Obama cites border influx, asks for funds

Letter to lawmakers seeks $3.7 billion for U.S. ‘surge’

President Barack Obama will meet with Texas Gov. Rick Perry on the influx of illegal aliens from Central America.
President Barack Obama will meet with Texas Gov. Rick Perry on the influx of illegal aliens from Central America.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama asked Congress for an emergency $3.7 billion to contain the surge of illegal aliens from Central America -- many of them unaccompanied children -- crossing into the U.S. through Mexico.

The money would increase detainment and court capacity to speed deportation decisions while expanding law enforcement efforts and prosecution of the criminal networks that smuggle people over the border. The administration also would improve temporary housing and care for the aliens while their cases are judged.

More than 52,000 unaccompanied children were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border from Oct. 1 through June 15, about double the total in a similar period a year earlier, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reported.

The funds "would support a sustained border security surge," Obama wrote in a letter Tuesday to House Speaker John Boehner.

photo

AP

Immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally stand in line for tickets at the bus station after they were released from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in McAllen, Texas, in this June 20 photo.

The request was made as Obama prepared to leave Washington later Tuesday to help Democrats raise money for the midterm elections. Stops were planned for Denver, Dallas and Austin, Texas.

In Dallas today, Obama will meet with Texas Gov. Rick Perry as part of a discussion with religious leaders and state and local officials on stemming the influx of foreigners. Obama has no plans to visit the border region during the trip.

"The president is very aware of the situation that exists on the southwest border," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday. He cited administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who have visited the border and facilities housing detained children.

Perry, a potential Republican nominee for president in 2016, has sparred with Obama over the Central American aliens entering the U.S. at the Texas border. "I don't believe he particularly cares whether or not the border of the United States is secure," Perry said Sunday on ABC's This Week.

In a letter Perry sent to the White House on Monday, he rejected "a quick handshake on the tarmac" during Obama's Texas trip but offered to meet with Obama "at any time" for a "substantive meeting to discuss this critical issue."

Obama's $3.7 billion funding request covers four areas: deterrence, enforcement, foreign assistance and capacity. Capacity refers to paying for the detention, care and transportation of children already in the U.S.

The supplemental appropriation request also will include $615 million for the Agriculture Department for wildfire suppression.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the Appropriations Committee will consider the measure Thursday and that he wants a full Senate vote before lawmakers' leave Washington for their August break.

White House officials said the emergency funding would support what they called an "all of government" response to the immigration crisis. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to offer specifics about how many more children would be returned to their countries with the additional funding, or how much faster the children would be processed through the legal system.

"The bottom line here is the number of kids removed is not large enough," one White House official said, adding that "the process, frankly, is much too long."

Some Senate Democrats voiced skepticism about other changes the White House has said it wants that would send the minors back to Central America more quickly, partly by limiting their existing rights to court hearings.

"Everybody's very concerned. I'm one of them," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. "I just want to make sure that at the end of the day we're being fair, humane and doing this in an orderly way."

Meanwhile, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said the president is "asking for a blank check in essence, $3.7 billion, but no reform."

Republican senators said they'll seek spending cuts to pay for a funding request, while the administration is seeking to treat the request as emergency spending, which would add to the deficit.

"There is an urgent situation," Earnest said Tuesday.

Almost half of the $3.7 billion for the immigration effort -- $1.8 billion -- would go to the Department of Health and Human Services to provide care for unaccompanied children already in the U.S. That provision has drawn contention from some congressional Republicans who say the president hasn't been aggressive enough about border security or deportations.

Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a statement Tuesday that Obama's plan doesn't do enough to seal the border.

"The speaker still supports deploying the National Guard to provide humanitarian support in the affected areas -- which this proposal does not address," according to the statement.

A White House fact sheet said that apprehension rates at the southwest U.S. border are "near historic lows" even as apprehensions of unaccompanied minors have swelled.

The Department of Homeland Security would use $1.1 billion to increase detention space for children and adults that meets "legal and humanitarian standards" and to ensure "protection of asylum seekers and refugees while enabling the prompt removal of individuals who do not qualify for asylum" or other relief.

The supplemental request follows visits in recent weeks by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry to meet with leaders from countries where the child immigration trend is most acute -- El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.

The fact sheet said the administration is committing resources to boost those countries' capacity to "receive and reintegrate returned individuals and address the underlying security and economic issues that cause migration."

Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said his panel will review the request and "make our own determination on how to appropriately and wisely use taxpayer resources."

"Plainly, the situation for many of these unaccompanied children is extremely dire, and the United States has both a security and a moral obligation to help," Rogers said in an emailed statement.

push for refugee status

Meanwhile, United Nations officials are pushing for many of the Central Americans fleeing to the U.S. to be treated as refugees displaced by armed conflict, a designation meant to increase pressure on the United States and Mexico to accept tens of thousands of people currently ineligible for asylum.

Officials with the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said they hope to see movement toward a regional agreement on that status Thursday when migration and interior department representatives from the U.S., Mexico, and Central America meet in Nicaragua. The group will discuss updating a 30-year-old declaration regarding the obligations that nations have to aid refugees.

While such a resolution would lack any legal weight, the agency said it believes "the U.S. and Mexico should recognize that this is a refugee situation, which implies that they shouldn't be automatically sent to their home countries but rather receive international protection."

Most of the people widely considered to be refugees by the international community are fleeing more traditional political or ethnic conflicts like those in Syria or Sudan. Central Americans would be among the first to be considered refugees because they are fleeing violence and extortion at the hands of criminal gangs.

Central America's Northern Triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras has become one of the most violent regions on Earth in recent years, with large areas of all three countries under the control of drug traffickers and street gangs who rob, rape and extort ordinary citizens with impunity.

Honduras, a primary transit point for U.S.-bound cocaine, has the world's highest homicide rate for a nation that is not at war. Hondurans who are used to hiding indoors at night have been terrorized anew in recent months by a wave of attacks against churches, schools and buses. In addition, Honduran police routinely are accused of civil-rights violations.

During a recent visit to the U.S., Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez said people from his country were "displaced by war" and called on the United States to acknowledge that.

Violence by criminal organizations spread after members of California street gangs were deported to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, where they overwhelmed weak and corrupt police forces.

In El Salvador, the end of a truce between street gangs has led to a steep rise in homicides this year.

Salvadorans heading north through Mexico who were interviewed by The Associated Press last month said there also was fear of the "Sombra Negra," or "Black Shadow" -- groups of masked men in civilian clothes who are believed to be responsible for extrajudicial killings of teens in gang-controlled neighborhoods. The Salvadoran government denies any involvement in death squads but said it is investigating the reports.

In El Salvador, at least 135,000 people, or 2.1 percent of the population, have been forced to leave their homes, the vast majority because of gang extortion and violence, according to U.N. figures. That's more than twice the percentage displaced by Colombia's civil war, the U.N. said.

Even though a refugee designation would not be legally binding on the countries that sign it, advocates said it would help create international consensus to help those fleeing their homes. Those actions could include emergency aid and social services for internally displaced people inside Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Information for this article was contributed by Roger Runningen, Derek Wallbank, Margaret Talev, Heidi Przybyla, Kathleen Hunter, James Rowley, Erik Wasson and Darrell Preston of Bloomberg News; by Alberto Arce, Michael Weissenstein, Marcos Aleman, Julie Pace, Erica Werner, Jim Kuhnhenn, David Espo and Will Weissert of The Associated Press; and by Michael D. Shear of The New York Times.

A Section on 07/09/2014

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