Los Angeles Times:
By Brian Bennett
July 5, 2014
President
Obama and his aides have repeatedly sought to dispel the rumors driving
thousands of children and teens from Central America to cross the U.S.
border each month
with the expectation they will be given a permiso and allowed to stay.
But under the Obama administration, those reports have proved increasingly true.
The
number of immigrants under 18 who were deported or turned away at ports
of entry fell from 8,143 in 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush
administration, to 1,669
last year, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data
released under a Freedom of Information Act request.
Similarly,
about 600 minors were ordered deported each year from nonborder states a
decade ago. Ninety-five were deported last year, records show, even as a
flood of unaccompanied
minors from Central America — five times more than two years earlier —
began pouring across the Southwest border.
Under-18 immigrants deported by ICE
The
previously unavailable deportation data are likely to fuel the
political debate over whether Obama administration policies are partly
responsible for the 52,000 children
and teens who have surrendered to or been caught by Border Patrol
agents since last October, spurring fresh concerns about U.S. border
security and immigration law.
Most
of the minors are being held in Border Patrol stations in Texas and
Arizona, and in emergency facilities set up by the Department of Health
and Human Services on
military bases and other sites. About 11,000, however, were from Mexico
and were swiftly bused back across the border, as the law allows.
Obama
administration officials deny that lenient policies — including a 2012 program that allowed immigrants who had entered the country illegally as minors before June 2007 to apply for deportation deferrals — have encouraged the sudden
surge.
They
instead blame a 2008 law signed by Bush that made it nearly impossible
to repatriate unaccompanied minors to Central America without letting
them appear before an
immigration judge.
A
mounting backlog in immigration courts since then has allowed most
Central American minors to stay for years while their cases wend their
way through the legal system.
Once they are assigned to social workers, as the law requires, the
overwhelming majority are sent to live with their parents or relatives
in the United States, officials said.
Organized
crime groups in Central America have exploited the slow U.S. legal
process and the compassion shown to children in apparent crisis,
according to David Leopold,
an immigration attorney in Cleveland.
He
said smugglers, who may charge a family up to $12,000 to deliver a
child to the border, often tell them exactly what to say to American
officials.
"The cartels have figured out where the hole is," he said.
About
60 criminal investigators have been sent to San Antonio and Houston to
try to infiltrate these networks and prosecute the smugglers who bring
the children into the
United States, officials said.
Obama
last week asked Congress to change the 2008 law to give the head of
Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, greater discretion to send children back
to Guatemala, El Salvador
and Honduras more quickly.
But
Obama is likely to face stiff opposition from fellow Democrats, who
have vowed to block narrow changes to immigration laws. Senate Democrats
overwhelmingly backed
a comprehensive immigration bill last summer only to see the measure
die in the GOP-led House.
"He can't get it passed," a senior Democratic staffer in the Senate said of Obama's request.
As
it now stands, the 2008 law guarantees unaccompanied minors from those
countries access to a federal asylum officer and a chance to tell a U.S.
judge that they were
victims of a crime or face abuse or sexual trafficking if they are sent
home. If the claim is deemed credible, judges may grant a waiver from
immediate deportation.
"Word
of mouth gets back, and now people are calling and saying, 'This is
what I said'" in court, said a senior U.S. law enforcement official, who
was not authorized to
speak on the record. "Whether it is true or not, the perception is that
they are successfully entering the United States.... That is what is
driving up the landings."
The
increase has been dramatic. For most of the last decade, U.S. agents
apprehended fewer than 4,000 unaccompanied children from El Salvador,
Guatemala and Honduras
each year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures.
The
total jumped to 10,146 in fiscal year 2012. It doubled to 20,805 last
fiscal year. It nearly doubled again, to 39,133, between last October
and June 15 this year.
The
number of unaccompanied Mexican minors apprehended dropped for several
years, but rose from 13,974 in 2012 to 17,240 last year. Most are bused
back, although some
are permitted to seek asylum.
The
deportation data released to The Times do not distinguish between
children who entered the U.S. with a parent and those who came alone and
are less likely to be sent
back. Children who arrived alone but turned 18 during deportation
proceedings are counted as adults.
The
figures also don't include Mexican children who were turned back at the
border by Border Patrol agents, as the law allows in their cases.
The data also shows more minors are sent home to Guatemala than to El Salvador or Honduras.
Rural
Guatemala is desperately poor, but U.S. law does not recognize poverty
as an acceptable reason to avoid deportation. Judges tend to be willing
to protect children
from specific threats of violence, however, and Honduras and El
Salvador suffer some of the world's highest peacetime murder rates.
When
Congress returns from the holiday weekend on Monday, the Obama
administration will ask lawmakers to appropriate more than $2 billion to
cover the mounting costs of
the crisis, including more staff for border stations, more detention
facilities and more social workers.
In
the meantime, extra asylum officers, immigration judges and prosecutors
have been rushed to the border to help conduct initial interviews and
start deportation proceedings.
Border
Patrol agents in California have begun using video links to interview
children in Texas, to speed up the process of sending them home or
handing them over to social
service officials.
The
sudden surge has surprised officials because illegal immigration has
fallen sharply overall. Experts attribute the drop to fewer job
opportunities in the U.S. and
to the doubling in size of the Border Patrol since 2004, which has made
the crossing more dangerous and expensive.
Speaking
in the Rose Garden last week, Obama said he was sending a "clear
message" to parents in Central America not to send their children north
in hopes of being allowed
into America.
"The
journey is unbelievably dangerous for these kids," Obama said. "The
children who are fortunate enough to survive it will be taken care of
while they go through the
legal process, but in most cases that process will lead to them being
sent back home."
But
that isn't always the case. The 2008 law signed by Bush expanded legal
protections for young migrants. The changes were intended to prevent
immigration officials from
inadvertently sending them back to pimps and drug violence.
The
law, for example, expanded the ability of children who were abused or
abandoned to be granted "special immigrant juvenile status" to stay in
the country, and to eventually
apply for lawful permanent residency.
Called
the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization
Act, the 2008 law was named for the English abolitionist who championed
the bill in Parliament
that ended the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807.
The
U.S. law, which sought to crack down on modern-day slavery and the
trafficking of children, passed easily by a voice vote in Congress with
broad support from both
parties. Bush signed it shortly before he left office in January 2009.
Former
U.S. Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Valley Village), who served from 1983 to
2013, was one of the sponsors of the 2008 law, and defended it this week
as necessary to
protect children. He blamed the violence in parts of Central America
for the influx of children, and said he wasn't sure whether the law
needed to be changed.
"What
do you do with the ones that come from Central America? Do you load
them all on a plane and see who comes and meets them at the airport?"
Berman asked in a telephone
interview.
He
said the authors of the law did not foresee that children and teens
would flood the border and overwhelm emergency shelters and child-care
facilities, or that immigration
courts would clog so quickly.
"Obviously this particular result was not anticipated," Berman said.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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