From unaccompanied minors to worksite inspections, federal agencies are ramping up illegal immigration enforcement in Alabama as part of President Donald Trump’s agenda to secure the border and deport the millions of migrants let in under the Biden administration.
Marshall County Sheriff Phil Sims told 1819 News that his office has been working with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) recently to track down the hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children that have been released to sponsor homes in the last four years.
“Marshall and DeKalb Counties have a large portion of undocumented children residing in the area in Alabama,” Sims said. “Our office will work with HSI closely to help verify and locate any of the children placed here by the federal government.”
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HSI Atlanta special agent in charge Steven Schrank, who oversees offices in Georgia and Alabama, said agents have been making home visits to verify minors’ location and well-being and to make arrests if necessary.
“Over the past four years, there have been hundreds of thousands of kids that crossed the southwestern border and were subsequently put into proceedings but released to the interior of the United States. And they were placed into sponsor households, but then no one from law enforcement was in a position or had the guidance, direction or authority to go follow up and check on them and make sure that they were not being abused, that they were not being subjected to harmful treatment or getting the resources that they should need,” Schrank told 1819 News.
“So the administration has mandated that HSI take the lead, along with the FBI and some of our other partners, in going to every single address that one of these kids has been sent to as a sponsor and checking on them, making sure they are in fact living with a family that is lawfully present in the United States," he added. "And if there is a house full of illegal aliens, or if these sponsors have been taking advantage of them or bringing in tons of illegal underage children, we have been addressing that accordingly.”
Schrank said HSI has visited and cleared nearly 100% of the sponsor homes in Alabama and that many resulted in an arrest.
“It's a small percentage, but we have found kids that were in the wrong place that weren't being cared for,” he said. “We found many other illegal aliens that were in those homes. And in a couple of rare instances, we found signs of abuse. We needed to involve state officials and child welfare services in order to make sure that those kids were getting the appropriate services and were replaced into a safe household.”
He also said that the children weren’t able to be found at their assigned sponsor home “a shockingly high number of times.”
“Ultimately, we're working with information on where a minor was placed, in some cases, years ago, and are having to expend significant additional efforts in trying to locate them after the fact if they're not where the U.S. government thought they would be," he said.
HSI is also investigating job sites around the state for illegal workers, Schrank said, as part of the Trump administration’s multi-prong approach to combating illegal immigration. He said tips and information from the public were key to finding and arresting illegal workers.
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“It's going to take time for us to get through all of the work sites. We rely on the public for some information,” he said. “We rely on law enforcement partners for some information. I would emplore your audience, that if they do have information on work sites that are employing legal aliens, they can submit leads through ice.gov/tips and provide that information to us so that we make sure that they're on our radar, and we take a look. Ultimately, having good information and timely information helps our law enforcement officers operate safely and utilize their time very wisely.”
Schrank said HSI, along with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Drug Enforcement Agency; U.S. Marshals; Customs and Border Protection; and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are working around the clock to address illegal immigration and make communities safer.
“We're trying to make sure that our agents are a part of the public safety solution statewide in order to address crimes committed by illegal aliens and enhance public safety,” he said. “...It is a monumental task. It is something that our agents are working on day in and day out, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. But we're making tremendous strides, tremendous headway, and ultimately making our community safer.”
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