into the U.S. at the southern border has been underway. The process involves a cheek swab test that takes about 90 minutes to produce results. During the first three days of the pilot, the program 30% of illegal immigrants Some migrants arriving at the border claimed children they were not related to, and stepparents and adoptive parents were not recognized. The program was ended when the Biden-Harris administration took office.
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