An ISIS video released last week showed a boy beheading a Syrian soldier, all while under the eye of an adult militant’s watch. Last month a video surfaced of 25 children shooting 25 Syrian soldiers in the head, after they were captured.

One 14-year-old boy named Yahya, who escaped from an ISIS training camp, stated that he couldn’t cut the head off right. He chopped several times and didn’t get the job done. He went on to say, “Then they taught me how to hold the sword, and they told me how to hit. They told me it was the head of the infidels.”

This boy is from a Yazidi town in Iraq that ISIS overran last year, butchering older men and enslaving many of the women and girls. With the Yazidis, whom ISIS considers to be heretics that they are more than happy to slaughter, they are kidnapping the youth and erasing their past, replacing it with radicalism.

Yahya said were taken to Raqqa in Syria, the extremists’ de facto capital, where they boys aged 8 to 15 were put in the Farouq training camp. ISIS changed their names to Muslim Arabic names to replace their Kurdish names. They then forced them to convert to Islam from their older faith, re-educated them, and started the process to turn them into jihadi fighters.

Yahya escaped in early March when fighters left the camp to carry out an attack. The remaining guards slept and he and his 10-year-old brother slipped away. He tried to get a friend to come too, but he wouldn’t, saying that he liked Islam and was now a Muslim.

Sunni Muslim children in ISIS-held towns are also being indoctrinated. Radical Islamists are befriending children in the streets with gifts and toys. Militants show them videos on the street and hold outdoor events where they pass out soft drinks, candy and propaganda. They are using gifts, brainwashing and threats, to build up the next generation of ISIS soldiers.

In their mosques and schools, they are indoctrinating children with extremist views and turning them against their own parents. Boys are turned into suicide bombers and killers.

According to an anti-ISIS activist who fled Raqqa, they are telling adults, “We have given up on you, we care about the new generation.”

According to Yahya, he spent nearly five months in the camp, training eight to ten hours a day. Their training included exercises, weapons drills and Koranic studies. They repeatedly told him that Yazidis are “dirty” and should be killed. They taught him how to shoot someone from close range and the boys hit each other in some exercises.

Yahya had to punch his own little brother, knocking out a tooth. He stated, the trainer said if he didn’t do it, he would be shot. “They told us it would make us tougher,” Yahya said. “They beat us everywhere.”

ISIS claims to have hundreds of these type of camps. In videos from camps like these, boys can be seen practicing shoot and crawling under barbed wire. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented at least 1100 Syrian children under the age of 16 who have joined ISIS this year. At least 52 have been killed fighting. Eight of those were suicide bombers.

Yahya says he will never forget the videos of beheadings that he was forced to watch. “I was scared when I saw that,” he said. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to behead someone like that. Even as an adult.”

On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee released data it obtained from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that shows that of the children who are coming across the southern border, nearly two-thirds who requested asylum this year have had their initial applications approved.

This means that the U.S. government thinks that the children are fleeing from danger in their home countries and that they cannot return, which will make it tougher to deport most of them in the future.

According to the data, 65 percent of applications for asylum from unaccompanied children are approved. And, even if the application is not approved, an appeal can be requested, which means the total number who end up staying will be higher. These numbers do not account for those that never ask for asylum and just disappear into the U.S., or for those who spend years here waiting for their court dates.

Asylum approval rates have increased dramatically in recent years from 28% in 2007 to 46% in 2013, and approval rates by immigration judges in affirmative cases have increased from 51% in 2007 to 74% in 2013. This means the vast majority of illegal aliens who claim asylum are successful in their claims.

And, this information comes at the same time an internal Homeland Security report shows that at least 70% of asylum cases contain possible or proven fraud.

Human smugglers, whose business is booming right now, have told Central Americans that if they can get to the U.S. border, they will be processed and released into the U.S., where they can disappear.

Republicans and Democrats remain at odds over the issue. Republicans say if the U.S. shows potential border crossers that they will be turned back at the border, or quickly deported, less people will try to make the journey.

But, the Democrats and the Obama administration continue to say that these children and families are surging our borders right now to flee violence and poverty in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) released the statement below along with the report:

President Obama’s refusal to crack down on rampant asylum fraud is one of the many reasons we are witnessing a surge of Central Americans seeking to enter the U.S. illegally at the border. New data showing that the vast majority of Central Americans’ asylum claims are immediately approved will only worsen the situation along our southern border by encouraging more to come and take advantage of the situation. Our asylum laws are in place to help individuals who are facing truly serious persecution in their countries. However, while I was in the Rio Grande Valley earlier this month, law enforcement officials on the ground said that the vast majority of Central Americans arriving at our border come to meet up with another family member who is already in the United States illegally.

President Obama has many tools at his disposal to stop this border crisis, including cracking down on fraudulent asylum claims and implementing tougher standards for preliminary asylum screenings. Unfortunately, he refuses to use these tools and instead makes the situation worse by refusing to enforce our immigration laws.

Photo by WEBN-TV

So, this is the kind of “fear-mongering” we are being fed when it comes to the illegal immigrant children flooding our borders. Yesterday, Democratic Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick actually told reporters that sending these children back to their home countries (i.e. back to their parents) is the same as what the U.S. did in 1939, in turning away Jewish children to return to Nazi death camps.

Patrick told local reporters, “My inclination is to remember what happened when a ship full of Jewish children tried to come to the United States in 1939 and the United States turned them away, and many of them went to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.”

Seriously? Is this guy cray-cray, or what? We are talking about sending them back to their parents, in most of the cases! He is equating being home with their families to “death camps?” Give me a break!

My gosh, the rhetoric on these undocumented children has gotten beyond absurd from the left and the media. They have created such a narrative that if anyone even dares to oppose the flood of illegals coming into the country, they are instantly labeled as heartless, uncaring extremists, who absolutely hate little children. Believe me, I have felt that label myself, even from friends who lean to the right.

It’s not a matter of “caring.” Of course I care about the children. I would venture to say that 99% of Americans care about the children. But, these kids are nothing more than pawns in “grown up” games. They are being used by the “people in charge” (i.e. governments) around them, and we are being subjected to BS propaganda with terms such as “unaccompanied minors,” and now images of “Nazi death camps” to get people fired up.

This helps to detracts from the fact that the Obama administration has failed to secure the borders properly, and has even encouraged illegal immigration with their policies.

It demonizes those who oppose Obama’s immigration policies as unfeeling, or, here’s one we have heard so much, racist, when they are actually realists who understand that bearing the burden of the health care, food, security and education of all these new children flooding our system is more than our country can handle right now.

UPDATE: A day after Patrick made this statement, according to the Boston Herald, he is being urged by his state lawmen and lawmakers to reject President Obama’s request to shelter some of the thousands of children who have been surging across the nation’s southern border illegally.

When one thinks about the border crisis we are currently facing, with thousands of children coming across the border from Mexico into the United States, images come to mind of little ones traveling through hostile territory all alone. Mexican territory that is controlled by drug cartels, gangs, and all other kinds of unseemly characters and possibly dangerous scenarios.

In a period of nine months (October 2013 to June 2014) almost 60,000 unaccompanied minors, most who are from Central American countries, have come into the United States, by crossing through Mexico. That’s nearly double the number from the previous year.

And the media and the administration are helping to paint the picture that one gets when thinking about it. But, are these children really “unaccompanied?”

If you really think about the semantics of it, there is no way that all these children are coming in “on their own,” like we keep hearing over and over again in news stories and from politicians. They may not be with their parents, which is really what the term “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) means, but they are, more often then not, not making that trip alone.

To travel alone they would have to walk, at a very bare minimum, 1220 miles across the mountains and deserts of Mexico, by themselves, with no equipment, food, protection from the sun, or shelter along the way. And, they would have to navigate their way across Mexico, on their own, and not get stopped or caught by Mexican officials, or, even worse, drug cartels and Mexican gangs. And, do all this without dying along the way.

That’s like sending your 10 year old on a trip from Houston, TX to 100 miles past Minneapolis, MN, on their own, on foot, with only a backpack on them. And, to give them an edge, this would be minus the drug cartels and Mexican gangs, as well as the higher temperatures in Mexico that the border children are enduring. How do you think your child would fare, and how long do you think it would take them?

Unaccompanied? Yeah, that’s not what’s happening, despite the picture that is being painted by the media.

According the The Washington Post’s Joshua Partlow, that term is “somewhat misleading.” In a piece he wrote recently he said:

The “unaccompanied minors” who walked out of the brush on the banks of the Rio Grande and turned themselves into Border Patrol officers last month were not, technically, unaccompanied. In the group of 15 people that we watched that night, about half of them appeared to be adults, including men and a woman carrying a baby, in addition to several children.

It’s the most potent image in the current immigration crisis: Tens of thousands of Central American children on a dangerous solo exodus out of their countries. But from what I’ve seen reporting on this issue from the U.S. border and in Honduras, it is also somewhat misleading.

The term “Unaccompanied Alien Children,” or UACs, as used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, refers to people up to age 17 who are traveling without a parent or legal guardian. It does not mean they are traveling alone.

In migrant shelters in Mexico and Honduras, talking to both children and adults who are making these journeys, or have been deported after failing to reach the United States, the most common scenario seems to be children who are traveling in groups that include adult relatives, neighbors, smugglers or others. Often the children migrating already have one or more parents living in the United States, and they are considered “unaccompanied,” even if traveling with other adult relatives.

In his article, Partlow concludes that children actually traveling alone “seems to be the exception.” So, the term “unaccompanied” is mostly a legal term, meaning that the child’s actual parent or guardian is not with them.

While the whole situation is sad, and one can’t help but feel for the children who are no longer with their parents, this certainly puts things in a different context then how it is being portrayed. The media and political narrative conjures up images of children making a gut-wrenching and harrowing journey, that would have surely been more dangerous then staying put with their families would have been, no matter how bad the economic crisis or violence in their home countries was, to enter into the sanctuary of the United States.

Honduran President Juan Hernandez said the U.S. should help his country, as well as Guatemala and El Salvador with funding to fight gangs and create anti-drug programs similar to those in Mexico and Columbia, as well as supply funding to lift up impoverished regions in the countries.

“One has to recognize that our countries can’t do it alone,” President Hernandez said at a conference about the children fleeing for the United States. “We need help from the United States, from Mexico, because this is everyone’s problem.”

Hernandez, who took office in January, said U.S. backed battles against cartels in Mexico and Colombia have pushed drug traffickers into Central America, which has increased violence and caused the exodus.

Honduran Foreign Minister Mireya Aguero said that efforts to beef up security at the U.S. border were not working and that U.S. aid to them would be better spent.

“It’s much more practical for the United States to launch a mini-Marshall plan, as they did after World War Two,” she said, “to create opportunities and really get to the root of the problem in Central American countries that is fueling migration.”

This came just two days after the first charter flight out of New Mexico returned 17 Honduran women, as well as 12 girls and nine boys between the ages of 18 months and 15 years, to San Pedro Sula, the city with the highest murder rate in the world.

The White House said on Tuesday, after that flight, they are trying to send a message that “they will not be welcomed to this country.”

President Barack Obama talks with Kinsey Button at the Magnolia Cafe in Austin, Texas, July 10, 2014. (Official White House Photo – Public Domain)

Since Obama made this statement, scores of actual “photo ops” he had taken in the past began showing up online and on Twitter, showing the absurdity of his “not interested in photo ops” claim.

This president doesn’t do photo ops! By the way here’s http://t.co/hQAr0oBGzT right now: pic.twitter.com/E3S2EFbVrt

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) July 9, 2014

President @BarackObama does dozens of #Photoops but denies involvement in them – sorry, the American people just aren’t that stupid

— Greta Van Susteren (@gretawire) July 10, 2014

Barack Obama was for #PhotoOps before he was against them. What a joke. #Coward #HypocriticalMuch

— Jen (@TN_SmartGirl) July 11, 2014

The deluge of comments over his absurd statement brought back memories of such classic moments as Obama’s selfie with Prime Minsters Helle Thorning-Schmidt and David Cameron at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. (A funeral, yo! Seriously? Where’s the class?) And, the one of him shaking the hand of former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. And, of course, the classic one where he honored Rosa Parks on Twitter by posting a picture of himself on the bus Rosa sat on.

This excellent video compilation above by Digitas Daily really hits the nail on the head about just how “uninterested” President Obama really is about photo ops.

With the influx of unaccompanied minor children flooding across our southern border, something that has been brought up very little in the news is the possibility of these children ending up in human trafficking rings.

Between October 1 and June 15, we have seen a 92 percent increase of unaccompanied minors flooding across our borders, compared to the same time last year. Some estimates say that between 90,000 and 150,000 unaccompanied alien children (UAC’s) will enter the U.S. this year.

Approximately 52,000 of the children already here have come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, according to ABC News. They state that a “high ranking Democratic senator” said 378 of these unaccompanied children were under the age of two, and, of those, 95 were under the age of one. Since these children cannot get here on their own, logic would dictate that someone must have “accompanied” them.

Could these infants and younger children be trafficked for sale in the illegal adoption market? Could the older children be trafficked for sex, child pornography, forced labor or worse? Many will scoff at the idea and say, “could never happen – this is the United States,” but the National Human Trafficking Hotline (NHTRC) has reported a 259% increase in calls to their center for human trafficking here, between 2008 and 2012.

According to the 2014 Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP Report) released by the U.S. State Department on June 20, 2014, “The United States is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children – both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals – subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor, including domestic servitude.” They go on to state that the top countries of original of federally identified trafficking victims in 2013 were the United States, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, Honduras, Guatemala, India, and El Salvador.

In Guatemala, jaladores, as they are called, often abduct newborns from hospitals by giving the mother a sleeping pill or arranging for her to be told her baby has died. They have also been known to snatch babies right from mothers’ arms in the street or trick them into giving their babies up for adoption. Guatemalan authorities say stolen children are being put up for illegal adoption – often sold into child pornography and prostitution where they are at the mercy of child trafficking rings. According to Erick Cardenas, Guatemala’s children’s prosecutor, “We’re investigating 22 cases of stolen babies this year that we believe are largely to do with illegal adoption.”

A 2010 report, by the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), found that hospital staff conspire with criminal gangs to obtain false birth certificates for newborns put up for illegal adoption and women pose as the biological mothers of children and are given fake identity papers by corrupt notaries.

And, we have “unaccompanied” children, under the age of two, coming across the U.S. border? They obviously aren’t traveling across Mexico by themselves and making it here! Children that young are being accompanied by someone. Am I the only one who sees a problem here? Who is coming in with these little ones?

I understand when people say, this is all the more reason to help these children. Many of these countries are sources for children being put into forced labour and used in sex trafficking, which is extremely lucrative financially for the criminal organizations running them. Even more lucrative then guns and drugs. Child traffickers prey on poor families in countries where the most children live in poverty, and these families all want a better life for their children.

But, we have children – children without their parents – flooding across our borders unchecked. How many have been sold into prostitution, before even getting here, as a way to get to the U.S.? How many have not made it here, instead targeted by human traffickers, while on their journey? And, how many have been taken from their parents by these trafficking rings, with promises of a better life in the U.S., only to be forced across the border to the “other half” of the ring operating in the U.S., who are their “relatives?” These children are coming in with no papers, and many saying they have relatives they have never met, in the U.S., who they will eventually be transferred to. How on earth does the U.S. government intend to confirm that we are really releasing all these children to actual relatives?

House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte claims that more than 90 percent of them, many of whom are teens and ripe for sex traffickers, will not appear for their court dates; they will just vanish into our country.

There are laws in place, many to protect the unaccompanied alien children (UAC) from these type of horrors, however it is all to easy for traffickers to use loopholes within these laws. According to the Office of Refuge Resettlement one of the four reasons for children coming across the U.S. border is that they are brought here by human trafficking rings.

These human trafficking rings know how to take advantage of our UAC laws that enable minors to remain in the U.S. under the “least restrictive setting” necessary, and how to exploit every loophole in the legal system. They know how to get to the children once they leave the dentition centers, and realize that the flood of minors currently overwhelming the system makes it even easier.

Our southern border is a mess and we are warehousing these children in caged facilities. Many of the immigrants coming into the US are not immunized and are carrying communicable diseases. We have so far seen, among many other diseases, things such as TB, hand and foot disease, and lice so bad they can be seen crawling on the children’s faces, brought across our border. There is little information available as to how many of them will eventually be returned to their country or be allowed to stay in the U.S. with “relatives” or in foster care.

I certainly don’t blame the children for any of this. They are innocents and victims in it all. But, we have a breakdown at the border that is not showing signs of getting fixed and a President who travels to Texas, in the midst of it all, not to visit these facilities, but on a political fundraising trip for the Democratic party.

There is a serious disconnect from realty here with this administration, and I see no short or long term solutions being seriously discussed as to how we will protect the children already here from horrors that no one is even talking about, and even more importantly, how we will stop the never-ending flow of more UAC’s crossing over into circumstances that, on the front end, may seem better than what they are leaving, but on the “dirty little” back end, may not be at all.