For the past six years, across two administrations, young children have been used and cast aside by adults posing as their parents to cross the southern border and enter our country.

These adults use children as pawns to create “family units,” guaranteeing them eventual release into the interior of the United States. I witnessed this firsthand as a member of the White House Security Council’s Human Smuggling Cell during the Obama administration, when I documented adults posing as parents crossing with young children that were not their own.

Last August, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin K. McAleenan, went on record to document this issue:

We have seen an unprecedented flow of family units, primarily from Central America, coming to our Southwest Border. During the first 10 months of this fiscal year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended or encountered almost 475,000 families, 90% of whom crossed our border unlawfully between ports of entry — three times any previous full-year record. In the month of May alone, we saw 88,630 members of family units arrive at the border – four times the record month of the last major border surge.

McAleenan further said the “2015 reinterpretation of the Flores Settlement Agreement — an agreement that is now more than two decades old ... applied, for the first time, the requirements of the Flores Settlement to accompanied minors [and] has generally forced the Government to release alien families into the country after just 20 days.”

Smugglers are keenly aware of Flores — it’s their business to exploit any vulnerabilities to ensure a profit. I reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to find out what the DHS was doing about the influx of fraudulent family units. It put me in touch with Gregory Nevano, Homeland Security Investigations’s assistant director of investigative programs.

Nevano told me, “In the summer of 2018, HSI was called upon by the Department of Homeland Security because we were seeing an increase in what we would call family units coming into the U.S. presenting fraudulent birth certificates and identification claiming they were part of a family unit.”

The main reason smugglers create a family unit is to exploit our legal system. Specifically, the smugglers take advantage of the fact that the Flores Settlement makes it mandatory for the federal government to release an accompanied minor within 20 days. Hence, an adult bringing a child across the border is released within that same 20 days.

Nevano said, “There are certain limitations [under Flores] on how long a family can be held in detention, and that is 20 days. Beyond 20 days, individuals have to be released into the interior if they have not already had a hearing before an immigration judge. For all intents and purposes, it's impractical that within 20 days you can schedule someone for a removal hearing and have a judge render a decision within that 20 days.”

To make matters worse, we have only approximately 400 immigration judges right now in the entire country. That’s right: Just 400 judges decide not only the thousands of cases at the border at any given time but over a million pending cases .

In 2019, HSI and its DHS partners put together a pilot program for screening family units comprising special agents, forensic interview specialists, victim assistance specialists, and document examiners. The pilot program team deployed to two locations. Using the full spectrum of assets available, including rapid DNA analysis, it determined that 15% of the 84 people screened were fraudulent families. Operation Noble Guardian formed from this pilot program.

What HSI found out was that numerous children were placed on flights back to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. HSI discovered that many of the children who recently came across the Southwest border already had plane tickets to leave the U.S. That’s right: Children who were just forced to trek 1,500 miles to gain passage to the U.S. were then forced to return almost immediately after crossing.

By sending the child back, these "parents" were circumventing the immigration process. The child was their “anchor” to stay in the U.S. Once the child leaves the country, the adults no longer have the status to remain here. But they had already been allowed inside.

What are the solutions? According to Nevano, we need to allow fingerprinting and the expansion of DNA testing by border enforcement agencies. And Nevano said the most significant thing is to change the Flores Settlement agreement to allow more time to assess the situation. With more time, we can help prevent children from being used as pawns by bad actors in a broken system.

Dr. Jason Piccolo (@DRJasonPiccolo) is a former Border Patrol agent, ICE special agent, and DHS supervisor. He is a former U.S. Army Captain (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and author of the recently released book Out of the Shadows: A Government Whistleblower’s Firsthand Account of How the Protection Of Migrant Children Became A Political Firestorm.