Grand Jury May Target Parents Using Smugglers to Bring Children to Florida

A grand jury may investigate parents employing smugglers to transport their unaccompanied children to the state of Florida, News Nation reported June 30.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) request to impanel a grand jury focused on illegal immigration issues was granted by the state’s highest court, once he announced the petition on June 17, according to the outlet.

The report continued:

The statewide grand jury is expected to investigate parents who use professional smugglers to bring their unaccompanied children to live with them in Florida, traffickers who smuggle people in the country illegally into Florida and people and organizations that do business with traffickers, either directly or indirectly.

In a social media post on June 30, DeSantis expressed his satisfaction with the court’s decision.

“I am glad that the Florida Supreme Court has granted my petition to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate international human smuggling networks that operate on our southern border,” he wrote:

I am glad that the Florida Supreme Court has granted my petition to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate international human smuggling networks that operate on our southern border.

We are united in fighting back against Biden’s border crisis and protecting Floridians.

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) June 30, 2022

“We are united in fighting back against Biden’s border crisis and protecting Floridians,” DeSantis concluded.

In his opinion piece for the Hill, Nolan Rappaport speculated that parents using smugglers may think their children were in more danger in Central America than they would be traveling to the United States with the smugglers:

Fear of being prosecuted on child endangerment charges may encourage parents who have or are going to bring their children to the United States in the care of smugglers to find another state to live in. In fact, this may be why DeSantis wants to be able to prosecute them.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s pro-migration policies aided coyotes in moving illegal migrants’ children to places throughout the nation, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) noted in March of last year.

“We’re complicit as a nation in human trafficking,” Graham said at a press conference in Texas.

Under former President Donald Trump’s policies in 2020, migrant adults, families, single children, and teens were promptly returned to their own countries, Breitbart News reported in 2021:

In contrast, Biden has put the border agencies into reverse and is using them to build more facilities so that more migrants can get pulled in to get the legal paperwork and work permits they need to help them stay in the United States.

The cooperative taxpayer-funded cross-border transport of claimed “Unaccompanied Alien Children” is an open secret in Washington D.C. and among the establishment media.

…

D.C. politicians also recognize that many of the teenagers who are admitted and transported under the 2008 law for “Unaccompanied Alien Children” are seeking to get jobs in the United States. Many of the teen migrants are going to work for the traffickers who paid the coyotes to relay them from Central American to the U.S. job sites, via the federal agencies.

In addition, Democrats fought privately to keep Trump’s border officials from disbanding the federal partnership with coyotes and cartels who received some of the smuggling profits, according to the Breitbart News report.