Breitbart Exclusive: Texas Rep. Farenthold Responds to Crisis at Texas Border

FORT WORTH, Texas—As thousands of unaccompanied minors stream seemingly effortlessly into South Texas, a humanitarian crisis is developing of the kind never seen before in modern American history. State and federal officials are scrambling to determine a proper course of action to address both the cause of the situation and for a solution on how to resolve the matter.

Congressman Blake Farenthold (R-TX) is the representative of the people of the 27th District of Texas. His district extends very close to Kingsville where one of the shelters experiencing the over-crowding due to the swarm of minors is occurring. Breitbart Texas stopped Congressman Farenthold at the Republican Party of Texas convention to get his reaction to this very critical situation just to the south of his district.

“This is something I’ve been working on for about a month,” Farenthold began. “We had a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee a couple weeks ago where we had the head of DHS in to testify.”

“I asked him,” Farenthold continued, “what are we going to do about these children? It’s an incredibly dangerous situation. The best answer he could come up with was, ‘We’re going to run an advertising campaign in Central America saying it’s a bad idea to send your children to America with human smugglers.”

Responding to the pictures released by Breitbart Texas late last week, Farenthold responded incredulously, “Well judging from some of your pictures, it doesn’t look like that happened in the United States of America - those children are all piled on top of each other.”

“The part I’ve seen,” he continued, “is when you get up to the district I represent in Corpus Christi, we have a couple of facilities that are intermediate housing for these kids. They don’t have enough beds to deal with them. We’ve got a bad policy right now that endangers children and we’ve got to fix it.”

Breitbart Texas asked the Congressman if the Obama Administration is responsible for somehow encouraging the parents of these children to send them to American unaccompanied. “I think part of it,” Farenthold responded, “is that the President has been unwilling to do what needs to be done to secure the border.”

“And,” he continued, “we’ve adopted a policy, out of all the right reasons – we’re trying to help out these kids – but what we’ve done is we’ve turned on a magnet that tells people who are in this country, in many cases not lawfully, that if you can get your child into the United States, we’ll reunite you with your children, no questions asked.”

Farenthold explained a new behavior being encountered by Border Patrol Agents. “It used to be,” Farenthold explained, “when they [illegal immigrants] saw the border patrol, they’d run away. Now, they run to them with a note. - ‘Here’s where my parents are.’ Word has gotten out, you’ve got a free ride if you can step foot in Texas.” The Congressman goes on to explain the other hazards the children face while being smuggled. “It’s dangerous because you’re [the children’s parents] hiring these coyotes, these human smuggles to bring children across. My fear, and what I think is starting to happen, they get over [the border] and the coyote says ‘I want more money before I let them out.’ Or, worse yet, they take them into human trafficking where they become sex slaves.”

“This is incredibly dangerous,” Farenthold said. “With the cartels being squeezed out of money due to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and other states, they’re looking for new sources of revenue and it looks like they’re turning to trafficking children.”

Whether its bringing them across the border in dangerous conditions,” he continued, “or worse yet, they’re selling them into slavery.”

Farenthold went on to discuss two bill recently passed by the House of Representatives that are now being held for a vote in the Senate before they can become law to help protect these children. “Listen,” Farenthold said, “there’s no predicting what Harry Reid will do. Every good idea goes to die in the United States Senate. It’s absolutely critical that we turn the Senate over in this next election so that we can move forward with some of these common-sense bills to protect children.”

The Congressman from Corpus Christi concluded the interview by placing the blame for this crisis frimly on the parents of the children. “It’s the parents who are endangering their children by sending them across. If an American parent, or a Texas parent went before a judge with this set of facts, the judge would terminate their parental rights and the children would go into foster care. It’s incredibly dangerous, it’s a bad thing for the parents to do, it’s a dangerous thing and unfortunately, our policies are facilitating it.”

Originally posted on Breitbart.com.