Human traffickers are drugging children as young as eight years old and smuggling them into the United States by posing as their parents, according to Border Patrol agents.

The agents told The New York Post that they are seeing a disturbing trend where “increasing numbers of smugglers posing as family units in order to ‘recycle’ children,” the report noted.

“A few years ago when they were coming in en masse, we had to let family units in. People kept coming in and after a while we noticed the kids were the same, but the parents were different. They were recycling the kids,” one Border Patrol source told The Post.

“I hate thinking about it because there were thousands of kids and who knows where they all ended up,” the source explained.

Authorities say it’s not clear what is happening to the children once they are smuggled into the US — but many are vulnerable to being exploited for child labor and child sex trafficking.

The cases have horrified leaders in the Border Patrol.

“Sometimes we encounter criminal actions so horrendous, they defy human decency,” said Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief of California’s El Centro sector in the southeast of the state, in response to the case.

Border Patrol agents recounted rescuing a child at the California border who was “heavily dosed with sleep aids to prevent him from talking” to immigration authorities, who later discovered that the traffickers carried birth certificates for multiple children.

Just weeks earlier, on Aug. 29, officers manning a port of entry in San Luis, Arizona, caught Marlen Contreras-Lopez — a 28-year-old US citizen and Arizona resident — with two young children in her car who had been drugged with sleep aids, according to federal prosecutors.

At first, Contreras-Lopez claimed she was related to the children, whom she tried to wake during the officers’ questioning, according to court documents.

Then, when she got out of the car for further inspection, officers observed that one of the kids had to be carried, while the other “struggled to walk,” according to the court documents.

“The woman had difficulty waking the children. Officers observed that the children remained extremely groggy. While interviewing the children, officers soon discovered there was no family relationship between the woman and the two minors, ages 11 and 8,” said Executive Assistant Office of Field Operations Commissioner Diane J. Sabatino in a post on X.

The children later told the authorities that they were given sleeping aids.

This revelation comes amid increasing numbers of unaccompanied minors traveling to the southern border.

RedState’s Ward Clark wrote about how the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has been linked to sex trafficking in eight states.

The crisis surrounding our wide-open southern border and the flood of illegal immigration into the country just seems to get worse day by day. On Tuesday, an exclusive New York Post article detailed how the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang is forcing illegal immigrant women into prostitution to pay for their being smuggled into the United States.

The vicious Venezuelan migrant gang Tren de Aragua is luring desperate women deep into the heart of the US, forcing them to sell their bodies on the streets of American cities to pay off exorbitant smuggling fees, a newly leaked law enforcement document obtained by The Post reveals.

At least eight states have seen an explosion in migrant prostitution since the gang laid down roots in the US, with authorities in Texas, Nevada, Illinois, California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey and New York now fighting to curtail the sex trade, the memo shows.

And the victims may be operating out in the open on the streets of New York City. On Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, sex workers and madams openly ply their trade on sidewalks.

The gangs in question are brazen; many suspected gang members were part of a huge rush on the southern border that overwhelmed Border Patrol agents, and the Ten de Aragua gang has already been implicated in running two brothels in New York City across the street from two elementary schools.

Illegal immigrants and asylum seekers are particularly vulnerable to human traffickers who exploit them for money. “Of the 17,000 likely victims whose immigration status was recorded, approximately 8,800 (52 percent) were not U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents” between 2015 and 2018, according to the Polaris Project.

These stories are already heartbreaking enough. But what is interesting about this is that Democrats are often the ones who claim to champion downtrodden individuals who come to the United States for a better life or to escape oppression in their home countries.

Yet, their refusal to address the border crisis has actually placed countless people, including small children, in danger of being sold into modern-day slavery. It is a tragic reality. But, unfortunately, it will likely stay the same if the election goes in the Democrats’ favor.