Border agents are searching for an unknown mother after a 17-year-old illegal alien who said he was traveling with the migrant caravan crossed the border unlawfully with a 2-year-old child that isn’t his.
In a press release Monday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said they apprehended a group of illegal aliens who’d made it about two miles north of the border, including a teen carrying a toddler he claimed he’d wound up with somewhere along the journey.
On Nov. 27, at approximately 6 p.m., Border Patrol agents apprehended six undocumented foreign nationals two miles north of the border near Campo. Traveling within the group was a two-year-old child, who was strapped to the chest of a 17-year-old male.
The young man, who claimed to be traveling by himself, reportedly told border patrol agents that he'd offered to carry the toddler when her mother became tired the night before and asked if another group member could shoulder the load for a bit. When they reached the U.S.-Mexico border, however, he said their groups became separated and he couldn’t find the girl’s mother, so he simply crossed the border illegally with the little girl in tow.
CBP reported the child is “currently is being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody while authorities attempt to reunite her with her mother.”
While there’s really no way of knowing whether the young man is telling the truth, human smuggling and kidnapping aren’t uncommon occurrences at the U.S.-Mexico border. CBP recently reported a 110 percent uptick in the number of illegal alien men crossing with children, adding they separated 170 fake “families” at the border in a less-than-6-month period this year. That number included 139 children.