Targeting child smuggling at entry ports may backfire

Kids face greater danger, critics warn

Daniel González
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 26, 2007 12:00 AM

A church acquaintance approached Brenda Aguirre with a proposition early last year. Would Aguirre, a U.S. citizen, be willing to bring two Mexican children into the United States illegally?

All she had to do was pick them up in Agua Prieta, Sonora, pretend they were her children and drive them back across the border and up to Phoenix. For her trouble, Aguirre, 25, would receive $500, plus the satisfaction of knowing the children would be reunited with their undocumented parents without a potentially deadly trek through the desert.

But things didn't go as planned. An entry port official in Douglas became suspicious when Aguirre presented Arizona birth certificates for her own kids, not the two Mexican children. Now, Aguirre is going to prison for 15 months. The children were sent back to Mexico.

The case shows the extremes to which parents living illegally in the U.S. will go to bring their children into the country, often putting their kids into the hands of strangers. It also shows the severe consequences for people lured into smuggling children. The heavy punishments are part of a new zero-tolerance government policy to combat a rise in child smuggling along the Arizona border.

The policy is keeping children out of harm's way, government officials say. But critics say the policy is having the opposite effect, driving desperate parents to take greater risks.

It is the height of the ludicrous to turn this by saying that the increased vigilance of our Border Patrol and federal prosecutors are putting these kids in danger. It is the arrogance and overt stupidity of these parents who have violated the federal law of the USA and her sovereignty and then place their own children in precarious and life-threatening situations to further violate the law! Should anything happen to these children, it is the parents and the smugglers who are to blame and who should be unmercifully punished for this action. -mm

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