Mexican criminal organizations known as cartels are using drones to carry out violent attacks on the public and rival gangs south of the border, according to a former U.S. Border Patrol official.

Carl Landrum, retired chief of the Border Patrol’s Laredo, Texas, region who now works for counterdrone defense company Dedrone, testified before House lawmakers Tuesday afternoon that “dozens and dozens” of violent incidents in Mexico have been facilitated through the unmanned aerial systems.

“These are dangerous, offensive capabilities that are being utilized by the cartels,” said Landrum, vice president of civilian programs and strategy at Dedrone, during a border technology hearing before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement, and the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability.

Last October, eight Colombians in Mexico were arrested after building drones with improvised explosive devices for a local narcotics smuggling gang.

In January, cartel-controlled drones were identified by Mexican authorities as the culprit behind a gruesome attack on remote Mexican villages in the state of Guerrero. Five people were burned to death as a result of the drone-facilitated attacks.

As recently as last week, residents of an indigenous village in Mexico’s Michoacan state were attacked through the use of drones operated by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Landrum said part of the problem was the “very limited amounts” of counterdrone technology. The United States has the ability to detect drones but is severely limited in its “offensive” capabilities or in how it can physically go after and take down drones in the sky.

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In the government’s fiscal 2022, Border Patrol reported that it used its own drones to spot and intercept 51,248 illegal immigrants who came across the border.

Drones, also called unmanned aerial systems, have increasingly been used by federal law enforcement agents at the U.S.’s land, air, and sea borders to track unauthorized entries. This past year, they played a unique role in helping agents get a bird’s-eye view of groups that are unable to be tracked on foot or by vehicle.

Senate Republicans charged the Biden administration with covering up how the government has handled wide-scale child trafficking at the southern border and accused authorities of using taxpayer money to fund “slavery” in America.

Government whistleblowers and Republican lawmakers blasted President Joe Biden and senior officials across the government for refusing to cooperate with a Senate investigation into the whereabouts of as many as 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children who have been apprehended at the southern border under Biden.

“Please understand this is taxpayer-funded child slavery sanctioned by our government and brought to you by [nongovernmental organizations],” Department of Health and Human Services whistleblower Deborah White said at a congressional roundtable Tuesday.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, accused HHS and the Department of Labor of covering up how the government and contracted companies have failed to properly care for 500,000 parentless immigrant children in government custody at the border.

“This blatant lack of transparency with the American people is reprehensible,” Cassidy said during a Senate roundtable with whistleblowers Tuesday afternoon. “Frankly, it is hard to see this as anything other than an effort to cover up and shield the Biden administration from scrutiny for its mistreatment and mishandling of unaccompanied children, particularly in an election year where the president is behind in the polls.”

White told the panel that what she witnessed while working with migrant children in government custody was “the biggest failure in government history that I have ever witnessed.”

“Despite raising case after case of trafficking, HHS [Office of Refugee Resettlement] leadership and the contractor allowed children to be trafficked on their watch and the taxpayers continue to fund it,” White said.

Over the past 17 months, Cassidy has led Republicans on the Senate HELP Committee through a winding journey that has widened to encompass not only how children were detained but also the companies using child workers and the federal departments that have shirked their responsibilities to screen, vet, and place adults who offer to house unrelated children.

In March 2023, Republicans on the Senate HELP Committee launched an oversight investigation following a New York Times report that revealed that the Biden administration had lost track of 85,000 unaccompanied children who had come across the southern border during Biden’s tenure. The large majority of children who arrive without a parent were released into the United States, as Cassidy found in his investigation, an alarming pace where screening protocols were relaxed in order to get more children out the door.

The newspaper uncovered that children who were released to adults in the country were being trafficked and forced into working in abhorrent conditions and that these types of horrific situations for children entrusted to the government to be released to fit adult sponsors were far more the exception.

Another HHS whistleblower, Tara Lee Rodas, told senators Tuesday that she was aware of a 16-year-old girl from Guatemala who had been released to an adult in North Carolina.

“She appeared in a photo on his social media. He was touching her inappropriately. It was clear her sponsor was not her brother. Later, Carmen appeared on her sponsor’s social media again — this time she was alone and all dolled up: Her hair was styled; her makeup was done, and her shirt was unbuttoned,” said Rodas. “ORR’s federal field specialist said Carmen looked drugged and that she was for sale. It was discovered that Carmen’s sponsor had other social media accounts containing child pornography. What keeps me up at night is wondering if Carmen is safe.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), former Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chairman, lambasted HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for not cooperating with Senate investigators for more than a year.

“Have they hopped on this? Have they put all hands on deck to dig into this — make sure this doesn’t happen, these children are protected? No. They won’t even respond to oversight letters. That’s what we’re dealing with here,” Johnson said. “They’re well aware of the inhumanity of the degradations being visited on the people that they claim to have a claim open border policy for.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has separately written to two dozen HHS contractors and grantees who have received “billions of taxpayer dollars” for answers about how children’s sponsors are being vetted, but not received responses, he said on Tuesday.

Republicans started out focused on individual companies that were reported for employing children. States vary with laws for employing minors, but certain dangerous jobs are off-limits to people under the age of 18.

In April 2023, Cassidy expanded the committee’s investigation into the Labor Department itself over claims that acting Secretary Julie Su “repeatedly ignored warnings and downplayed the exploitation of migrant children for cheap labor.”

Lawmakers learned that four children in HHS ORR care had recently died in separate incidents while in ORR custody. That federal office detains children at the border for an average of 30 days before placing the child with a family member in the country or unrelated adult sponsor.

The committee’s Republicans expanded the investigation in mid-2023 following reports that the HHS ORR had released children with latent Tuberculosis to sponsors in 44 states across the country.

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Investigators hope to wrap up the matter by the year’s end, according to a committee aide.

The Washington Examiner reached out to HHS for comment.

The Biden administration will protect up to 2,300 citizens of Yemen who are living illegally in the United States from deportation by renewing temporary protected status, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS announced Monday morning that it would renew the 18-month TPS program for Yemenis through March 3, 2026, because conditions in the Arab nation are not suitable for the government to take back its citizens.

“Yemen has been in a state of protracted conflict for the past decade, severely limiting civilians’ access to water, food, and medical care, pushing the country to the brink of economic collapse, and preventing Yemeni nationals living abroad from safely returning home,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement Monday.

Yemen has faced armed conflict, and “extraordinary” and temporary conditions continue to support Yemen’s TPS designation, according to the Biden administration.

“The steps the Department of Homeland Security has taken today will allow certain Yemenis currently residing in the United States to remain and work here until conditions in their home country improve,” Mayorkas said.

Yemen was first designated for TPS in 2015. Recipients receive documents to work in the country and authorization to legally reside in the country.

At present, 2,300 Yemenis have been approved for TPS under the current designation, which was slated to end this month.

Last month, the Biden administration announced it would redesignate Haiti for TPS. The decision will allow roughly 309,000 Haitian illegal immigrants in the U.S. to apply for protection from deportation.

Early on in the Trump administration, the White House threatened to end TPS for several countries.

Trump criticized his predecessors for renewing national memberships every 18 months in the TPS program, which allows illegal immigrants from specific countries to remain in the country and work because the home country is unstable as a result of political or environmental problems. Trump said crises in those countries that began 20 and 30 years ago could not still affect their ability to take back their citizens.

However, the Trump administration renewed TPS designations for most participating countries in 2019 after it was blocked in court from removing them. In other cases, it continued the years-old program because conditions in those countries had not dramatically improved.

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The Biden administration has continued to renew most countries’ designations since 2021.

Congress created TPS in 1990 as a way to help countries that had been seriously harmed by armed conflict, famine, or natural disaster from having to repatriate citizens deported from the U.S. TPS status can be requested from the U.S. government by the countries at any time.

The Democratic district attorney in a Houston-area county where 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was allegedly raped and murdered by two Venezuelan illegal immigrants blamed the “broken” immigration system for the girl’s death.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg rebuked federal law enforcement at the southern border for letting Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel, 22, and Franklin Jose Peña Ramos, 26, into the United States after they were caught illegally entering near El Paso, Texas, this spring.

“They should have never been released when they crossed over into El Paso, but we have a broken system, and Jocelyn’s death resulted,” Ogg said in a recent interview with local media outlet KPRC. “It’s just hard when you know something could have been prevented like a child’s death.”

Nungaray was found deceased early in the morning on June 16. Court records said Nungaray had snuck out of her home late the previous night and gone to 7-Eleven, where she encountered the two suspects after they had partied at a local restaurant, according to KPRC.

The two are alleged to have lured her to a private area where they raped and then strangled her before throwing her body into a creek to get rid of DNA evidence. One suspect reportedly searched how to get out of the U.S. before police arrested them.

“Our immigration system is broken, and if ever there was a case that reflected that, it’s this one,” Ogg added.

Ogg’s statements echo those made by the Biden administration, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has called on Congress since 2021 to fix the “broken immigration system.” Republicans, meanwhile, squarely place blame at President Joe Biden’s feet, pointing to his decision to undo Trump-era border policies upon assuming office.

As illegal immigrant arrests have increased to record-high levels under Biden, a greater percentage of people arriving are from faraway countries, not just Mexico and northern Central America. Hundreds of thousands of migrants from countries including Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia have arrived at the border.

“It’s not just immigrants from Mexico. We’re seeing immigrants from China, from the islands, from South America, like these individuals,” Ogg said. “I think it’s increasing the risk factor for regular people here. So I’m hoping that our government will work together in a bipartisan fashion to keep the public safe by making our borders safer.”

The Biden administration has largely arrested and then released into the U.S. most illegal immigrants due to an inability to fly back as many people as are being encountered and a preference against detaining people in jail through yearslong immigration proceedings.

Although the Department of Homeland Security has stated it is screening and vetting illegal immigrants before it releases them into the country, some governments, like Venezuela, do not share criminal database information with the U.S., making it impossible for federal law enforcement at the border to know each person’s entire history.

Despite Ogg’s complaints, Houston is a sanctuary city, which means the city has elected not to turn over illegal immigrants in custody to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement except for rare cases in which a serious crime has been committed. In Nungaray’s case, ICE has placed a request for the city to hold the suspects for federal officers to take custody.

However, ICE would not transfer the two men into its custody and begin deportation proceedings until after they have completed their sentence, if convicted.

Ogg berated the federal government for releasing both men with ankle monitor devices and said it gave Houston residents a false sense of security that the government was tracking illegal immigrants it released into the country.

“One of them cut it off. The ankle monitors give the public a false sense of security. We don’t rely on them as prosecutors because we see too many problems with folks who are supposed to be under supervision and yet aren’t,” Ogg said. “And that’s the case with these two guys. They should have never been released when they crossed over in El Paso.”

Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain of Houston blamed Ogg and the Biden administration for endorsing immigration policies that he said had protected illegal immigrants.

“Harris County has become a sanctuary for criminals, and the blame is not just on the Biden administration, but it’s on the DA’s office,” Cain, a Republican, told Fox News Digital.

Ogg lost her Democratic primary in March to a former prosecutor from her office, Sean Teare, who will take on Republican attorney Dan Simons in November. Cain implored Houston voters to select the Republican come this fall.

“In November: Republicans support legislation that could have allowed Texas to arrest and deport these monsters before they could harm anyone. Democrats want them to stay in the U.S. indefinitely. Vote accordingly,” Cain wrote in a post to X on June 25.

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The defendants were charged with capital murder. Life without parole is the maximum punishment for the murder of a child between the ages of 10 and 15, but an underlying felony conviction of sexual assault could make them eligible for the death penalty, Ogg said.

Each suspect is being held on a $10 million bond.