(IntegrityPress.org) – A Republican Congresswoman is looking to tackle child trafficking from Latin American to the U.S. via the southern border. Florida’s Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has introduced two bills that together seek to save children from their traffickers and punish the employers who would hire them and other illegal aliens.
Luna’s Family Reunification Act would require all self-identified family groups entering the U.S. to submit to rapid D.N.A. testing, in order to check that the children are in fact related to the adults bringing them into the country. Any child found to be unrelated to the adult would be detained, rather than allowing them to travel on with their alleged trafficker.
This testing was standard practice during Donald Trump’s presidency but was halted by the current President Joe Biden shortly after he took office, despite the success of the testing. In 2019, it was found that 30% of so-called family groups suspected of lying about their relation were in fact unrelated. With no testing in place and nearly 2.5 million people having crossed the border claiming to be families under Biden’s presidency, Luna claims that many of the children in these groups are victims of trafficking.
Luna’s second bill is the Illegal Labor Accountability Act. This bill seeks to punish “greedy companies” for illicitly hiring illegal aliens, including children. Under Biden, approximately half a million unaccompanied children have crossed the border into the U.S. in addition to the children being brought into the country by adults who may or may not be related to them.
A 2023 investigation found that the Biden administration had failed to keep track of 85,000 unaccompanied children handed over to sponsors in the U.S. That same investigation found companies in the U.S. exploiting children and making them work in unsafe and miserable conditions in places such as factories and slaughterhouses. The Illegal Labor Accountability Act would triple the financial penalties set out in the Immigration and Nationality Act for businesses that break the law in how they employ people.
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