Thread: Children swarming southern border prove a test to Obama’s immigration policy

Estimated 60,000 minors likely to double

By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
Updated: 10:11 p.m. on Wednesday, May 28, 2014


AP Photo/File

Children traveling without their families, including an “overwhelming” number younger than 12, are flooding across the southwestern border in the latest test of the Obama administration’s immigration policy.

Homeland Security Officials predict that 60,000 minors will cross the border this year and that the number will double next year, accounting for an astonishing percentage of people trying to jump the border — braving the tremendous perils of crossing Mexico and trying to evade border authorities, hoping to eventually connect with family in the U.S.

The administration seems powerless to stop most of the border breaches and instead has searched for ways to manage the flow of vulnerable, and politically sympathetic, immigrants.

On Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson will raise the issue with Congress. He will recount his trip this month to the border in Texas, where he saw such children, which the government calls “unaccompanied alien children,” or UACs.

“I have been closely following this emerging issue since coming into office, with a particular focus on the Rio Grande Valley,” Mr. Johnson will tell the House, according to his prepared testimony. “I traveled to McAllen, Texas, to view the situation and saw the children there firsthand — an overwhelming number of whom were under 12 years old.”

Officials are grappling with how the U.S. should handle children inside the border and whether there is any way to stop the flow.

Under U.S. law, the children are entitled to special protections and can’t be put straight into deportation proceedings, as adults are.

Instead, they are screened for trafficking concerns. Once processed, they are placed with either foster families or sent to their own families in the U.S. while they apply for asylum or a special juvenile visa, said Marc R. Rosenblum, deputy director of the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. immigration policy program.

“Those policies make a lot of sense because these are a vulnerable population,” he said.

In some cases, Homeland Security officials are sending the children to be with their parents — even when those parents are known to be living in the U.S. illegally. A federal judge in Texas blasted the department for that practice late last year, saying the government essentially had become complicit in criminal activity.

“The DHS is rewarding criminal conduct instead of enforcing the current laws. More troubling, the DHS is encouraging parents to seriously jeopardize the safety of their children,” Judge Andrew S. Hanen wrote in a court order.

The children are chiefly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and have to cross through Mexico, braving the elements and smugglers to eventually arrive at the border in Texas, where they generally try to cross. Reports of rape are common among the girls.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees released a study this year that surveyed more than 400 of the children as they arrived in the U.S. and found nearly half of them were fleeing drug cartels or gangs in their home countries. Still others were fleeing abusive homes.

“I am here because the gang threatened me,” one 15-year-old girl from El Salvador, identified only as Maritza, told the UNHCR investigators. “One of them ‘liked’ me. Another gang member told my uncle that he should get me out of there because the guy who liked me was going to do me harm. In El Salvador they take young girls, rape them and throw them in plastic bags.”

The number of unaccompanied children has spiked even in the past few weeks, said Homeland Security spokeswoman Marsha Catron, who said the rise has strained her department and the Department of Health and Human Services, which under the law is responsible for caring for the children.

HHS has asked for space to house up to 1,000 children at Lackland Air Force Base, and the government is trying to find even more facilities.

Meanwhile, Mr. Johnson has sent staff to southern Texas to make sure children are receiving medical care. He also has directed his department to develop “an aggressive public messaging campaign to outline the dangers of and deter” the children from trying to cross, the spokeswoman said.

“DHS is expanding awareness campaigns targeting potential crossers, in their home countries, in an effort to warn them of the extreme dangers associated with attempts to illegally enter the United States while also underscoring the fact that illegal crossers — including children seeking to reunite with families — are not eligible for legal status, including under prospective legislation,” Ms. Catron said.

But she acknowledged that the government has limited tools to stem the flow.

Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the numbers have been rising steadily for several years, and that the administration should have been better prepared.

“This is a crisis on the level of the Mariel crisis. This far outstrips the agency’s capacity to deal with it in the normal way,” she said, referring to the 1980 mass emigration from Cuba. “But they saw this coming, too. They estimated months ago that it was going to be double the prior year and they don’t seem to be taking any steps to prevent it from happening.”

She said releasing the children into the community, where they live for years while awaiting a final decision on their cases, will encourage more families to send their children.

“I would argue that it would be perhaps more humane to deal with it firmly so that people stop taking the risk of putting children through this smuggling ordeal,” Ms. Vaughan said.

That is probably unthinkable for an administration that has carved most illegal immigrants in the interior of the U.S. out of danger of deportation, and is searching for more ways to halt deportations.

Left with few other options, the administration has pleaded for help from Mexico, which is the first to see the border crossers.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry raised the issue during a recent visit to Mexico City.

For now though, the administration continues to struggle.

Mr. Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute said he is able to come up with good policy answers to most immigration questions, even if they are not politically possible. But in this case, he said, that’s not true.

“On this one, there’s really not a good policy answer,” he said. “Anything you do to protect those kids creates perverse incentives for other families to send their kids, and anything you do on enforcement puts them back in those bad situations.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...ve-a-test-oba/

Is there anybody on earth who does not have a sob story which qualifies them for special privileges?

Too bad that we don't think that our own foster children should qualify for special privileges.
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Americans first in this magnificent country

American jobs for American workers

Fair trade, not free trade

By Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON Wed May 28, 2014 1:54pm EDT

(Reuters) - Tens of thousands of children unaccompanied by parents or relatives are flooding across the southern U.S. border illegally, forcing the Obama administration and Congress to grapple with both a humanitarian crisis and a budget dilemma.

An estimated 60,000 such children will pour into the United States this year, according to the administration, up from about 6,000 in 2011. Now, Washington is trying to figure out how to pay for their food, housing and transportation once they are taken into custody.

The flow is expected to grow. The number of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrants who are under 18 will likely double in 2015 to nearly 130,000 and cost U.S. taxpayers $2 billion, up from $868 million this year, according to administration estimates.

The shortage of housing for these children, some as young as 3, has already become so acute that an emergency shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, has been opened and can accommodate 1,000 of them, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in an interview with Reuters.

The issue is an added source of tension between Democrats and Republicans, who disagree on how to rewrite immigration laws. With comprehensive legislation stalled, President Barack Obama is looking at small, administrative steps he could take, which might be announced this summer. No details have been outlined but immigration groups are pressing him to take steps to keep families with children together.

The minors flooding over the border are often teenagers leaving behind poverty or violence in Mexico and other parts of Central America such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. They are sometimes seeking to reunite with a parent who is already in the United States, also without documentation.

"This is a humanitarian crisis and it requires a humanitarian response," Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski said in an interview. The Maryland Democrat, a former social worker, has likened the flood of unaccompanied children to the "boat people" of past exodus movements.

Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on Mikulski's committee, said, "The need is there, you know the humanitarian aspect of it, but we're challenged on money."

Immigration groups lobbying for comprehensive reform argue that children are being hit hardest by the political deadlock.

BLAME GAME

With an even bigger funding challenge looming for 2015, Mikulski worries corners might be cut. She said children could end up being placed in federal holding cells meant only for adults and that funds might have to be shifted from other programs, such as refugee aid, to help cover the $252-per-day cost of detaining a child.

Mark Lagon, who coordinated the George W. Bush administration’s efforts to combat human trafficking, tied the sharp increase in unaccompanied minors to both U.S. economic factors and escalating violence in Central America.

He noted that there was a decrease in migration to the United States in the period 2008-2010 that reflected the U.S. economic downturn, and that has been reversed.

"Now, it is again seen that there is a better life to be had in the United States and it’s worth the risk" of parents encouraging their children to make the perilous journey from countries like El Salvador and Honduras, said Langon, now a professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Also, with drug wars raging in Mexico, those fleeing Central American countries are less likely to make Mexico their destination and instead continue onto the United States, he said.

The budget and border-security implications of the problem could spill into campaigns for the November congressional elections, especially in Senate races in states with significant immigrant populations, such as North Carolina and Colorado.

Republican Representative John Carter of Texas blamed Obama for what he called a "nightmare at the border" with "tens of thousands of children" being smuggled into the United States.

In an opinion piece in The Hill newspaper last month, Carter said Obama's policies had created an "invitational posture for illegal immigrants." He said the administration helped to fuel the crossings with a 2012 decision to give temporary relief from deportation to certain children brought to the United States illegally by their parents.

Immigration advocacy groups point out that the unaccompanied youths coming to the United States since 2011 would not qualify under that program.

Lagon criticized the "political canard from my fellow Republicans" who suggest the tide of unaccompanied minors is the result of Obama policies, especially given Obama’s aggressive deportation policy since he became president in 2009.

A report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, based on interviews of 404 children aged 12-17 who left their home countries, found that 70 percent did so because of either domestic abuse, or violence "in the region by organized armed criminal actors, including drug cartels and gangs or by State actors."

HARROWING JOURNEYS

Minors sometimes endure horrific conditions to get to the United States, immigration groups say.

Suyen G, who asked that her full name not be published, said she left her native Honduras two years ago aged 16 after securing $9,000 to pay a smuggler to get her into the United States. "I didn't know it was illegal because a lot of people come. I thought it was something that normal people just do," she said through a translator.

Suyen has a quick smile and looks like a typical American teenager in her sandals and fashionably-torn blue jeans. But she recounts a harrowing journey, saying she left home to escape a father who was beating her, and that along the way she was raped by a "coyote" or migrant smuggler. She endured 24 hours with no food as she sat atop a slow-moving freight train through Mexico and made an overnight trek by foot.

When she struggled to pull herself over a wall at the Mexico-U.S. border, Suyen said, "I thought I was going to die" after being shoved over by a coyote, plunging down the other side and landing atop a man below.

Unlike most kids, she entered the United States undetected, only to end up in a stranger's house in Houston. There, she said she was forced to work without pay for a month before being transferred to a vineyard, where she cooked meals, also without pay, for 300 migrant workers. Reuters has not verified the details of her journey but Suyen told a similar story in a sworn deposition to an immigration court.

Finally, Suyen said, she was allowed to travel to northern Virginia where she was reunited with her mother.

Rebecca Walters, a lawyer in the northern Virginia office of Ayuda, which provides assistance to immigrants, helped Suyen win protective status and eventually a "green card" that allows her to work legally in the United States.

Walters said she typically juggles up to 60 cases at a time involving unaccompanied minors. A lot of her cases were boys who said they had friends who had been murdered for refusing to join gangs at home, she said.

Walters told of a boy from El Salvador who lived with an abusive, alcoholic father. The boy had to stop going outside to avoid getting beaten by gang members trying to recruit him.

In 2011, the boy and his brother, aged 16 and 15, arrived in the United States after walking for days in the desert. They were caught by U.S. authorities just inside border.

If not for the father's abuse, "it would have been almost impossible" to prevent the brothers' deportation, Walters said.

Minors who escape domestic abuse in their countries have a good chance of winning a special protective status from U.S. immigration courts, even if they are caught at the border. But the law does not recognize gang activity as a reason to protect immigrant children.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0E814T20140528

By: John Hayward
5/29/2014 08:47 AM
Human Events



This is the most predictable news in recent history. Anyone who doesn’t understand what’s happening at the border, as the number of juvenile illegal aliens surges by a thousand percent since 2011, is an absolute fool. Unfortunately, blinkered fools are at the helm during our immigration debate, so this article from Reuters hems and haws through half a dozen tortured explanations for the astonishing surge of young illegals before arriving at the obvious primary reason: they’re coming because they know the open borders crowd is dying to give them amnesty. Free citizenship is dangled before people from hellish Central American countries, and they quite logically and understandably come to collect it.

Tens of thousands of children unaccompanied by parents or relatives are flooding across the southern U.S. border illegally, forcing the Obama administration and Congress to grapple with both a humanitarian crisis and a budget dilemma.

An estimated 60,000 such children will pour into the United States this year, according to the administration, up from about 6,000 in 2011. Now, Washington is trying to figure out how to pay for their food, housing and transportation once they are taken into custody.

The flow is expected to grow. The number of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrants who are under 18 will likely double in 2015 to nearly 130,000 and cost U.S. taxpayers $2 billion, up from $868 million this year, according to administration estimates.

The shortage of housing for these children, some as young as 3, has already become so acute that an emergency shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, has been opened and can accommodate 1,000 of them, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in an interview with Reuters.

The issue is an added source of tension between Democrats and Republicans, who disagree on how to rewrite immigration laws. With comprehensive legislation stalled, President Barack Obama is looking at small, administrative steps he could take, which might be announced this summer. No details have been outlined but immigration groups are pressing him to take steps to keep families with children together.

The minors flooding over the border are often teenagers leaving behind poverty or violence in Mexico and other parts of Central America such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. They are sometimes seeking to reunite with a parent who is already in the United States, also without documentation.

Has there ever been a more obvious case of cause and effect? The American ruling class fawns over young illegals as “Dreamers,” holding them up as better than native-born and legal citizens in many ways, promising them a full menu of benefits. The only real debate concerns how sweeping their amnesty will be, how long it will take before they have full access to the panoply of American social programs, and whether it will all arrive via Obama’s executive orders or action by the open-borders crowd in Congress.

We’re going to spend a few billion dollars coping with “unintended consequences” that arrive before the laws are even passed. Usually you have to pass an ill-considered law before the “unintended consequences” come knocking, but in this case the consequences are already parked in emergency shelters in Texas, costing the American taxpayer $252 apiece per day.

Who can blame them? The American Ruling Class is handing them a gold-trimmed invitation to illegally cross the border. The other factors cited by Reuters – horrible economic conditions, political violence and drug wars – are certainly incentives to make the journey, but the sure and certain promise of fabulous rewards for any young person who gets a foot across the border is a magnet that outweighs other factors. Under Barack Obama, it’s become almost impossible to get deported, even for adult illegals who commit serious additional crimes, contrary to the weird efforts to mythologize Obama as some kind of deportation hardliner. ”Dreamers” have every reason to think crossing the border means they win the immigration game.

It’s sadly amusing to see references to the supposedly improving American economy as factor in increased illegal immigration, seeing as how the first quarter of 2014 was just officially revised downward from near-zero economic growth into an outright contraction. But even in the grip of endless Obama malaise, the U.S. economy offers a far better future than what the young illegals are fleeing, and one suspects the news about the U.S. economy most of them are getting is closer to White House spin than the unlovely truth.

Of course, anyone who makes the obvious connection between immigration policy and the surge in border crossings is accused of playing politics, not to mention xenophobia:

The budget and border-security implications of the problem could spill into campaigns for the November congressional elections, especially in Senate races in states with significant immigrant populations, such as North Carolina and Colorado.

Republican Representative John Carter of Texas blamed Obama for what he called a “nightmare at the border” with “tens of thousands of children” being smuggled into the United States.

In an opinion piece in The Hill newspaper last month, Carter said Obama’s policies had created an “invitational posture for illegal immigrants.” He said the administration helped to fuel the crossings with a 2012 decision to give temporary relief from deportation to certain children brought to the United States illegally by their parents.

Immigration advocacy groups point out that the unaccompanied youths coming to the United States since 2011 would not qualify under that program.

[Bush Administration immigration official Mark] Lagon criticized the “political canard from my fellow Republicans” who suggest the tide of unaccompanied minors is the result of Obama policies, especially given Obama’s aggressive deportation policy since he became president in 2009.

Repeat after me: there is no aggressive Obama deportation policy. It’s pure myth, achieved by cooking the books to include people intercepted at the border as “deportations.” Out here in the real world, the Obama Administration put 68,000 illegal aliens guilty of additional offenses, including some violent ones, back on the streets last year instead of deporting them. And as the rest of the Reuters article makes clear, these young “Dreamers” are not being turned back at the border – they’re turning into refugee-camp humanitarian crisis.

The precise effects of massive national policies can be difficult to predict – which is one of the arguments for having as few massive national policies as possible – but the link between increased illegal immigration and promises of amnesty is as solid and obvious as a suspension bridge hanging across the border. People respond to incentives; a crime with little risk of detection or punishment will be committed more frequently; and when the political class declares it isn’t really a “crime” at all, but instead an act of noble virtue, what rational person is surprised to see a dramatic increase in undesirable behavior?

We do still think crossing the border in defiance of our immigration laws is “undesirable,” even if it’s not really illegal in any meaningful sense… don’t we? Do the legal citizens of the United States have anything to say about the mounting humanitarian crisis at the border, or are we just supposed to shut up and pay for it? Do we still have anything to say about the number of new citizens accepted into the country, or the manner in which citizenship is conferred?

If the answer to all of those questions is “no” – as nearly the entire Democrat Party and a sizable portion of the Republican Party would insist – then let’s stop putting young lives at risk and start providing escort services for the inbound “Dreamers.” Use military ground and air transportation to pick them up at designated “Dream Stations” and bring them safely into the United States, sparing them a long, arduous, and extremely dangerous journey from their awful countries of origin. How can we live with ourselves for forcing them to go through such tribulations, unaccompanied by an adult in many of these recent cases? Are we saying that the only meaningful barrier to immigration and free citizenship for “Dreamers” is the chance that they might die on the way to collect the invitation we have extended to them?

What’s the point of spending tons of money on a border security system that cannot and will not stop a large percentage of the people who violate the border? That’s one of the reasons it’s a mistake to focus entirely on physical border security in the “comprehensive immigration reform” debate – the incentives our social policies provide to defeat that security are important too. It can’t be a game that ends in decisive victory when the feet of an intruder touch U.S. soil. The highest border fences in the world don’t matter if social policies give people strong enough incentives to climb it… or dump their young children in front of it.

What we’re doing right now is madness, inflicted by the reluctance of the Ruling Class to be completely honest with the American people about what it wants, and what the inevitable consequences of its agenda will be.

http://www.humanevents.com/2014/05/2...g-for-amnesty/