Trump: Migrant children will be the 'biggest beneficiaries' of border wall

President Trump has said that migrant children will be the “biggest beneficiaries” of the strict border security measures he wants to implement.

In a press briefing Friday, Trump was talking about the drawbacks of the current border system when he commented, “Children are the biggest beneficiaries of what we want to do. Children are hurt more than anybody else.”

The president went on to blast those hired to smuggle people across the border, noting, “These coyotes, what they do with children, all because we have open borders, because they think they can get away with it.”

And he later brought up the point again, saying: “We want to save lives. We want children to be safe. The children are being decimated. And I’m not talking about necessarily children in our country. I’m talking about wonderful children that are coming up from other places, whether it’s Honduras or Guatemala, or El Salvador or Mexico, or other places. And we have to take care of those children also. We can’t let them die on the way up.”

Despite Trump’s argument, an NPR article from 2014 addresses the characterization of coyotes as bad people by pointing out that “there are, to be sure, bad coyotes who do abuse their clients. But, as in any business, not everyone is the same.”

A smuggler and a U.S. expert on human smuggling also separately pointed out that parents would likely be unwilling to send their kids off with people who have bad reputations.