Traffickers pose as parents, drug children to ‘avoid detection’ while smuggling minors into US: Border Patrol

Customs and Border Protection agents reported two recent instances in which children were rescued after being drugged by traffickers who were attempting to smuggle them into the United States.

Executive Assistant Office of Field Operations Commissioner Diane Sabatino posted a video on social media on Thursday, announcing that Border Patrol agents in San Luis, Arizona, arrested Marlen Contreras-Lopez, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen and Arizona resident.

'Sometimes we encounter criminal actions so horrendous they defy human decency.'

When stopped at the border on August 29, Contreras-Lopez presented officers with birth certificates for two sleeping children, 8 and 11 years old, in her vehicle. She claimed that the minors were family members.

During the initial inspection with Border Patrol agents, Contreras-Lopez was unable to awaken the children, so she was referred to a secondary inspection, where she continued to “have difficulty waking the children.”

According to the officers who conducted the inspection, the children remained “extremely groggy.”

Court records obtained by the New York Post stated that one of the children had to be carried and the other “struggled to walk.”

While interviewing the minors, agents reportedly discovered that they were not related to Contreras-Lopez. While the birth certificates were legitimate, they apparently did not belong to the children, who were Mexican citizens.

“The children indicated to CBP officers that they were provided sleep aids in order to avoid detection,” Sabatino said.

According to the court documents, one of the children informed the officers that the other child was her brother and that they had taken a bus from their hometown in Mexico to the border town of San Luis Rio Colorado, where Contreras-Lopez had picked them up, the Post reported. The girl reportedly told agents that their mother was still in Mexico and that they were being taken to their mother’s boyfriend in the U.S.

The children were turned over to Mexican authorities.

Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief of California’s El Centro sector, told the Post about a separate similar incident that occurred within the past few weeks in which Border Patrol agents in California rescued a child who had been “heavily dosed with sleep aids to prevent him from talking” to law enforcement agents.

Bovino explained that officers discovered that the smugglers in that case were in possession of birth certificates for more children to whom they were not related.

“Sometimes we encounter criminal actions so horrendous they defy human decency,” Bovino told the Post.

In 2019, former President Donald Trump launched a rapid DNA testing pilot program at the southern border to further deter traffickers from smuggling children. The process involved cheek swabs that took approximately 90 minutes to obtain results. Within the initial three-day trial run, the program determined that 30% of illegal aliens arriving at the border with children they claimed were theirs were, in fact, not related. They were also ruled out as stepparents or adoptive parents. When the Biden-Harris administration took office, it ended the program.

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