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Patrick Trueman, a former Justice Department lawyer responsible for prosecuting child exploitation, says there's little chance as many as a dozen babies bought in Mexico and sold in the U.S. will be returned to their parents.
Mexican police have arrested Amado Torres Vega, 64, of Harlingen, Texas, and charged him with paying nine Mexican women for their babies under the pretense of giving the children to adoptive families in the United States. But the San Antonio-based adoption agency Vega claims to have been working with says they had never heard of him.
Patrick Trueman, former chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation Section, says children caught up in similar schemes are usually either placed through illegal adoptions or kept as slaves for sex trafficking.
"I've personally talked to a sex trafficker who would visit families in Mexico, dressed as a nun with another trafficker dressed as a priest, trying to talk parents into giving up their children to go to a school in the United States, promising a free education with the visit of the child once a year to the parents until he or she is educated," says Trueman. "But, instead, the children go into sex trafficking."
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Trueman says the adoption scams often auction off the children. Prospective bidders pay a fee to participate in the auction, and the child trafficker keeps all of the fees and the money from the winning bid. The former federal prosecutor says, unfortunately, attempts to return these children to their parents do not stand much chance of success.
"I would say the likelihood is almost zero," he laments. "We have a fairly poor track record in law enforcement on human trafficking here in this country. And, with respect to adoptions and children who may have been illegally adopted, there are [state] agencies that work on this problem -- but the federal government has very little say-so about it."
If Vega and his girlfriend, Maria Isabel Hernandez, 25, are convicted of child trafficking in Mexico, they each face prison sentences as long as 12 years. A police investigator in Texas told Associated Press that Vega helped smuggle pregnant women into the U.S. so their children could be born as U.S. citizens, thereby making the children more adoptable by American couples. |
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Centers for Decency is apart of a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization which encourages, motivates, educates, and equips the family and community in promoting reasonable values and attitudes relating to morality and decency -- in understanding the harmful effects of pornography and obscenity on the family and community in a cultural war against family values. Centers for Decency, 1415 South Voss Road, Suite 110393, Houston, Texas 77057 or call 713.266.2715. |
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