Late Saturday night, groups of migrants were running through the town's streets saying a migrant's child had been snatched. Something similar led to a panic at an earlier stop, but was not confirmed.

It's likely it will be the last we hear of this, just another color anecdote, given the amorphous state of the reporting on the caravan, but it raises important issues:

Whoever it was who lost their kid also lost their fast-pass ticket into the U.S., given the propensity of U.S. authorities, responding to leftist court orders, to prioritize illegal migrants with children over other illegal immigrants, including the court order not to separate them.

What's likely to happen now is that someone is going to approach U.S. border authorities with the child on his or her hip, calling him or her his or her own, using the kid (probably too small to say anything) to get into the U.S. as an object of special pity deserving of asylum. Instead of being taken to a detention center, the "family" will be released into the general population, diseases or no diseases, and not have to worry about prison conditions that other lawbreakers endure. Meanwhile, the mainstream press will be the first to feature them as objects of pity with some cooked up sob story describing why the pair should stay in the U.S., and why it would be so evil and wrong to separate them, so out into the public they go, free to skip their court dates. Once in, the child's usefulness will then be disposable and the child could be sold off to traffickers or human smugglers for use again as an immigration entry device.

As for the mother with the missing child, too bad. Good luck finding him or her.

Nice work, lefties. Chalk it up to a specialty we see on that side of the spectrum, unintended consequences.

Which is why the caravan set-up is such an awful idea. The small children on the journey, having become bargaining chips for special-consideration entry, are absolute magnets for kidnappers, given the way leftist-influenced U.S. immigration policy is run, what with the left's stink about separating families with children. In the past, purported families would be separated, if for nothing else to determine if those kids are biologically related to the people claiming to be their parents. Now it's a free for all, and the result of that is an incentive to kidnap. The migrant caravan kids are right there, sleeping in the streets, and free for the taking. It would be very easy for a military-aged migrant male to take a small child, splinter off from the group, get on a bus, and arrive at the border with the child on his hip asking for asylum.

ABC News reports just one incident, with a rumored incident earlier, so it's likely this may be a bigger problem than reported, given the randomness of their information. Judicial Watch earlier did report that a human smuggling ring carrying seven kidnapped children was uncovered in the caravan as it crossed Guatemala, which adds to the total incidents.

Meanwhile, the migrant mothers and children, with strollers, are reporting that the male migrants are tramping all over them and rushing to take all the best seats on the trucks and buses that the Mexicans are supplying them for the journey northward, according to the ABC News report, so one can conclude that there isn't a lot of chivalry or social capital inside the caravan, it's Lord of the Flies and every man for himself, meaning the tinder is dry for kidnappers what with the Darwinian survival-of-the-strongest ethic being the socially operative principle.

With the incentives there, this caravan is increasingly looking as though it may end up being a kidnapper's paradise. Expect to read a few more stories about migrant child kidnappings as the press and its leftist politicians yell on the U.S. side that family separations are evil.

Image credit: Fox News screenshot



