Obama administration is aiding and abetting felonies' by 'delivering' flood of illegal immigrant children to relatives in the US: Withering verdict of furious judge



Federal Judge Andrew S. Hanen called out the Obama administration in December for 'aiding and abetting felonies'

The Department of Homeland Security, he wrote in a scathing decision, 'has simply chosen not to enforce the United States' border security laws'

Republicans are playing a game of 'we-told-you-so,' seizing on Hanen's ruling to claim that the Obama administration is encouraging a flood of illegal immigration, especially among children

One congressman says the Obama administration is intentionally participating in 'a felony – alien smuggling and human trafficking'

As many as 80,000 illegal immigrant children, many traveling alone, are expected to be apprehended crossing the US border this year

Shocking photos leaked out of a Texas holding facility show minors packed in overcrowded rooms



Republicans today quoted a little-noticed December 2013 federal court ruling as evidence of a 'catch and release' immigration policy that the Obama administration uses to encourage a flood of illegal migrants to the U.S. from the south.



One congressman told MailOnline on Tuesday that Federal Judge Andrew S. Hanen called out the Obama administration for aiding and abetting felonies. And a former lawmaker wrote that the decision shows how the White House is rolling out the welcome mat for human traffickers.



As many as 80,000 children, many traveling with human traffickers but without their parents, are expected to cross the southern U.S. border illegally in 2014.



He wrote in the case of a 10-year-old Salvadoran girl smuggled in the the United States that the Department of Homeland security is essentially 'delivering the minors to the custody of the parent illegally living in the United States' – even when Border Patrol agents arrest the 'coyotes' who sneak them in.

'These actions are both dangerous and unconscionable,' Hanen wrote.



'The DHS has simply chosen not to enforce the United States' border security laws.'

Traveling alone: 14-year-old Brian Duran from Comayagua, Honduras, came to the U.S.-Mexico border by himself, reacting to false claims that young immigrant children can be reunited with family members in the U.S. Buses carrying children have been pouring into a border patrol facility in Nogales, Arizona, with authorities rushing to staff and supply makeshift holding facilities for all the minors who turn up in border sweeps

Last week photos leaked from a temporary detention facility in Texas showed hundreds of children crammed into holding rooms, without their parents, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents processed them.

After they're fingerprinted and given case numbers, most are turned over to other government agencies or released outright to parents who have no legal basis for being in the U.S.

And 'since most border violators are not caught, the actual numbers arriving presumably are far larger,' former Oklahoma Republican congressman Ernest Istook wrote Tuesday in a Washington Times essay.

Critics say the Obama administration is turning an already porous border into a sieve on purpose.

'This is a crisis of the federal government’s creation,' Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said in a statement, 'and the fact that the border remains unsecure – now apparently intentionally - while this operation continues full-steam ahead is deplorable.'

'Judge Hanen’s order is a must-read for everyone trying to understand the roots of today’s "humanitarian crisis" of children being smuggled into the U.S.,' he added.

'When more people learn the truth, they will hold President Obama accountable [for] ... creating human tragedy and suffering.'



Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican whose state is housing hundreds of illegal immigrant children in a makeshift holding facility in the town of Nogales, told MailOnline that Hanen 'issued an astute, neutral and accurate decision on the gross incompetence and potential illegal activities engaged in by the federal government.'

'When I first learned that the federal government was opening the Texas border and allowing thousands of illegal aliens into the country, and then transporting them across state lines only to abandon them destitute, homeless and dependent, I believed then this constituted a felony – alien smuggling and human trafficking,' Gosar explained in an email.

'Judge Hanen agrees ... finding that the DHS has in fact been a criminal participant in human trafficking.'

Rep. Phil Gingrey, a Georgia Republican, told MailOnline that 'the Obama administration has acknowledged the surging number of children crossing the border illegally,' but 'by failing to enforce current immigration laws, its policies have only exacerbated the crisis.'

'President Obama’s non-enforcement doctrine has perpetuated illegal border crossing – without fear of reprisal – and encourages risking children’s lives to illegally cross the border,' said Gingrey.



Overflowing: The shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas can no longer accommodate large numbers of children and mothers traveling with their kids, forcing the federal government to open more facilities and move many to Nogales for processing Many of the children appear to be teenagers but some clearly are younger

Hanen's scathing ruling documented a guilty plea from human trafficker Mirtha Veronica Nava-Martinez, who was paid to bring the 10-year-old girl to Virginia but never got past a checkpoint in Brownsville, Texas. She was already a felon convicted of food stamp fraud in 2011.

The girl's mother, Patricia Elizabeth Salmeron Santos, lives illegally in Virginia. She paid Nava-Martinez to fetch her daughter and smuggler her across the border.

'Salmeron Santos admitted that she started this conspiracy by hiring alien smugglers to transfer her child from El Salvador to Virginia,' Hanen wrote. 'She agreed to pay $8500 (and actually paid $6,000 in advance) for these human traffickers to smuggle her daughter).

'The criminal conspiracy instigated by Salmeron Santos was temporarily interrupted when Nava-Martinez was arrested,' but '[d]espite this setback, the goal of the conspiracy was successfully completed thanks to the United States Government.'

Salmeron Santo, he notes, was never the subject of any criminal proceedings.



DHS 'did not arrest her. It did not prosecute her. It did not even initiate deportation proceedings for her,' Hanen wrote.



It is 'completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States.'

Those criminal missions include drug-smuggling plots: Mexican and South American narcotics cartels control much of the human trafficking, using both the coyotes and their immigrant cargo as drug mules during crossings.

'The irony, says Istook, 'is that the White House claims the children are fleeing the dangers of organized crime in Central America – the very organized crime being trusted and paid to transport them to the U.S.



President Obama, he claims, 'denounces the situation as a "humanitarian crisis" as though he were not a perpetrator in creating it.'

Status unknown: Maria Eva Casco, left, and her son Christian Casco of El Salvador, were arrested in Texas but later released and transported to a bus station in Arizona 'When more people learn the truth, they will hold President Obama accountable ,' insists Rep. Paul Gosar, whose home state of Arizona has become overrun by children crossing the U.S.-Mexican border

Obama himself likely sparked the mass migration from Central America and Mexico, according to former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Napolitano said Monday night on the Fox News Channel that 'the president of the United States personally and directly caused this with a telephone and a pen,' referring to Obama's favorite aphorism for 'executive actions' that he has taken without the say-so of Congress.

The president flexed his pen in 2012 with a high-profile order that relaxed deportations for potentially millions of illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children before June 2007.

But news reports indicate that human traffickers are purposely misinterpreting Obama's action, telling families in Central America that the rule applies to them.

Nora Griselda Bercian Diaz, a mother who crossed the border illegally with her six-year-old daughter, told KRGV-TV in south Texas that the message being disseminated in Guatemala is, 'go to America with your child, you won't be turned away.'

Spark: President Obama announced in June 2012 that he was relaxing deportation for people who came to the U.S. illegally as children before 2007 -- but human traffickers are telling Third World children that the new rule will apply to them

'Word has gotten out,' National Border Patrol Council local vice president Chris Cabrera told The New York Times, ' that we’re giving people permission and walking them out the door' after they're processed.

'So they’re coming across in droves.'

The White House has carefully disputed the idea that Obama's 2012 amnesty proposal, which he extended on June 5, is to blame.

'We have heard sort of rumors and reports, or suggestions, that the increase may be in response to the perception that children would be allowed to stay or that immigration reform would in some way benefit these children,' White House Domestic Policy Council director Cecilia Muñoz told reporters during a conference call on Monday.

'It seems to be quite clear that what is driving this is what’s happening in their home countries.'

But immigrants sneaking into America seem pre-armed with expectations about how the Obama administration will welcome them.

If you make it, they take you to a shelter and take care of you and let you have permission to stay,' 13-year-old Robin Tulio told the Times after he was apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.

'When you appeal your case, if you say you want to study, they support you.'

Jeh Johnson, the newly minted Homeland Security secretary, announced the two-year extension of Obama's mini-amnesty program on Thursday.