‘For the Children’ Is a Sick Joke When It Comes to Border Policy

June 9, 2022

By Brian Lonergan

Whenever politicians today want to immunize themselves or their agendas from criticism, their instinct is to hide behind children. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shamelessly uses them as props in her media events and shoehorns “the children” into her rationale for nearly every agenda item. Who could take sides against the children?

For all the pro-children rhetoric that comes out of Washington, D.C., our ruling class shows them nothing but contempt regarding immigration policy. Politicians shed ample crocodile tears for the children in detention at the border, but another group of children have been suffering and have few advocates: those who are at risk from or who have been the victims of criminal alien sex offenders inside the United States.

The problem of noncitizen sex offenders appears to be worsening, to the point that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) created a national enforcement effort called Operation SOAR (Sex Offender Arrest and Removal). Last year ICE reported that SOAR resulted in the arrest of 302 sex offenders, but the reports of alien sex offenders targeting children are hard to ignore. 

A criminal fugitive who was convicted and sentenced to serve 14 years in prison on child rape charges in Brazil was arrested last month in Massachusetts. Vagner Brito Paixao was reported to have been living in the U.S. for years before he was apprehended by ICE.

Federal agents in Houston recently arrested 10 illegal alien sex offenders. Eight of those arrested were convicted of sex offenses involving minors.

Just last week, the Border Patrol arrested numerous criminal aliens and gang members. They included sex offenders, child sex offenders and one accused of murder in Mexico.

What is going on here? While ICE agents should be commended for their work in getting dangerous criminal aliens off our streets, the situation raises the question of why those individuals were here in the first place.

If our border had the necessary tools, protocols and personnel in place, ICE would not have to be searching for these people, needle-in-a-haystack style, when they are already in the country and a threat to our children. Having a fortified wall in place and controlling the flow of people who pass through it might allow agents the opportunity to properly vet those seeking entry and target those with a history of sex offense for removal.

Instead, the Biden Administration’s absurd policies have turned the border into “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior,” a post-apocalyptic no man’s land where law enforcement is overwhelmed by orchestrated caravans and bloodthirsty, armed cartels making obscene profits by ferrying their human and narcotic cargo across the Rio Grande.

The children caught up in the cartels’ human trafficking operations are the first to be victimized. They are often abused on their journey north and assigned like an entry ticket to those who have paid the cartel. Once the client has made it across the border, the children are often recycled back to the border to be used for the next paying customer. This is what the “compassionate” approach to the border has created.

Those children who enter illegally with their families are also at risk. Criminal aliens tend to live in sanctuary communities among others here illegally, to lower their profile to immigration enforcement. In many of the cases involving criminal alien sex offenders, their victims are noncitizen minors. Again, in what way do the policies that allow this to happen protect children?

On the rare occasion they are confronted with the horrors of these policies, anti-borders politicians are quick to respond that they are strongly in favor of the deportation of anyone who commits such heinous acts. But why does a child have to be traumatized for life before the removal of someone who has entered our country illegally can take place?

It is a situation that calls for some version of the broken windows theory that Rudy Giuliani used to reduce crime in New York City in the 1990s dramatically. Cracking down on what are often framed as “victimless” crimes such as entering the U.S. illegally would lower the number of child sex offender aliens able to terrorize children in the United States.  

Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen. So long as elected officials see political gain in anti-borders policies, they will remain wedded to such policies while the corporate media demonizes anyone who dares object. Meanwhile, the children they claim to champion will continue to fall prey to most vile offenders among us.

It is common today to hear that a nation without borders is not a nation. The same can be said for a nation that claims to protect its children and does the opposite.

Brian Lonergan is director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.  

Also published at: Brian Lonergan, ‘For the Children’ Is a Sick Joke When It Comes to Border Policy, American Greatness, June 9, 2022.