FIRST ON FOX: Sens. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., on Thursday introduced a bipartisan bill to intensify federal prosecution of human smugglers at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The proposed legislation, dubbed the Border Smuggling Crackdown Act, aims to enhance penalties for traffickers by updating federal sentencing guidelines to better reflect the exact number of individuals smuggled.
“Criminals and human traffickers who exploit and smuggle human beings across our Southern Border must pay a heavy price. They threaten our national security and exploit victims of trafficking,” Ossoff said in a statement.
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In recent years, federal authorities have reported an uptick in the kidnapping and extortion of migrants in U.S. border cities, as human smuggling operations increasingly shift from people to transnational criminal networks.
Ossoff’s office said that current federal guidelines do not adequately account for the precise number of persons smuggled, instead allotting sentencing enhancements based on broad ranges of persons smuggled.
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Additionally, the bill raises the sentencing levels for cases where victims experience bodily harm or death, with an increase in penalty increments based on the severity of injuries sustained. Bodily injury incurs a two-level increase per person, serious bodily injury adds four levels, life-threatening or permanent injury adds six levels, and each death leads to a 10-level increase, according to the bill text.
“Cartels at our southern border are trafficking and exploiting innocent men, women, and children every day,” Blackburn said in a statement. “Our bill would modernize federal sentencing law to better hold these human smugglers to account and ensure that sentencing for these crimes reflects every single person these criminals injure or murder.”
The bill comes as President-elect Trump has promised to crack down on illegal immigration and the crisis at the southern border while making historic gains among Democratic districts.
Democrats have struggled this election cycle, with Vice President Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, to address illegal immigration.
This year, the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General sent a report to Congress finding that, over the past five years, more than 32,000 unaccompanied illegal alien children did not show for immigration court hearings, and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement could not account for the location of all of those who did not appear.
Fox News Digital’s Adam Shaw contributed to this report.
