Mexican cartels are increasingly using American children as young as 12 to smuggle drugs and weapons across the United States border.
The number of children arrested for narcotics along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona has jumped since fiscal year 2018, a Customs and Border Protection official told Fox News this week.
“It’s a problem, we know it’s there,” Tucson Sector Border Patrol agent Alan Regalado said. “We’re trying to mitigate that issue through education and prevention.”
Thirty-six children were arrested in fiscal year 2018, 57 were arrested in 2019, and 17 arrests have been made so far in fiscal year 2020. The Santa Cruz Attorney’s Office told Fox it had already prosecuted three children this year.
“We went out to local high schools, and I noticed that students were already recruited at that point,” Regalado said.
The border patrol agent, however, has a plan to help stem the number of children being recruited by drug cartels: the Together Educating and Mentoring Kids, or T.E.A.M. Kids, program.
Border patrol agents visit students as young as elementary school age, warning them of cartel recruiters during the four-week program.
“There’s kids now being recruited in Phoenix, Tucson, not only for northbound activity but also southbound, where they are taking weapons from the United States into Mexico,” Regalado said. “So it’s not just the narcotics coming from Mexico into the United States.”
The initiative is also getting a helping hand from the Santa Cruz Attorney’s Office, which warned students of the legal side of getting wrapped up with cartels.
“At this school, I had promised the kids that if you are caught with dangerous drugs, I’m sending you to prison, and that’s what ended up happening to this 17-year-old,” Santa Cruz County Attorney George Silva said. “This student was an honor roll student, you know, he was a very good student. He wanted to go NAU, and he wanted to study criminal justice. So he thought ‘I can’t afford to go to college, so one way of being able to pay for my college is to run dope.’”
T.E.A.M. Kids plans to hold its next event in April and boasted that its last event in November hosted more than 400 people.
