One of the top lawyers in Obama’s Department of Justice told a federal court that the President’s policy on unaccompanied minors and incomplete family units causes the kidnapping of children.

Appearing before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Leon Fresco said, “When people now know that when I come as a family unit, I won’t be apprehended and detained — we now have people being abducted so that they can be deemed as family units, so that they can avoid detention.”

His comments came during a hearing in front of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California where a group of illegal immigrant families has filed a lawsuit demanding the release of minors and incomplete family units being held in federal immigration detention facilities, Fox News reported. Fresco is defending the government’s position in detaining the illegal immigrants who have been flooding into the country in massive numbers.

He explained that illegal immigrants who are hoping to be released into the U.S. are kidnapping children and then pretending to be a family unit when they are picked up by Border Patrol agents. The federal agency involved in the detention and deportation efforts by the government, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to respond to inquiries from Fox News.

An attorney for the illegal immigrants responded saying there is no evidence to back up the government’s claim. “We know zero instances of that, and there’s zero support for that anywhere in the record,” Attorney Peter Schey, president of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law told Fox News. “If they know of any such instances, I would think they would bring the actual instances to the attention of the court.”

Federal law requires the government to quickly process and release unaccompanied minors from nations that are non-contiguous with the U.S. borders. Because of this, hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied alien children and incomplete family units have been making the dangerous, and often deadly, trip from Central America to the U.S.

Fresco told the court this law is supposed to be applied only to the unaccompanied children. The lawyers for the illegal immigrants are trying to have the law applied more broadly to the incomplete family units as well. He said that applying the law across the board in this manner would invite kidnappings.

Breitbart Texas has reported extensively on the issue of these unaccompanied minors and the dangers presented by the human smugglers that have turned this opportunity into a cash cow business that adds tremendous revenues to their existing drug smuggling operations.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas and is a member of the original Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.