Unspeakable Harm to Children — and 400,000 ‘Unaccompanied’ Alien Children

Of all the outrages of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, one stood out: the kidnapping of Shiri Bibas, a 32-year-old resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz, and her two sons, four-year-old Ariel and nine-month-old Kfir. That horror was compounded after the bodies of the two children were returned in a grisly Hamas propaganda spectacle and Israeli forensic examination showed they had been “brutally murdered by terrorists in captivity”. A poignant response to their deaths from a leading intellectual brings to mind unspeakable abuses inflicted on many of the 400,000-plus unaccompanied alien children (UACs) who came here illegally over the past four years, not on this side of the border but at the hands of the smugglers who brought them to the United States. That those abuses were rarely mentioned in the media is itself a tragedy and shame.

The Fate of Kfir and Ariel Bibas. Note that Hamas claims that Kfir and Ariel Bibas were not, in fact, murdered, but rather died in an Israeli airstrike. Respectfully, terrorists don’t get the benefit of the doubt, and every Hamas action surrounding the two — from their kidnapping to the return of their bodies — negates any possibility of taking their claims seriously.

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy fittingly weighed in on the incident in the Wall Street Journal, and he likely speaks for every father — and probably every person — when he writes the following about Kfir and Ariel:

One day, they died. Whether on the same day or not the family, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, or the government may tell us, but they died. After interminable weeks of waiting, suffering, and the profanation of their purity and sanctity as children, they ended their lives alone. As unbearable as it is, we must imagine that moment, because the ultimate indecency — the most indecent form of comfort — would be to close our eyes and refuse to see.

“These Smugglers Routinely Engage in Physical and Sexual Abuse.” The reason why Lévy’s reference to “the profanation of” the Bibas brothers’ “purity and sanctity as children” strikes such a chord is because in our increasingly secular and profane world, the sanctity of children is one of the few forms of sanctity most of us can all agree upon.

Part of the reason why so-called “Dreamers”, aliens brought to the United States as children, are referenced so often by immigrants’ advocates is that it’s difficult to counter the argument that many came to this country illegally through no fault of their own.

Trust me — I had to defend enforcement of the immigration laws at a House Judiciary Committee hearing captioned “Protecting Dreamers and TPS Recipients” in March 2019, and was treated abysmally, grilled about people I had met and books I had read — neither of which had anything to do with the hearing.

Which brings me to unaccompanied alien children (UACs), defined in statute as aliens under the age of 18 without immigration status and “with respect to whom … there is no parent or legal guardian in the United States or … no parent or legal guardian in the United States … available to provide care and physical custody”.

I have written extensively in the past about a poorly thought-out 2008 law that incentivizes those children — and more often their parents or other relatives — to pay smugglers to bring them illegally to the United States.

More salient to my current point, however, is the abuses those children suffer at the hands of the smugglers who drop them off on this side of the border, safe in the knowledge that the U.S. government will complete the smuggling conspiracy by delivering them to their destinations here.

In 2014, President Obama was faced with a wave of UAC arrivals at the Southwest border, and it so overwhelmed his officials that he began placing children on military bases throughout the United States for care.

Obama quickly responded, enlisting governments throughout Central America to warn parents of the dangers of child smuggling and sending his vice president — Joe Biden — to Guatemala City in June 2014 to meet with regional leaders and craft a response.

Here’s what Biden told assembled reporters after leaving that meeting:

The United States, to state the obvious, is greatly concerned by the startling number of unaccompanied minors that — children and teenagers who are making a very perilous journey through Central America to reach the United States. These are some of the most vulnerable migrants that ever attempt — and many from around the world attempt — to come to the United States. They’re among the most vulnerable. And the majority of these individuals rely — we estimate between 75 and 80 percent — rely on very dangerous, not-nice, human-smuggling networks that transport them through Central America and Mexico to the United States.

These smugglers — and everyone should know it, and not turn a blind eye to it — these smugglers routinely engage in physical and sexual abuse, and extortion of these innocent, young women and men by and large.

And they profit from the misery of these children and teenagers; these desperate, desperate young people. [Emphasis added.]

Biden, if anything, understated the threats posed by predacious and rapacious child smugglers, and yet as president, he enabled them to line their pockets by failing to do anything to stop what quickly became a flood of UACs across the Southwest border.

Here are the stats: In FY 2021, CBP encountered more than 146,000 UACs at the Southwest border, more than doubling the prior yearly record. UAC encounters rose the next fiscal year to just over 152,000, before dropping slightly in FY 2023 to 137,275. In FY 2024, UAC encounters fell just short of 110,000, and in the first three months of FY 2025, CBP encountered nearly 20,000 UACs at the U.S.-Mexico line.

Smugglers didn’t change their ways or find religion after Biden took office. In fact, a grand jury convened by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis found in March 2023 that federal government agents charged with caring for UACs were:

facilitating the forced migration, sale, and abuse of foreign children, and some of our fellow Florida residents are (in some cases unwittingly) funding and incentivizing it for primarily economic reasons. These entities encourage UAC to undertake and/or be subjected to a harrowing trek to our border, ultimately abandoning significant numbers of those who survive the journey to an uncertain fate with persons who are largely unvetted. This process exposes children to horrifying health conditions, constant criminal threat, labor and sex trafficking, robbery, rape, and other experiences not done justice by mere words. [Emphasis added.]

I don’t expect most Americans to follow Florida grand jury presentments, but I do expect that media outlets would at least allude to the fact that tens of thousands of migrant children annually were being exposed to the threat of the worst assaults imaginable.

But few in the media did. They opted for what Lévy calls “the ultimate indecency — the most indecent form of comfort” — and closed their eyes and refused to see the abuses smugglers regularly and wantonly inflicted on children.

If, as critics have complained, those willfully blind reporters and media outlets were in the tank for the then-president, at least they could have quoted what Biden said in 2014 to warn parents and other relatives of the dangers they were subjecting their children to by handing them over to smugglers.

Few if any even bothered to do that.

And to the degree advocates ever reference the dangers of the illicit trek to this country, they usually do so to bolster claims that migrants face even worse hells back home.

That’s a canard, because smugglers never advertise their past misdeeds or future base intentions, few migrants who make it ever discuss the indecencies they were subjected to, and as noted, the American press rarely reports on it.

One person who doesn’t shy away from the topic is Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan.

Just watch Homan’s response on Fox News as he watched a video of smuggled toddlers being tossed over the border wall three years ago: “If they’ve seen what I’ve seen in my 34 years, they’d be angry too. … I’ve arrested smugglers that raped women. I’ve arrested smugglers that tortured and killed migrants who couldn’t pay their smuggling fee.”

Homan didn’t speak those words yesterday, or only after he became Trump’s top immigration cop. He made those points three years ago — but few cared to listen, and nobody in the Biden administration bothered to ask what was happening on the other side of the line.

Worse — indescribably worse — was then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s comments about smuggled children in March 2021:

We are not apprehending a 9-year-old child who’s come alone, who has traversed Mexico, whose parents — whose loving parents — had sent that child alone, we are not expelling that 9-year-old child to Mexico when that child’s origin, country of origin, was Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador. [Emphasis added.]

Mayorkas should have asked his boss how “loving” those parents really are.

Now that Homan is quarterbacking Trump’s immigration policies, the smugglers are paying attention. In January, CBP encountered just 3,224 UAC migrants at the Southwest border — still too many, but less than half of December’s total and the lowest monthly total in four years.

And the czar was only on the job for 11 days last month.

Many in the media equate immigration enforcement with government-sanctioned inhumanity. But true inhumanity is encouraging parents to trust savages to smuggle their children here, and “the ultimate indecency” is for reporters and elected officials to close their eyes to that fact.