No, Obama Didn’t Create The Migrant Children Crisis
The latest GOP reason to halt action on immigration reform: unaccompanied child refugees.
The post No, Obama Didn’t Create The Migrant Children Crisis appeared first on ThinkProgress.
Maria Eva Casco, left, and her son Christian Casco of El Salvador, sit at the Greyhound bus terminal in Phoenix.
CREDIT: AP
The number of unaccompanied children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border has spiked 90 percent since last year. Republicans are responding to the humanitarian situation by making it the latest excuse to halt efforts on immigration reform. While some Republicans are lining their campaign wallets using the crisis, others are trying to blame the President Obama for not enforcing current immigration laws.
House Republicans will hold a House Judiciary Committee hearing next week titled, “An Administration Made Disaster: The South Texas Border Surge of Unaccompanied Alien Minors” to drive home that point. In an op-ed published Thursday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said that Obama’s “broader refusal to uphold our immigration laws [has] created a powerful incentive for children to cross into the United States illegally.”
In early June, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) also argued in a press release that the President was “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.” As a result, Sessions said, “President Obama is responsible for this calamity.”
Most children are fleeing extreme violence and a fear of individual safety in Mexico and Central America’s northern triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. And there has been an uptick of these child refugees since 2009, long before either the Senate comprehensive immigration bill or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program (a presidential initiative which grants temporary legal presence to some undocumented immigrants) came into public existence.
After the Obama administration announced a cross-governmental agencies plan to deal with the situation, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) released a press release stating that the surge was “an administration-made crisis” due to Obama’s supposed lax border enforcement policies. Goodlatte said in early June, “Many of the Obama Administration’s policies… have led to a surge of minors arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Even House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) criticized the President’s “lax enforcement at Mexico’s borders,” in a strongly worded letter to Obama Friday, claiming Obama was giving a “free pass” to immigrants heading into the United States. He requested for the President to send the National Guard and asked the State Department to begin repatriation talks. But Boehner also insisted that, “once [unaccompanied children] reach U.S. soil, they will be able to stay here indefinitely.”
In fact, the current process of dealing with unaccompanied children from countries other than Mexico was set by the Bush administration, according to Dara Lind at Vox. Under the law, the Border Patrol agency is required to take in these children, screen and vaccinate them, then turn them over to the Department of Health of Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The ORR assigns children to shelters until the agency can identify sponsors and once children are placed with sponsors, their cases work their way through the immigration court. Earlier this month, Jonathan Ryan, an attorney with the immigration advocacy group RAICES, told ThinkProgress that the Bush administration “changed the treatment of how kids go through immigration court.” Ryan added that the law was a “recognition of the need to protect these kids and at the time, the need was the war that’s pushing kids out of Central America.”
These lawmakers may be drawing from a Border Patrol “survey” leaked to conservative media outlets and congressional members, which found that about 230 children and women from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador came to the United States for immigration reform. Yet the survey findings, which ThinkProgress also obtained, has massive gaps in its methodology and data results. The memo acknowledged that Border Patrol agents threw out any responses that did not fit with their “general consensus” for the main reasons to leave their countries. In many cases, children and women gave multiple reasons for entering the U.S., including an increase in gang-related violence in Central America. Other missing gaps include: Border Patrol agents are not trained to conduct surveys of people that they have just apprehended; the data set includes only answers given on one day, May 28th; and it’s unclear how many children were interviewed.
Other researchers have determined that immigration reform, or any U.S. legislation, is not behind the emigration. In a survey conducted by the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees, only one out of 104 El Salvadoran children mentioned immigration reform as a primary motivator for leaving. Another survey by Elizabeth Kennedy, a doctoral candidate at San Diego State University found that “in only one of 400-plus interviews did a child migrant ask about the DREAM Act and immigration reform. …Fifteen had heard that the U.S. system treated children differently than adults and wanted to know how. In all 15 cases, the child had received a threat to join the gang or be killed, and some had then been beat or raped when they refused to join.”
After children are placed with the ORR, they are put into immigration proceedings as the White House and DHS Sec. Johnson have long emphasized. The New York Times reported that the Obama administration has been responding to the crisis by accelerating the immigration adjudication process and deporting children as quickly as possible. The New York Times also found that the DHS has “expand[ed] the use of monitoring devices, such as electronic ankle bracelets, to keep track of migrants after they are released.” Even Hillary Clinton recently said to CNN that the children “should be sent back” to their home countries. Clinton added, “Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay. … We don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws, or we’ll encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”
Although the data is not limited to only children, the Department of Justice found that only 18 percent of non-detained immigrants fail to appear for their removal hearings.
Meanwhile, on Friday, the White House announced steps “to improve enforcement and partnering with our Central American counterparts in three key areas: combating gang violence and strengthening citizen security, spurring economic development, and improving capacity to receive and reintegrate returned families and children.” It will also provide $9.6 million for Central American governments to help repatriated citizens, establish a $40-million U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program over 5 years to improve citizen security in Guatemala, launch a $25-million Crime and Violence Prevention USAID program in El Salvador, and provide $18.5 million to support community policing and law enforcement efforts in Honduras. The White House press release also stated that it will collaborate on “campaigns to help potential migrants understand the significant danger of relying on human smuggling networks and to reinforce that recently arriving children and individuals are not eligible for programs like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, commonly called DACA, and earned citizenship provisions in comprehensive immigration reform currently under consideration in the Congress.”
Republicans has long justified inaction on immigration reform based on a revolving list of excuses, including citing the President ignoring the law in order to secure the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, because HealthCare.gov was broken, that the Boston Marathon bomber was an immigrant, and Obama’s refusal to negotiate during the shutdown made it unrealistic to pass immigration reform.
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Activists Call For UN Intervention As Government Moves To Shut Off Water For Detroit’s Broke Residents
Water rates have skyrocketed as Detroit residents’ ability to pay has fallen. The city has cut off water to thousands as a result.
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CREDIT: Shutterstock
As the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department moves to shut off water to thousands of residents who are delinquent on their bills, a coalition of activists is appealing to the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to intervene on behalf of the bankrupt city’s most vulnerable citizens.
Their report, filed Wednesday with the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, alleges that the DWSD crackdown is part of an effort “to sweeten the pot for a private investor” to take over the city’s heavily-indebted water and sewer system as part of Detroit’s broader bankruptcy proceedings.
One of the activist groups behind the report, the Detroit People’s Water Board, notes that city residents have seen water rates more than double over the past decade at the same time that the city’s poverty rate rose to nearly 40 percent, putting the cost of basic running water beyond reach for tens of thousands of households. Earlier this week, city lawmakers voted to raise water rates by a further 8.7 percent.
Almost exactly 50 percent of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s 323,900 total accounts were delinquent as of March, according to the Detroit News (via Nexis), with a combined $175 million in unpaid water bills outstanding. The department announced at that time that it would begin an aggressive campaign of water shutoffs, and a DWSD spokesman said that it has shut off water to nearly 7,000 separate clients since the beginning of April. DWSD mailed warnings about the shutoffs in March, but the People’s Water Board report says that some residents it interviewed either never received a warning notice or had their water shut off before the payment deadline printed in the notices had passed.
One key piece of the activists’ complaint has to do with allegedly disparate treatment of residential and commercial clients by the DWSD. The People’s Water Board claims that delinquent business entities “have not been targeted in the same way as residential users,” a claim the department strongly disputes.
“There are no sacred cows. We aren’t discriminating in terms of individuals or businesses,” DWSD spokesman Bill Johnson said in an interview. “Last month we shut off about 3,600 accounts, both businesses and residential. Everybody is getting cut off who is $150 or 60 days in arrears. That is our policy and we’re ramping up our enforcement of that policy.”
The department has not yet had time to break out the data on water shutoffs by client category, Johnson said, but he hopes to be able to report exact figures on the number of business clients who have lost water access soon.
The DWSD’s roughly $5 billion in debts have turned out to be the most difficult piece of Detroit’s bankruptcy, after initially seeming to be on track for a rapid resolution. Neighboring counties have balked at absorbing the city system into a regional water and sewer authority, and subsequent plans to privatize the city’s water services have been criticized as too rapid, too costly, and too damaging to residents’ quality of life. The system’s massive backlog of delinquent bills makes it harder to convince anyone, whether private company or public authority, to shoulder the DWSD’s obligations. But if the water shutoffs were aimed at making the department look like a shinier prize in bankruptcy negotiations, they would likely be targeted at corporate clients directly, for the same reason that Depression-era gangsters robbed banks: that’s where the money is.
While the vast majority of the nearly 165,000 delinquent accounts reported in March are residential clients, those private households owe much smaller amounts than the commercial and industrial clients who are delinquent on their DWSD bills. Fewer than 11,000 delinquent accounts relate to commercial or industrial clients. But those delinquencies average more than $7,700 per business, according to the numbers published in the Detroit News in March, compared to an average debt of less than $600 per residential delinquency. Non-residential clients account for almost half of what DWSD is owed despite being less than 7 percent of total delinquencies, according to the March figures. The People’s Water Board says that it obtained a document showing similar figures, but did not respond to a request for the document by press time.
It is not clear what action the activists seek from the UN Human Rights Commission. A request for comment from the UN official to whom the report was submitted went unanswered.
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