Two years ago, the Biden administration unleashed a catastrophic crisis at our southwest border. Since then, it has doubled down on the policies that sparked this crisis, despite the clear national security, humanitarian, and public health consequences.

What often gets lost in the big debates in Washington, though, are the thousands of innocent lives devastated by Biden’s radical agenda—not only American citizens, but the migrants themselves.

Sadly, since Biden has been in the White House, more than 1,700 migrants have died on U.S. soil while trying to enter this county illegally. And that’s just the ones that have been recorded. Many more will never be found in the river or the thousands of square miles of harsh wilderness.

Biden’s latest gambit will only cause thousands more innocent people to needlessly suffer.

Earlier this month, Biden announced that his administration would begin paroling 30,000 individuals from Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua into the U.S. every month. This single policy will bring 360,000 individuals, who would otherwise have no grounds to enter the country, into the United States. As part of their application, they need to prove they have a "sponsor" in the U.S. ready to receive them.

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Additionally, the administration launched a new app that would increase the number of individuals applying for asylum at ports of entry, regardless of whether they qualify.

More than 250,000 children have been smuggled into this country on Biden’s watch already, and this administration has curtailed vetting of sponsors because they are in such a hurry to release them.

It’s all about optics. If there’s "no overcrowding," Biden can claim there’s "no crisis."

The administration has also proven to be massively incompetent in the vetting it does perform, as well as keeping track of minors released into the country.

Just last October, Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs wrote a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, the department responsible for placing these individuals with sponsors and ensuring they are properly taken care of, demanding to know how HHS was "unable to contact 19,726 sponsors of unaccompanied alien children since January 2021," referencing a statement by an HHS official from February 2022. 

In other words, in just one year, the Biden administration completely lost track of 20,000 minors they had released.

In September 2021, Axios reported that the administration "has lost contact with thousands of migrant children released from its custody," with nearly a third of calls to these minors or their sponsors going unanswered. A year later, Reuters was running similar headlines: "Dozens of migrant children reported missing in Houston, raising alarms."

The consequences of this recklessness are becoming more and more clear. Just a few days ago, DHS launched an investigation into a meat-packing plant in Nebraska, where 50 children, some as young as 13, were illegally employed and forced to endure dangerous working conditions.

Having worked to enforce immigration law for more than three decades, I can say confidently these children were trafficked into the U.S. for the purpose of forced labor.

The Biden administration is inviting this at even greater scale. Hundreds of thousands more would-be migrants are going to apply under these new programs, with no clear or adequate infrastructure in place to properly vet potential sponsors. The result will be mass victimization on a scale we’ve never seen before.

No doubt, many sponsors will be good, decent people. But for thousands of migrants, the nightmare is just beginning. Vulnerable people will seek out sponsors quickly, and many will ultimately be victimized.

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Some will be placed with individuals who plan to force them into the sex trade. Others will become the victims of labor trafficking. Many others will be placed with sponsors who simply have no business being responsible for the welfare of a minor.

Some will be sponsored by smugglers and cartel members who will charge them thousands of dollars to become their sponsors. To be clear, this is alien smuggling, a felony.

This is personal to me. Almost 20 years ago, I stood in the back of a semi-trailer in Victoria, Texas, where 19 migrants—including a 5-year-old boy—suffocated after being abandoned by their smuggler.

The officials implementing these disastrous policies haven’t seen what I’ve seen. They haven’t held that young boy in their arms, thinking of his last moments on this earth. They haven’t seen the bodies of migrants in the desert who were killed because they couldn’t pay the smugglers’ fees. They haven’t interviewed young women and girls as young as 10, the victims of sexual assault on the journey to the border, forever scarred by the evil done to them.

I am fighting against these policies because they empower evil people. Evil is alive and well in this world, and the United States government should be standing up and fighting it, not opening the door to it.