Ted Cruz Won’t Support Funding For Border Crisis Unless Obama Deports DREAMers
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) will likely refuse to support emergency funding to deal with the border migrant crisis unless the Obama administration ends a 2012 presidential initiative that granted temporary deportation reprieve and legal presence to more than 550,000 undocumented youths.
About 90,000 migrant children — mostly from the Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala — are expected to cross the border through the end of the 2014 fiscal year. Earlier in the month, Obama requested Congress to approve a $3.7 billion emergency funding package that would improve border security, provide housing facilities for children while they’re in custody, and speed up the deportation proceedings.
Interviews with some migrant children show that many kids are not coming to the country because they believe that they will receive some form of immigration benefit. A recent U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency infographic that shows where about 35,000 child migrants apprehended between October 1 and May 14, 2014 found that “many Guatemalan children come from rural areas, indicating that they are probably seeking economic opportunities in the US. Salvadoran and Honduran children, on the other hand, come from extremely violent regions where they probably perceive the risk of traveling alone to the US preferable to remaining at home.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) agency found that of 404 children who left Latin America, at least 58 percent of the children cited “international protection needs,” as in they were seeking protection from the international community because their home governments could no longer protect them. A 2012 Vera Institute report found that at least 40 percent of apprehended children are eligible for some form of legal relief from removal. And a Center for American Progress analysis also found that violence is the primary factor during the border surge.
Republican lawmakers like Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) have made it political fodder to blame the Obama administration for being “personally responsible” for “incentivizing” unaccompanied children with the promise of “citizenship for anyone in the world who arrives illegally in the country by a certain age.” But the uptick of child refugees has been ongoing since 2009, long before either the Senate comprehensive immigration bill or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program came into public awareness.
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http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2014/07/17/3461160/ted-cruz-border-funding-daca/
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Problem solved.
