Immigration officials have begun telling illegal migrants they must take their children home, following the decision by 100 migrants to leave their children in the United States.

“All of these adults who left [the United States] without their kids, left based on a decision to leave their children,” Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said July 18 in an interview at the Aspen Security Forum. “So now we’re saying to them, ‘No, no, no, you have to take the children.’”

At least one Central American country wants the power to decide if the separated children should live in the United States, Nielsen said:

We have to involve the other countries. You know, one of the Northern Triangle countries when I just met with them, said to me, ‘It’s not appropriate for DHS or the United States government to determine what’s in the best interest of the [migrant’s] child. We in our courts will determine what’s in the best interest of the child.’ So it’s very complicated.

The decisions by more than 100 migrants to separate themselves from their children is undermining the political claims by many progressives and Democrats that President Donald Trump is willfully separating families to frighten and deter migrants from crossing the border.

Immigration experts say the migrants’ use of their children shows they are rationally arbitraging contradictory immigration rules to smuggle themselves into themselves into U.S. job market via the catch-and-release process. The New York Times reported June 22:

“This is the reason I brought a minor with me,” said Guillermo T., 57, a construction worker who recently arrived in Arizona. Facing unemployment at home in Guatemala, he decided to head north; he had been told that bringing his 16-year-old daughter would assure passage. He asked that only his first named be used to avoid consequences with his immigration case. “She was my passport,” he said of his daughter.

Some departing migrants are leaving their children in the United States to be picked up by relatives who are living illegally in the United States, experts say. Since 2010, more than 400,000 Central Americans — including many youths — have migrated into the United States because of lax border enforcement.

The family separation problem is being worsened by a California judge who is allowing the ACLU and other pro-immigration groups to advise migrants who face deportation about letting their children remain in the United States to make their own legal appeals for asylum.

The U.S. government is already caring for a growing population of foreign children brought into the United States, Nielsen said:

We have 2,000 children who need our care in terms of being reunited with their parents [since they were detained this summer], and we’re working very hard on doing that. We have 10,000 children [at the Department of Health and Human Services] who have no advocates for them whatsoever, and then we have a lot of children whose parents when they receive final orders of removal decide to leave their children here. All three of those groups of children I worry about and think we need to do more to protect them.

She noted that thousands of migrant youths have already been abandoned by their parents:

That’s 10,000 children whose parents sent them on this journey without any parental supervision, with smugglers, with traffickers, with other adults. They have no advocates, they’re here alone. HHS is taking care of them.

This summer, the Department of Justice began to prosecute all illegal border-crossers, including migrants who bring children.

When migrant parents are detained prior to a court verdict, their children must be sent to shelters run by HHS, aside from the small population that can be kept in the government’s family detention centers.

But that required separation procedure was used by progressives, Democrats, and judges to claim the agencies and President were improperly splitting families. The emotional claim was magnified by media allies, prompting Trump to reverse the no-exemptions prosecution policy.

“We are no longer prosecuting at this time families who choose to illegally enter … We have no border control now,” Nielsen said. Overall, she said:

We have Congress telling the executive branch, don’t enforce the laws we passed. We don’t have courage to fix them. We have the judicial branch who is neither operational nor legislative body saying, this is how we want you to enforce the law in a very tactical way, thereby making the law. How this should work is Congress should make the laws, the law enforcement bodies should enforce the laws, the judicial branch should interpret them … We should be able to keep families together. We should be able to secure our borders. We should be able to protect our communities, but unfortunately … we have 50,000 people coming into the country illegally each month.

Trump’s border reforms have been repeatedly blocked by GOP leaders and Democrats in Congress. The bipartisan budget deals in 2017 and 2018 included little money for extra border officers or additional border wall and the Democrats in the House and Senate blocked his “Four Pillar” compromise immigration-reforms.

Senate Democrats are now pushing for a new catch-and-release law that would bar the detention of migrants with children until courts have ruled against their children’s claim for asylum. Only about 5 percent of migrants who are released at the border are deported.

Currently, four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market — but the government provides green cards to roughly 1 million legal immigrants and temporary work-permits to roughly 3 million foreign workers.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.