• Illegal alien kids vanish from officials in US


    Juan Osuna, director of the Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review, testifies to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about border security on Capitol Hill.

    WASHINGTON — Two days after the White House declared that most immigrant kids crossing illegally from Central America would be sent back home, a top administration official admitted Wednesday that nearly half have already vanished within the United States.

    The official, Juan Osuna, director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review at the Department of Justice, told a Senate committee that about 46 percent of all children, accompanied and unaccompanied, apprehended by authorities fail to show up for hearings before immigration judges.

    He told the panel the office didn’t have a court-response rate for the unaccompanied children that have flooded through the southern border in recent months, so that rate could be even higher.

    The rate could be even higher among the unaccompanied children that have flooded through the southern US border in recent months.

    By Marisa Schultz
    July 9, 2014 | 9:37pm
    New York Post

    Osuna indicated that even kids who obey the law face lengthy waits inside the United States because immigration courts are overloaded with 375,000 cases, a record.

    “We are facing the largest caseload that the agency has ever seen,” Osuna testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

    The eye-opening testimony left a far different impression of the border crisis than White House spokesman Josh Earnest did Monday, when he said the majority of the illegal-immigrant kids wouldn’t be allowed to stay.

    “Based on what we know about these cases, it is unlikely that most of these kids will qualify for humanitarian relief,” Earnest said. “And what that means is they will not have a legal basis for remaining in this country and will be returned.”
    Critics fret that the kids will eventually go underground.

    The Senate hearing came on a day when President Obama headed to Texas amid criticism the administration has been slow to react to the torrent of kids fleeing largely from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.


    Sen. John McCain speaks during the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on challenges at the border.Photo: EPA/Michael Reynolds

    The number of unaccompanied kids caught since October hit 57,000, more than double the number last year.

    “The fact is that people show up and they have every reason to believe, according to these numbers, that … there is ample incentive for them to come to this country,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

    Children from Central American countries by law are granted due process before the immigration court system to determine whether they can stay in the country legally for humanitarian reasons.

    They are required to be held in the least restrictive environment, so that means about 95 percent are released to family or adult sponsors in the United States pending court hearings, Mark Greenberg, an HHS official told the Senate panel.

    Under tough questioning from Sen. Tom Coburn ( R-Okla.), Greenberg admitted the administration has a policy of not checking the immigration status of the relatives who receive the children.

    It’s no wonder, Coburn said, the children aren’t coming back to court because their relatives now fear deportation.

    “The likelihood they [the children] are going to show up before a judge is markedly diminished because it exposes them [their relatives],” Coburn said.

    Greenberg countered that his department’s priority is making sure the children are placed in a safe home.
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