Thread: Arizona Still Struggling with Shipment of Foreign Children from Texas Border

by Kristin Tate 8 Jun 2014, 1:00 PM PDT
breitbart



The federal government is unable to accommodate the flood of illegal aliens that have "overwhelmed" the Texas-Mexico border. As a result, the State of Arizona and its residents must accommodate many of the new illegal immigrants.

Thousands of illegal immigrants were recently sent from Texas to Arizona-based holding facilities, which have become overcrowded. Now state officials have been forced to resort to a makeshift housing center in Nogales, Arizona for hundreds of illegal immigrant children. Arizona officials are in dire need of medical supplies and living materials for the illegal immigrants, according to The Associate Press (AP).

Federal agents began sending illegal immigrants to Arizona after a sharp spike in illegal immigration caused Texas-based facilities to become overwhelmed. Texas' Rio Grande Valley area has seen the most significant increase in illegal crossings in recent months--there, more than 1,000 illegal immigrants are apprehended by Border Patrol agents each day.

The AP reported that children at the new housing center in Nogales are sleeping on plastic cots while officials wait for 2,000 mattresses to arrive at the facility. Portable toilets and showers were also allegedly brought to warehouse, which has a capacity of 1,500. 800 children are expected to be living at the housing center by the end of this weekend, but the AP reported that 1,400 minors will ultimately be brought there.

According to Breitbart Texas' contributing editor and border security expert Sylvia Longmire, the Arizona state government is being forced to accommodate the illegal immigrants since the federal government has not handled the situation appropriately.

"What's most telling about the severity of this situation is the fact that both Republicans and Democrats are criticizing President Obama for the way his administration has been handling this crisis," Longmire said. "US Rep. Raúl Grijalva, probably the most liberal congressman in Arizona, acknowledged to Arizona Public Media that even he wasn't notified about the immigrant transfer to his state, and said the Obama administration was not handling the situation appropriately."

She continued, "By declaring this a 'humanitarian crisis,' President Obama places this situation on the border on equal footing with a natural disaster, especially since he's called in FEMA to assist. But what should the US President be doing in the wake of a strong hurricane, earthquake, or wildfire? He speaks to the American people to provide them with the extent of the damage and explain exactly what their government is doing to help. He visits the disaster areas and meets with the families. He speaks in person with the agencies dealing with the crisis and offers whatever federal help is needed. However, Obama has not spoken publicly about this situation since he labeled it a crisis almost a week ago, and has not acknowledged the uproar caused by the tragic photos Breitbart Texas released on Thursday of immigrant children packed into Border Patrol stations like sardines."

But Obama isn't the only one who has been silent--DHS officials haven't spoken out on the matter, either.

"This stubborn silence is also being passed down to DHS, which canceled a press conference in Laredo last week mere minutes before a Border Patrol spokesman was about to address the situation," Longmire said. "DHS is also not allowing the press to interview doctors and nurses who are treating sick illegal immigrants at the stations, nor take any tours of the facilities. Either the White House wants this tragedy to expand even further as a way to justify its own immigration reform agenda, or it is demonstrating even more ineptitude in how it's handling this crisis that is largely by its own doing."

Reports state that authorities hope to eventually use the Nogales-based facility as a medical checkpoint for children, who--subsequent to being treated for any illness and infections--would be sent to other processing centers in states like California, Texas, and Oklahoma.

There have already been incidents where apprehended illegal immigrants have passed diseases on to federal agents. As Breitbart Texas reported, several Texas Border Patrol agents recently contracted scabies from contact with detained illegal immigrants. Overcrowding in processing facilities has made it difficult to identify and quarantine infected detainees. Many are concerned that scabies and other illnesses may be passed onto the general public.

Many of the new immigrants caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are from Central or South America--deporting such individuals has proven more difficult than deporting Mexican crossers. Thousands of such illegal immigrants are simply released onto U.S. soil each week. Some of the released aliens are even criminals--as Breitbart Texas previously reported, more than 36,000 convicted criminal illegal aliens were released by U.S. authorities in 2013 alone.

The sharp increase in illegal immigration shows no signs of slowing down. Word has apparently spread in Central and South America that aliens are being released at a rapid rate--this could be encouraging more families and individuals to make the dangerous trip north.

Nora Griselda Bercian Diaz, a mother from Guatemala who crossed into the U.S. illegally with her 6-year-old daughter, told local media outlet KRGV that the message being spread in her home country is, "Go to America with your child, you won't be turned away."

Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently told Breitbart Texas that the Obama Administration's "lawlessness" is responsible for the recent sharp increase in illegal immigration.

"We need a president who is willing to uphold the law," Cruz said. "On issue after issue the Obama Administration has openly ignored, defied, and unilaterally tried to change the law. With respect to securing the border, the Obama Administration has handcuffed the courageous men and women who serve in Border Patrol. Morale in ICE is at an all-time low because the political operatives leading this Administration are preventing them from doing their job and upholding the law."

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-T...reign-Children

WATCH THE VIDEOS AT THE LINK:

Questions surround surge in migrant kids left at border


The mayor of Nogales, Ariz., speaks out about the hundreds of unaccompanied kids at a giant Border Patrol warehouse in the southern part of the state. The mayor said the kids are in good care. KPNX-TV, Phoenix
Bob Ortega,
The Arizona Republic7:10 a.m. EDT June 10, 2014
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(Photo: Charlie Leight/The Republic)

PHOENIX — A surge in unaccompanied minors from Central America crossing the border illegally into Texas has so overwhelmed the Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley that officials have transported more than 750 children since last week to Border Patrol facilities in Arizona — with plans to bring hundreds more, if necessary.

Calling the situation "a humanitarian crisis," President Barack Obama has sent federal officials scrambling to ramp up temporary housing in three other states for about 3,000 more migrant children.

Here are the key questions and answers about what is happening and why:

STORY: Scores of undocumented migrants dropped off in Arizona
STORY: Food, water, smiles greet migrants shipped to Ariz.

How many unaccompanied children are crossing?

According to Customs and Border Protection, in the past eight months, agents have apprehended about 47,000 unaccompanied minors who crossed the border into the U.S. illegally from Mexico.
The CBP estimates that apprehensions of minors this year may reach 90,000.

Almost three-fourths of the children apprehended are from Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador. And 33,470 of them entered through the Rio Grande Valley Sector, which this year surpassed the Tucson Sector as the busiest for illegal crossings. Overall, Border Patrol apprehensions of undocumented migrants are still running at less than half of the rate of 2000-06, when they typically exceeded 1 million a year.

Why are so many children crossing now?

Gang violence in El Salvador and in urban areas of Guatemala has escalated dramatically in recent months since a weak truce among rival gangs has evaporated, said Elizabeth G. Kennedy, a Fulbright scholar reached Monday in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador.

"Half of them are fleeing for their lives," she said.

Kennedy, investigating the causes of child migration, has interviewed more than 400 child migrants. For many, Kennedy said, "their decision is: Do I face possible death in migrating or sure death in staying?"

The gang violence "particularly affects youths," said Alison Ramirez, who works on a U.S.-funded violence-prevention project in El Salvador and who frequently visits Honduras and Guatemala.

"The gangs are in schools, neighborhoods. They're everywhere," she said. "Even if the kids don't want to be a part of it, they get caught up in the crossfire, extorted, threatened."

"The violence is one of the drivers in Honduras," said David Scott FitzGerald, associate director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies in California. "Just looking at the homicide rate, it has tripled in the last decade. It's the highest in the world for a country not at war."

Migrants get off a federal bus on Monday at the Greyhound station in Phoenix. Undocumented immigrants from Central America, transferred from Texas, have been released in Arizona since last week.(Photo: Michael Chow, The Arizona Republic)

Children from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador aren't just fleeing to the United States. Increasing numbers have been seeking asylum in Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua and Belize, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Kennedy and Ramirez agreed that most children who flee to the United States do so because they have family members here.

The family ties are a key factor, too, said Cecilia Menjivar, a sociologist at Arizona State University who has researched migration from Central America for more than 16 years.

"Immigration laws have as much to do with the crisis as the conditions back home," she said.

She said that because of civil war and post-conflict violence, Hondurans have been able to seek asylum and be granted temporary protected status since 1998. Salvadorans have been able to gain temporary protected status since an earthquake in 2001.

That status doesn't allow holders to gain permanent residency, but they are allowed to work.
"A lot of people who have that status have children they haven't seen in a long time," Menjivar said. "That means they may be encouraging their family members to take the dangerous journey north even as children are motivated to flee violence or seek better economic opportunities."

Why are they being sent to Arizona?

Capacity. For most of the past decade, the Tucson Sector has been the busiest in the country for illegal border crossings, Border Patrol spokesman Andy Adame said.

As a result, the sector "has gotten a lot of resources in terms of agents, infrastructure and technology," he said. "And we have two big processing facilities, in Nogales and Tucson."

It's important to note that the unaccompanied children being sent to Arizona won't stay here indefinitely. In a telephone conference Monday, White House officials agreed to discuss what the administration is doing so long as they were identified only as "senior administration officials."

They said the goal — not yet being met — is to process each minor within 72hours either to be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation proceedings or to the Health and Human Services Department to be reunited with family members or placed in foster homes pending deportation proceedings.

The Nogales, Ariz., holding facility received mattresses and four portable showers over the weekend. The Border Patrol didn't respond by deadline to questions about whether additional showers and other supplies had been delivered Monday.
Can't the Border Patrol just stop them?

The short answer: No. While the U.S. government has spent more than $126 billion over the past nine years on border security and enforcement, much of the fencing and infrastructure was built in California, Arizona and western Texas, which were the major crossing areas over the past decade.

The Border Patrol has been moving increasing numbers of agents into the Rio Grande Valley Sector, but vast stretches of the river are easy to cross, and there is extensive vegetation along the banks that makes it easy to hide both before and after crossing.


Immigration authorities are overwhelmed as many women and children from Central America are crossing the Texas-Mexico border, then being sent to Arizona and West Texas where they are released. VPC

Senior administration officials said Monday that they had been preparing for increased numbers of unaccompanied children but that the numbers have been much greater than they expected.

Officials said they have been in daily contact with the governments of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador and carrying out public-information campaigns in those countries to warn people of the dangers children face and that they are not eligible for any kind of residency or protected status under any potential immigration-reform measure.

The administration last week named a team, led by W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to coordinate with Homeland Security on how to handle the massive influx of unaccompanied minors.

Federal officials said they are working to improve the conditions in the Nogales processing facility. As of Monday, they had also readied facilities to temporarily house up to 1,767 children at military bases in California and Texas, and they were preparing additional temporary housing at Fort Sill, Okla.

Depending on how many minors Border Patrol agents continue to apprehend in Texas, more children may be sent to Arizona, officials said.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...rder/10269915/

Alison Ramirez, who works on a U.S.-funded violence-prevention project in El Salvador and who frequently visits Honduras and Guatemala.

I no longer wonder how the word is being spread to encourage this flood of welfare illegals to the US. Look no further than the NGO's supported by our tax dollars. Similar to the Obama funded NGO's that helped to stir the pot in Egypt.