A Guatemalan family accepted the equivalent of $130 to 'rent' their eight-year-old son to a man seeking easier passage across the Southern U.S. border, according to a federal indictment.
Maynor Velasquez Molina sought the boy out after hearing that it would be 'easier to get into the United States with a child,' a federal agent said in the criminal complaint.
It's just one example of what the Trump administration has said is a growing crisis –Border Patrol's Yuma division has recorded more than 700 fraudulent family claims since October – including instances in which adults have claimed to be unaccompanied minors, according to Tucson.com.
While that remains a small portion of the overall flow of people across the border –24,200 migrant families were apprehended at the crossing near Yuma from October – March – officials are still concerned about child trafficking.
Young migrant children, whose faces can not be shown, are seen at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Facility in Tucson, Arizona on June 28, 2018 in this file photo
'ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is redirecting resources to the border in response to cases of fake families using forged documents to illegally enter our country and avoid detention,' ICE Acting Director Matthew Albence said. 'Our highly-skilled teams are working to stop individuals, networks and organizations facilitating child smuggling and document fraud.'
Molina traveled by bus with the young boy to reach Mexico, after paying an additional $130 to have a fake birth certificate mocked up for the child. They crossed the border in February with a group of more than 100 migrants. Molina was indicted March 27 on a charge of human smuggling.
For the most part, people caught making false family claims have received fairly light sentences: Some 53 people have been prosecuted, as have 15 adults who used fraudulent birth certificates to try to pass as minors since June 2018, according to The Arizona Daily Star.
Most of those cases were treated as misdemeanors. Just three cases led to immediate guilty pleas for crossing the border illegally. In those cases, prison sentences ranged from a few days to several weeks.
In one case, another Guatemalan man used a fake birth certificate to try to prove that he was the father of a family he was traveling
