Border Patrol agents are warning that kids as young as 8 are being drugged and smuggled into the US by traffickers posing as their parents or family members — and nobody knows how common the horrifying practice is.
Authorities have rescued children caught up in two different instances of such smuggling in recent weeks — including one instance in which the alleged traffickers had birth certificates for multiple kids to whom they weren’t related, according to the Border Patrol.
Border Patrol sources have told The Post they’ve observed increasing numbers of smugglers posing as family units in order to “recycle” children.
“A few years ago when they were coming in en masse, we had to let family units in. People kept coming in and after a while we noticed the kids were the same, but the parents were different.
They were recycling the kids,” one Border Patrol source told The Post. “I hate thinking about it because there were thousands of kids and who knows where they all ended up,” the source explained.
Authorities say it’s not clear what is happening to the children once they are smuggled into the US — but many are vulnerable to being exploited for child labor and child sex trafficking.
The cases have horrified leaders in the Border Patrol. “Sometimes we encounter criminal actions so horrendous, they defy human decency,” said Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief of California’s El Centro sector in the southeast of the state, in response to the case.
In one case, border agents rescued a child at the California border who had been “heavily dosed with sleep aids to prevent him from talking” to authorities, Bovino said Friday. Those agents found that the traffickers had birth certificates for more children.
Just weeks earlier, on Aug. 29, officers manning a port of entry in San Luis, Arizona, caught Marlen Contreras-Lopez — a 28-year-old US citizen and Arizona resident — with two young children in her car who had been drugged with sleep aids, according to federal prosecutors.
At first, Contreras-Lopez claimed she was related to the children, whom she tried to wake during the officers’ questioning, according to court documents.
