Central American Leaders to Meet Obama on Migrants

New York Times

By Michael D. Shear

July 18, 2014

 Central American Leaders to Meet Obama on Migrants

WASHINGTON — President Obama has summoned the presidents of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to the White House next week in an effort to demonstrate high-level cooperation to stanch the flow of migrant children from Central America through Mexico and into the United States.

The White House said late Friday that Mr. Obama will meet with the three leaders next Friday, a high-profile gathering that comes as the administration struggles to win approval in Congress for $3.7 billion to expand border security, add immigration judges and care for the 57,000 unaccompanied children who have arrived since last fall.

White House officials on Friday said that there is some evidence that the flood of child migrants across the border may be receding. The average number of children crossing the border declined to about 120 per day at the beginning of this week from 283 per day in mid-June, officials said.

But officials concede that they do not know if that trend will continue. And the surge of Central American migrants, including the children, has become a humanitarian border crisis and a political headache for the president, who intends to exert his executive authority later this summer to reduce deportations of illegal immigrants already in this country.

Mr. Obama’s critics have seized on the new border crisis as evidence of the administration’s failure to secure the southern border with Mexico. But the roots of the new surge in migration begin farther south, in the three violence-wracked countries of Central America whose leaders will be in Washington next week.

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Friday that the three leaders will discuss ways to “promote safe, legal and orderly migration between our countries in a spirit of shared responsibility, including with respect to the return of family units, which began this week for all three countries.”

That discussion, which is likely to take place in the Oval Office, could be a tricky one for the president, who has vowed that migrants from Central America and their children who do not have legitimate humanitarian claims should be processed quickly and sent back to their home countries.

In the past, the three presidents, Otto Pérez Molina of Guatemala, Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras and Salvador Sánchez Cerén of El Salvador, have pledged their support for efforts to stem the flow of migrants north from their countries. In conversations between the three presidents and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. earlier this month, the three Central American presidents said they would work in partnership with the United States to secure their own borders.

But even as Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden seek help from the Central American presidents, they are under pressure from members of the Democratic Party in the United States not to undermine the rights that children have to seek asylum. In a meeting this week, Hispanic lawmakers urged the president not to give in on that principle.

After that meeting, several lawmakers said that Mr. Obama promised not to undermine the migrant children’s basic rights to due process. But White House officials have said they remain committed to persuading Congress to provide the secretary of homeland security new flexibility to allow the cases to be processed faster.

Lawmakers in the United States are set to leave soon on their summer recess, and it remains unclear whether the divided Congress will act on Mr. Obama’s requests.

Regardless, a White House official said Friday that Mr. Obama would tell the Central American presidents that the migrant crisis could not be solved without the help of the children’s home countries.

“We want to make sure that we have buy-in from the leaders of the Central American countries,” said a White House official, who spoke on background to discuss planning for the meeting.

Aides said the talks were arranged in the last 10 days, as the crisis drew international attention and protests erupted in several cities where busloads of children were arriving.

Mr. Biden traveled to Central America to meet with the three presidents in June, but officials said that Mr. Obama decided that the border issue was too complicated and too important to leave to long-distance diplomacy. The meeting in Washington, they said, was intended in part to pressure Congress to pass the funding and legal changes that the president wants.

“A big part of this is sending a message to Congress that the president is going to work with Central American countries to get something done here,” the White House official said. “Congress should take note of the fact that the president is very serious about this issue.”

Officials said they were encouraged by the news that the number of children arriving in the United States appeared to be dropping. According to the White House, 1,985 unaccompanied children crossed the border from June 22 through 28. That number dropped to 977 two weeks later, from July 6 through 12, and was 362 in the three days of July 13 through 15.

“We believe the downward trend can be attributed to a number of factors, to include steps taken by the president to address the issue and the weather-related declines we’ve seen during the same time period in past years,” said Shawn Turner, a White House spokesman. “We know that they are not necessarily due to any single factor.”

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