Bloomberg
By Lauren Etter and Jennifer Oldham
February 16, 2016
Amid
a resurgence in the pace of unaccompanied migrant children crossing the
U.S. border, President Barack Obama is facing angry opposition as he
searches for places to
house them temporarily.
The
administration is attempting to assemble a network of shelters on
military bases and other federal facilities to lodge thousands of
children awaiting immigration proceedings
after fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. That’s
hit a nerve in communities, some in crucial presidential swing states
such as Colorado and Florida, where potential facilities were announced
without community input and later scrapped.
“I
don’t want a military base to be an orphanage,” said Veronica Kemeny,
president of the Republican Veterans of Florida, who lives in Panama
City near an Air Force Base
that was named as a potential shelter.
“I don’t want a military base to be an orphanage.”
Veronica Kemeny
Since
Oct. 1, 20,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended at the U.S.
border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s
compared with nearly 70,000
in all of 2014 when the humanitarian crisis was at its worst. The
influx that year stunned unprepared officials, who crammed children into
school gymnasiums and on concrete floors of Border Patrol stations.
The
recent surge of unaccompanied minors is the latest controversy
surrounding Obama’s immigration policies that have angered Democrats and
Republicans and alienated Hispanics,
a critical voting bloc 27 million strong. There’s a push in Congress to
see the children deported, a position that follows Republican
presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s call to build a border wall to
keep out undocumented immigrants. A separate bill
sponsored by Texas Representative John Carter, also a Republican, would
prohibit them from being kept at military installations.
“They’re
politicizing the kids,” said Representative Luis Gutiérrez, a Democrat
from Illinois. “They’re saying, ‘Let’s talk about what we feel like are
issues that are
going to encourage Republicans to come out to vote in the upcoming
election.”’
Political Cost
Democrat
Hillary Clinton distanced herself from Obama after he ordered raids
targeting undocumented Central Americans. Obama has formally deported
more people than any
other U.S. president. A congressional investigation found that the
federal government had delivered some unaccompanied children into the
hands of human traffickers amid a rush to process them.
“We
want the Democrats to realize that there’s a political cost to some of
these Obama actions,” said Lynn Tramonte, deputy director at America’s
Voice, a Washington immigration
reform group. “Democrats cannot afford to leave Latino votes on the
table.”
Under
a 2008 law, unaccompanied children from countries other than Mexico and
Canada are granted access to the U.S. pending their asylum claim. In
December, Health and
Human Services, which cares for them until they can be placed with
relatives, announced it would establish temporary shelters to avoid a
crisis like the one two years ago. The first such facilities were to
include a total of 2,500 beds at a federal building
near Denver, a Job Corps site in Homestead, Florida, and an Air Force
base outside Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Ten
additional military bases were placed under review by the government.
Six were dropped as potential sites last week, leaving under
consideration bases in Illinois,
Pennsylvania, Alabama and California, according to Defense Department
spokesman Tom Crosson.
“As
a nation, we must secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws
consistent with our priorities,” said White House spokesman Peter
Boogaard. “At all times, we
endeavor to do this consistent with American values, and basic
principles of decency, fairness, and humanity.”
Denver Complex
In
Colorado, a political prize that Obama visited 11 times in 2012,
residents and elected officials demanded answers from the Health and
Human Services Department about
how the government planned to convert and manage parts of a federal
complex outside Denver to shelter as many as 1,000 migrant children by
April.
More
than 3,000 people joined an hour-long call Jan. 19 with federal
officials to discuss the plan. Residents asked who would pay for the
shelter, how long it would remain,
where children would be placed and how the federal government would
ensure they didn’t present a security risk.
“I
respect the fact that the children have to go somewhere,” said Mike
Coffman, a Republican congressman from Aurora, Colorado. “The
fundamental problem to me is the Obama
administration has brought this problem on themselves.”
Last
week, HHS abandoned plans to use the Denver campus, saying architects
and engineers concluded that necessary renovations would be too
expensive and time consuming.
Democratic
U.S. Representative Ed Perlmutter, who represents the area, said in a
news release that he wished the government would have done a more
thorough review of the
site before notifying the public.
“After
personally visiting the site, it quickly became evident that setting up
a facility of this magnitude was going to be a monumental undertaking,”
Perlmutter said.
Unintended Consequences
In
Ohio, Republican Governor and presidential candidate John Kasich in
December denied requests by the Obama administration to use the state’s
National Guard facilities
to house children. The governor has been an outspoken critic of the
government’s handling of the children since last year after a federal
grand jury indicted a group of people for trafficking Guatemalan
children into slave-labor conditions on an Ohio egg farm.
“The
federal government has attempted to increase capacity and push people
through the system too quickly, causing unintended consequences,” said
Ohio adjutant general
Mark Bartman in an e-mail declining the administration’s request. “The
Governor and I have concerns about the federal government’s ability to
handle the increased number.”
In
Florida, before it was crossed it off the list last week, Obama’s plan
to house children at Tyndall Air Force Base outside Panama City had
turned into a political fight
in a heated congressional race featuring two Republicans trying to
unseat a Democratic incumbent.
In
Alabama, U.S. Representative Martha Roby, a Republican whose seat is
being challenged, has vowed to fight the use of an Air Force Base in her
district.
“It
is entirely inappropriate to house illegal immigrants at this or other
active military installations,” Roby said in a January letter to the
Obama administration. The
military’s “mission is challenging enough without the added
responsibility of housing, feeding and securing detainees.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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