A video circulating on social media reportedly shows a young migrant boy sobbing about being abandoned after being discovered by an off-duty Border Patrol agent.
Last week, a friend of the Border Patrol agent posted the video on Facebook. In the video, a young boy can be seen walking alone on the side of a dirt road. The driver pulls over and begins to speak with him. The Facebook post states that the boy was found east of Rio Grande City “in an area infested with rattlesnakes.” It adds that he says he woke up alone after the group of 184 people he had been traveling with left him behind. The boy can be seen crying in the video as he asks the agent for help, telling him that he is afraid, ABC 13 reported.
Univision reported on the encounter between the boy and the agent. “I came with a group, they dumped me and I don’t know where they are,” the young boy said in between sobs. “They can rob me, kidnap me. I am afraid.”
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The head of the El Paso Border Patrol sector Gloria Chávez told Univision, “To all the parents who are considering sending their unaccompanied children to the border, please reconsider that act because it is very dangerous to expose children.”
ABC 13 reported, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection later confirmed the video as authentic. The agency said the 10-year-old boy is from Nicaragua. He was traveling with a group of migrants and woke up to realize he had been left behind by the group.”
“Scenes like these are all too common, as smugglers continue to abandon children in desolate areas, with zero regard for their well-being,” a CBP spokesperson said.
The Biden administration continues to face a growing number of migrants coming to the border, many of them unaccompanied children who are sometimes brought by human traffickers. On Friday, Reuters reported, “U.S. authorities caught more than 171,000 migrants at the U.S. border with Mexico in March, according to preliminary data shared with Reuters, the highest monthly total in two decades and the latest sign of the mounting humanitarian challenge confronting President Joe Biden.”
Last week, a video emerged of two toddlers being lifted over a large, 14-foot barrier at the border and dropped onto the U.S. side. An agent spotted the incident on footage and directed other agents to the area to rescue the young girls. The girls were stable and transported to a local facility.
A few days later, Chavez was able to meet the young girls who had been dropped over the barrier into the United States.
The Daily Wire reported:
“I was really horrified and appalled and worried when I first saw the images come through from my staff,” Chavez told Fox News host Neil Cavuto on Thursday. “When I saw that first child dropped to the ground and then not see her move for a few seconds, I honestly thought this child just probably hit her head and is unconscious. And then I see the second child and immediately DHS, obviously, within a few minutes responded to that area to rescue them.”
“When I visited with these little girls, they were so loving and so talkative, some of them were asking the names of all the agents that were there around them, and they even said they were a little hungry,” Chavez recalled. “So I helped them peel a banana and open a juice box and just talked to them. You know, children are just so resilient and I’m so grateful that they’re not severely injured or [have] broken limbs or anything like that.”
Chavez told the outlet that officials had not seen “ruthless” smugglers leave unaccompanied children in those deserted regions outside of El Paso in the past.
“I’ve been doing this for over twenty-five years now and we know exactly the tactics of these people,” she said. “For them, it’s just a profit … So when we see an image like that … that raises my alert and my worry that they may continue to try these tactics further out in the desert area like [near] Lordsburg, New Mexico [or] Fort Hancock, Texas, where it’s not urban, it’s very remote, it’s very rural and the logistics and the challenges that exist for Border Patrol agents to get to those locations are quite high.”
The Facebook post with the video of the young boy was updated on April 5 to report that he was taken to the Donna migrant facility and his family was contacted.