How Biden border policy fuels migrant kidnapping, extortion
WASHINGTON — With shaking hands, Karen Cruz Caceres manages to hit record on the call.
“How many days have you gone without food?” she asks into the phone.
Tani, her younger sister, is heard sobbing. “Help me,” she gets out.
Cruz Caceres assures her: “I am going to pay today. I’ll make another deposit.”
The April 1 call ends abruptly, and Cruz Caceres stops recording.
A week before the recording, Cruz Caceres, a single mother from Honduras who won asylum in Tennessee, had gotten another call that upended her already precarious life: Kidnappers in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, had abducted her pregnant sister Tani and Tani’s 4-year-old son, and they wanted more than $20,000, according to a video recording of the call and messages reviewed by the Los Angeles Times. The family asked The Times not to use her sister’s last name, for fear of retribution from the kidnappers in Mexico and gangs back home.
Tani, 33, and her son were kidnapped on March 25, Cruz Caceres and lawyers said — just after U.S. authorities expelled them from Texas alongside other mothers and children under a Trump-era pandemic policy known as Title 42, which President Biden has continued.
The unprecedented policy, which relies an obscure 1944 public health statute to indefinitely close the border to “nonessential” travel, has made migrant children and parents easy prey for the criminal groups waiting just on the other side. Biden’s continued reliance on Title 42 to quickly remove the vast majority of migrants at the southern border without due process contrasts with his pledge to restore “human dignity” to a U.S. immigration
