They drug 5-year-olds to smuggle them for $900 a head. Why is Congress looking away?

Nine hundred dollars a child. That was the going rate, according to federal prosecutors, for carrying a child across the bridge from Juárez into El Paso. Some of those children were 5 years old. Some were given marijuana gummies before the trip so they’d be too groggy to answer questions at the port. One of them ended up in an El Paso hospital with marijuana poisoning.This week, the two people prosecutors say ran the operation, Susana Guadian and Daniel Guadian, were extradited from Mexico and arraigned in federal court. I’m glad they’re here. I spent years working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and I’ve seen what happens to children who get moved like cattle. But two arrests don’t fix what made those children worth $900 apiece, and Congress has had years to deal with that.According to court documents, the ring operated from May through October 2024. The drivers pretended to be the children’s parents and showed inspectors U.S. documents that belonged to other children. On one crossing in October, two smugglers had four children with them, ages 2, 5, 9, and 12, and only one belonged to anybody in the group. Investigators say Susana Guadian had coached three of them on fake names and given them THC gummies in Juárez. Once the children were across, others in the ring picked them up and paid the drivers. Two co-defendants have already been dealt with. Manuel Valenzuela got five years. Susana’s daughter, Dianne, a U.S. citizen, pleaded guilty to four counts of aiding and abetting smuggling for profit. What nobody has said publicly is how many children this group moved in total, how much money it made, or where they went after El Paso. I want to know. So should every member of Congress.People will point to the TVPRA here, and they should, but it helps to know what the law actually does. The 2008 act sets up two tracks. A child from Mexico or Canada gets screened at the border, and if there’s no sign of trafficking and no fear of going home, the child can be returned quickly. A child from anywhere else has to be handed to Health and Human Services within 72 hours and is eventually released to a sponsor somewhere in the country while the case sits in immigration court for years.These were Mexican children. The Guadians didn’t bring them in as unaccompanied minors because a Mexican child who shows up alone is likely to be screened and sent home. So, they faked families and drugged the children to keep them quiet. When smugglers go that far to get around a screening, the screening is working. Congress should apply the same screen-and-return process to every unaccompanied child, regardless of nationality, with the trafficking and fear screening kept in place. Bills to do that have been introduced over and over. They don’t pass.There’s a second lesson here, and it’s about paper. Inspection that runs on documents can be beaten with documents. You can’t borrow somebody else’s DNA.That goes double on the HHS side. In August 2024, the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General reported that ICE had transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied children to HHS between fiscal 2019 and 2023. More than 32,000 missed court. More than 291,000 were never even served a notice to appear.John Fabbricatore, a former ICE field office director who later went to HHS to help track those children down, described the old sponsor process to the Daily Wire this way: “We could never tell if they were able to take care of these children.” At a Heritage Foundation event, he reported that only about 300 children and the adults claiming them got rapid DNA tests out of 2.7 million border apprehensions, and that reviews had turned up 254,000 falsified identity documents.HHS now requires a DNA test when a sponsor claims to be family, along with fingerprints and home visits. “We will not tolerate children being placed with sponsors who pose risks,” Fabbricatore said in an HHS release. He’s been straight about the cost, too. “Children are staying in custody longer, but there’s a reason for that,” he told Fox News.Here’s my problem. All of that is agency policy, and a future HHS secretary can undo it with a memo. We’ve already watched rapid DNA testing at the border get started in 2019 and then shut down.Congress did do something in 2025. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act paid for transportation and removal, including for unaccompanied children, and put new fees on sponsors. But it went through reconciliation, and reconciliation is limited to budget matters. It could fund enforcement. It couldn’t rewrite the TVPRA or put sponsor vetting into law.The bills that would are stuck. The End Unaccountable Amnesty Act, introduced in January 2025, would generally require sending unaccompanied inadmissible children home. The ASSIMILATION Act, which has its own section on unaccompanied children, went to the Senate Judiciary Committee in May. Neither one has had a floor vote.I SURVIVED THE NORTH TOWER. IT TOOK A RED-LIGHT DISTRICT TO SHOW ME WHYWhat Congress needs to do isn’t complicated. Treat every unaccompanied child the way we already treat Mexican children. Require a DNA test any time an adult at a port of entry says a child is theirs, and any time a sponsor claims to be a relative. Write fingerprinting, ID checks, and home visits into the statute so they survive the next administration, and make HHS and ICE share what they know about where these children are. Add real prison time for anyone who drugs a child to get them across. And when a ring like this one goes down, require prosecutors to tell the public how many children it moved, and go after every dollar it made.The HSI agents in El Paso, the Border Patrol agents, and the prosecutors who worked with Mexico to get the Guadians back did their part. A 5-year-old who was handed a laced gummy doesn’t care who was president at the time. What matters is whether it happens to the next child. The executive branch can tighten things up for a few years. Making it stick is Congress’s job.Scott Mechkowski spent 24 years in federal immigration enforcement, retiring in 2018 as Deputy Field Office Director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City. He is a Visiting Fellow for Deportation Studies at the Oversight Project and a Senior Advisor at the National Immigration Center for Enforcement.