Under Biden, Child Trafficking Soared. The One Big Beautiful Bill Helps Prevent Another Humanitarian Crisis
By Senator Marsha Blackburn
Since Inauguration Day, President Trump has been hard at work delivering on his mandate to secure the southern border, achieving historic results.
Under President Biden, the average number of border crossings each month neared 160,000. Some days saw as many as 15,000 illegal crossings. Under President Trump, those numbers have plummeted to all-time lows. In July, border encounters nationwide totaled just 24,630. At the southwest border, there were 4,598 encounters over the entire month—lower than the daily average under the Biden administration.
At the same time, President Trump has ramped up deportations of illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country. Since January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported close to 200,000 people, including drug dealers, cartel members, and violent criminals. If the agency keeps up its current pace, it will conduct the most deportations in a single year in over a decade. In addition, 1.6 million illegal aliens have left the country under President Trump, including many hoping to avoid deportation.
President Trump’s leadership is keeping criminals off our streets, making our communities safer, and restoring law and order. To supercharge these efforts, Republicans secured major wins in the landmark One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) to bolster border security.
On top of finishing President Trump’s border wall with hundreds of miles of new barriers, the OBBB provides funds to hire thousands of new ICE agents, increases detention capacity, and invests in local law enforcement to facilitate cooperation with federal law enforcement efforts.
These measures are vital to ensuring that Biden’s border crisis—and all the suffering it caused—can never happen again. To that end, the law also includes my provisions to empower Border Patrol to collect fingerprints and DNA from minors who appear at the border.
Under President Biden, hundreds of thousands of minors appeared at the southern border. Through a heinous practice called “child recycling,” cartels trafficked many of these children to help unrelated illegal aliens gain entry into our country by presenting themselves as a family unit. According to ICE, some children have been “recycled” across the border more than half a dozen times.
President Biden had a responsibility to place migrant children with vetted sponsors. Yet his administration reportedly lost track of 320,000 migrant children who faced the threat of abuse, sexual exploitation, and forced labor.
Joe Biden’s open border created one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in our nation’s history—which is why all Americans should be grateful that President Trump is doing everything in his power to keep our border secure. To support this effort, I recently sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Noem urging her to use the One Big Beautiful Bill provisions to ensure migrant children are fully protected from harm and exploitation.
By fingerprinting and DNA testing migrant children, border agents will be able to quickly confirm familial relationships and help bring child trafficking to an end. Reports show us that up to 30 percent of minors who are DNA tested are found to be unrelated to their accompanying adult. Under these provisions, any illegal alien who falsifies a familial relationship with a minor will face up to 10 years in prison.
Human trafficking is a modern-day slavery that harms the most vulnerable among us, especially children. As the administration works to keep our border secure, I will continue to do everything possible to bring this heinous practice to an end.
