GOP lawmakers' bill tackles child trafficking crisis at border

Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, is joining GOP colleagues successful the Senate by introducing authorities to support unaccompanied migrant children from quality traffickers.

"Over 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children efficaciously disappeared nether the Biden administration, leaving them susceptible to trafficking, abuse, and exploitation. Instead of ensuring their safety, these children are released with nary follow-up, falling into the hands of cartels and criminals," Luttrell said successful a merchandise announcing the Stop Human Trafficking of Unaccompanied Migrant Children Act of 2024.

Luttrell's authorities is a companion to a measure introduced successful the Senate by senators Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and aims to forestall further trafficking of migrant children by implementing due vetting for adults who sponsor a kid successful the United States, including vetting for parents, contiguous relatives and unrelated adults.

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Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, and the U.S. confederate border. (Getty Images)

The measure volition besides necessitate that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) instrumentality steps to vet each adults who volition unrecorded successful the location of a migrant child.

"It is terrifying to deliberation that implicit 300,000 young, guiltless children person been brought into this nation, perchance forced into unsafe conditions and astatine hazard for quality trafficking," Scott said successful the release. "As a genitor oregon grandparent, it’s unimaginable to deliberation what mightiness hap to these children and that erstwhile President Joe Biden allowed this to hap by wholly dismantling our migration strategy and opening our confederate border, wholly ignoring the consequences oregon the tolls connected quality life."

Luttrell's measure seeks to beef up vetting of adults who sponsor a kid successful the United States to combat cross-border kid trafficking. (Fox News)

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The measure aims to enactment aggregate steps successful spot to forestall trafficking of children, including a prohibition connected children being released to a sponsor who is in the U.S. illegally, unless the sponsor is the child's ineligible guardian oregon a relative. The measure volition besides necessitate authorities to implicit a location sojourn anterior to a kid being released to the sponsor and calls for astatine slightest 5 further unannounced location visits during the child's archetypal twelvemonth successful the country.

The authorities volition besides necessitate reporting to Congress connected actions being taken to relationship for existent missing children, according to the release.

Children play adjacent a conception of the U.S.-Mexico borderline partition successful Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, successful May 2021. (Getty Images)

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"HHS indispensable instrumentality thorough vetting to guarantee these children are placed with liable adults — not predators," Luttrell said. "President Biden’s borderline policies failed everyone, and this authorities volition enactment the Trump administration’s efforts to people close the catastrophe we were near with."