NUMBERS GROWING
The head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Gil Kerlikowske, told senators Wednesday at a hearing of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the number of unaccompanied minors picked up after crossing the Mexican border since October now stands at 57,000, up from 52,000 in mid-June, and more than double what it was at the same time last year. They are coming mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, often fleeing gang violence. The situation, Kerlikowske said, “is difficult and distressing on a lot of levels.”
— Associated Press
After sitting down with one of his harshest critics, President Barack Obama said Wednesday he was open to all of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s suggestions for addressing the wave of unaccompanied minors coming over the border from Mexico, and urged Congress to approve his request for more funding so that those and other ideas can be put in place.
Obama said he was willing to consider dispatching National Guard troops to the border, as Perry suggested, but warned it would only be a temporary solution. He said that if Perry and his fellow Republicans want the problem to be fixed in the longer term, they should press Congress to move quickly to fund his $3.7 billion request.
“There’s nothing the governor indicated that he’d like to see that I have a philosophical objection to,” Obama said in statement following his meeting with Perry and local leaders in Dallas. The meeting was hastily arranged after the White House decided, despite intense pressure from Republican lawmakers and Perry, that Obama would not visit the border during his Texas trip.
Obama said Perry raised four areas of concern dealing with the number of border patrol agents, the positioning of those agents, the differing policies for immigrants coming from Mexico versus Central America and the functioning of the U.S. immigrant judicial system.
If Congress passes he emergency funding request, the government will have to resources to take some of the steps Perry recommended, Obama said. He said the problem is fixable if lawmakers are interested in solving it, but that if the preference is for politics, it will remain.
Obama’s meeting with Perry came after senior administration officials, urging Congress to approve the funding request, testified in a Senate hearing Wednesday. They told the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee that the tens of thousands of children streaming from chaotic Central American nations to the U.S. border have overwhelmed the government’s ability to respond.
But Republican opposition to the funding appeared to harden. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has supported Obama’s stalled quest to remake the nation’s immigration laws, said he could not support the allocation, which would be used to add more immigration judges, increase detention facilities, help care for the children and pay for programs in Central America to try to keep them from coming..
“I cannot vote for a provision which will then just perpetuate an unacceptable humanitarian crisis that’s taking place on our southern border,” McCain said on the Senate floor.
He was joined by fellow Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and Texas GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who took take turns blaming Obama’s policies for causing the border situation. They contended that his efforts to reduce deportations have contributed to rumors circulating in Central America that once here, migrant children will be allowed to stay.
“Amnesty is unfolding before our very eyes,” Cruz said.
McCain and other Republicans said the only way to stem the tide would be to deport the children more rapidly.
“They will do nothing … nothing that planeloads upon planeloads of children would do,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.
In the House, Speaker John Boehner was noncommittal about bringing the spending measure to a vote.
“If we don’t secure the border, nothing’s going to change. And if you look at the president’s request, it’s all more about continuing to deal with the problem,” Boehner told reporters.
Meanwhile immigration advocacy groups attacked the spending request from the left, saying it was overly focused on enforcement. A group of civil liberties organizations filed a lawsuit in Seattle against the Obama administration, arguing that the federal government is failing to provide the minors with legal representation.
Even some Democrats joined in the criticism, saying Obama should drop his resistance to visiting the border.
“Going out there and talking to people who live this day in and day out — that’s the perspective that’s missing,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz.
Asked about Obama’s decision not to go to the border, White House spokesman Josh Earnest noted that other administration officials have done so and have a detailed understanding of the situation.
“So the president is well aware of exactly what’s happening,” Earnest told reporters. “The president has sufficient visibility of the problem there to understand what kind of solutions are going to work best.”
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