Deportee tried to re-enter US with boy not his son, ICE says amid child-smuggling crackdown

A Honduran man who had been deported in 2013 was charged with alien smuggling in Texas last week for trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border with a 6-month-old child he falsely claimed was his son, U.S. immigration officials said.

In recent months, ICE -- the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency -- has stepped up its crackdown on fraud involving children, piloting a DNA program that could help identify groups of people falsely claiming to be family in order to take advantage of U.S. immigration law ...

“Cases like this demonstrate the real danger that exists to children in this disturbing new trend,” Alysa Erichs, ICE’s acting executive associate director of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), said in a statement Thursday.

“And while we have seen egregious cases of smugglers renting and recycling children, this case involving a six-month-old infant is a new low – and an unprecedented level of child endangerment,” she said ...