Guatemalan President: Biden's Messaging Encourages Child Trafficking
'Messages were confusing'
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Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said that child traffickers were encouraged to drop off children at the U.S.-Mexico border due to Joe Biden's confusing messaging on immigration.
During an interview with Ayman Mohyeldin of MSNBC, Giammattei was asked:
"The president has been talking and speaking very compassionately about migration, certainly children migration."
"Do you believe that the president's message about compassion is making the situation worse or is indirectly encouraging migrants to informally migrate to the U.S.?"
Giammattei responded:
"I am nobody to make a judgment here, but I believe in the first few weeks of the Biden administration, messages were confusing."
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"They were compassionate messages that were understood by people in our country, especially the coyotes, to tell families, 'we'll take the children, the children can go in, and once the children are there, they will call their parents.'"
"And so those messages were confusing," Giammattei added.
"Not because of the way they were communicated, but because of the way they were translated here," he explained.
Giammattei warned that unaccompanied minors were more likely to fall into the hands of cartels and prostitution as they tried to cross the border.
Giammattei was asked to respond to the conditions in U.S. detention centers.
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The Guatemalan president argued that the smugglers who lead the illegal migrants into the U.S. were far more inhumane.
He added that because of the large wave of migrants, it proves difficult for any nation to provide the proper conditions.
"What I can say is that no government, no matter how large or strong, can have that gigantic apparatus that would be required to address 30 or 40 thousand people in detention centers and have all of them in a status where they're claiming refuge," Giammattei said.
Earlier this month, a video released by U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) agents showed human traffickers dropping young children over a 14-foot barrier onto the floor and abandoning them.
USBP released disturbing footage showing smugglers dropping a 3-year-old toddler and her 5-year-old sister from the top of the border wall.
They left the little girls exposed in the desert as they fled back into Mexico.
WATCH:
Smugglers, under cover of night, scaled a 14 ft. border barrier and cruelly dropped 2 young children in the middle of the New Mexico desert. The girls, ages 3 & 5, were left miles from the nearest residence. Thank you STN Agents for rescuing these children! @CBP @CBPWestTexas pic.twitter.com/U91y2g8Lk1
— Gloria I. Chavez (@USBPChiefEPT) March 31, 2021
National Border Patrol Council Vice President Hector Garza said the only way Joe Biden can"stem the flow of illegal immigration" is to tell migrants the border is not open.
