Border Patrol agents found a crying three-year-old migrant boy sitting by himself in a cornfield near the US-Mexico border, the Customs and Border Protection agency said Tuesday.
The child had his name and phone numbers written on his shoes, and officials believe he was abandoned in the field when the group he was traveling with ran away.
"#CBP is attempting to reach his family," the agency tweeted. "We believe the boy was with a larger group that ran when they encountered Agents."
The agency posted two pictures of the child, including one of the boy being carried out of the cornfield by an agent, and another of him watching "Paw Patrol" at a Border Patrol station.
Though agents have tried calling the phone numbers written on his shoes, they haven't yet found his parents, NBC News reported.
—CBP (@CBP) April 24, 2019
Rudy Karish, the Rio Grande Valley's chief Border Patrol agent, told the outlet that the boy appears to be in good spirits, and he will be transferred into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which typically takes custody of unaccompanied migrant children.
The incident comes amid a surge of migrant families apprehended at the US-Mexico border in recent months. More than 103,000 migrants crossed the border in March 2019, and the number was expected to increase throughout April.
Border Patrol has faced backlash over the conditions in which it holds migrant families, many of whom arrive with young children. In December, two young migrant children died in Border Patrol custody shortly after arriving in the US.
The Trump administration has struggled to accommodate the growing number of families in short-term detention facilities — just last month, CBP shuttered an open-air enclosure underneath a bridge that held hundreds of migrant families for days at a time.
- Read more:
- The Department of Homeland Security reportedly once considered housing migrant children in Guantanamo Bay
- The FBI arrested the leader of a militia that has been detaining migrant families at the border
- Trump reportedly told his border chief to close the border and block migrants from entering the US — and that if he went to jail, he'd pardon him
- Trump is booting out anyone who tells him his immigration ideas are illegal. Experts are worried about what will happen next.
