A U.S. Border Patrol agent’s video showing two young children being abandoned by smugglers has gone viral in the midst of the migrant crisis at the southern U.S. border.
The video: Gloria Chavez, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector, posted surveillance camera footage to Twitter Wednesday showing men dropping two girls from a 14-foot fence near Mt. Cristo Rey, New Mexico.
The details: According to a Border Patrol press release, the two Ecuadorian children, aged two and five, were medically cleared and are currently at a holding facility in San Teresa, New Mexico.
- “I’m appalled by the way these smugglers viciously dropped innocent children from a 14-foot border barrier last night. If not for the vigilance of our Agents using mobile technology, these two tender-aged siblings would have been exposed to the harsh elements of desert environment for hours,” Chavez said in the press release.
- “We are currently working with our law enforcement partners in Mexico and attempting to identify these ruthless human smugglers so as to hold them accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”
Background: The episode is not the first instance of infants or young children being left to fend for themselves.
- In a recent high-profile story, smugglers threw a six-month-old into the Rio Grande, where she was rescued by Texas authorities.
Crisis mode: President Joe Biden’s policy of not deporting unaccompanied children has incentivized “self-separation,” or parents leaving their children alone in the U.S.
- A record number of children crossed the border in the first months of the Biden presidency, leading to the reopening and capacity expansion of the detention centers the mainstream media decried under the Trump administration.
