Waves of immigrant minors present crisis for Obama,
Congress
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.
Barbara Mikulski
Barbara A. Mikulski
is a member of the Senate Committee on
Appropriations, and Ann Lewis was
her chief of staff.
Note: Ann
Lewis was Barbara A. Mikulski’s chief
of staff, and a VP for the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America.
Open
Society Foundations was a funder for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Amnesty International, the Human
Rights Watch, and the Natural Resources
Defense Council.
George
Soros is the founder & chairman for the Open Society Foundations, a board member for the International Crisis Group, was the
chairman for the Foundation to Promote
Open Society, and a benefactor at the Human
Rights Watch.
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for Amnesty International, Refugees
International, the Roosevelt
Institute, the Human Rights Watch,
the Natural Resources Defense Council,
the NAACP Legal Defense &
Educational Fund, the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace (think tank), the Brookings
Institution (think tank), and the Aspen
Institute (think tank).
Ernesto
Zedillo was a board member for the International
Crisis Group, and the president of Mexico.
Martin
London was an attorney for the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America, and is of counsel at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Jeh Charles
Johnson is a partner at Paul, Weiss,
Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and was a governor for the Roosevelt Institute.
Adrian W. DeWind
was a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind,
Wharton & Garrison, a co-founder for the Human Rights Watch, a trustee at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and a director at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund.
Theodore V.
Wells Jr. is a partner at Paul,
Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and a co-chair emeritus at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund.
Jerome
A. Cohen is of counsel at Paul,
Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and was a trustee at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(think tank).
Jessica Tuchman Mathews is the
president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (think tank),
a director at the American Friends of Bilderberg (think tank), was a board
member for the International Crisis
Group, an honorary trustee at the Brookings Institution (think tank),
and a 2008 Bilderberg conference participant (think tank).
Ed Griffin’s interview with
Norman Dodd in 1982
(The investigation into the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace uncovered the plans for population
control by involving the United
States in war)
Ernesto
Zedillo was a board member for the International
Crisis Group, and the president of Mexico.
Warren
B. Rudman was an honorary trustee at the Brookings Institution (think
tank), a lifetime trustee at the Aspen
Institute (think tank), and of counsel at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
David M.
Rubenstein is a co-chairman for the Brookings Institution (think tank),
the president of the Economic Club of
Washington, was a benefactor for the Aspen
Institute (think tank), and a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Vernon E. Jordan Jr. was the president
of the Economic Club of Washington, a
member of the Iraq Study Group, is a senior director at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund,
an honorary trustee at the Brookings Institution (think tank), Valerie B. Jarrett’s great uncle, a
director at the American Friends of Bilderberg (think tank), and a 2008 Bilderberg
conference participant (think tank).
Lee
H. Hamilton was a co-chair for the Iraq
Study Group, is an honorary trustee at the Brookings Institution (think
tank), and a co-chair for
the Independent Task Force on
Immigration and America's Future.
Carlos
Pascual was a VP at the Brookings Institution (think tank), and a U.S.
ambassador for Mexico.
Cyrus F.
Freidheim Jr. is an honorary trustee at the Brookings Institution (think tank), and a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago.
Valerie B. Jarrett
is Vernon E. Jordan Jr’s great niece, the senior
adviser for the Barack Obama
administration, and a member of the Commercial
Club of Chicago.
James S.
Crown is a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago, and a trustee
at the Aspen Institute (think tank).
Lester Crown
was a lifetime trustee at the Aspen Institute (think tank), and is a
member of the Commercial Club of Chicago.
Kathleen
Brown is a member of the Commercial Club of Chicago, and was an attorney
at O'Melveny & Myers LLP.
Alejandro N.
Mayorkas was an attorney at O'Melveny
& Myers LLP, a director at the U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services, and is the deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Jeh Charles
Johnson is the secretary for the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and was a governor
for the Roosevelt Institute.
No comments:
Post a Comment