Kids a deluge, panel told

Officials pitch Obama plan for border crisis

Texas Gov. Rick Perry greets President Barack Obama as he arrives Wednesday at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport for a meeting with Texas officials on the immigration crisis.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry greets President Barack Obama as he arrives Wednesday at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport for a meeting with Texas officials on the immigration crisis.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

WASHINGTON -- Tens of thousands of children streaming from chaotic Central American nations to the U.S. border have overwhelmed the government's ability to respond, senior Obama administration officials testified Wednesday as they urged senators to agree to the president's emergency spending request for the crisis.

But as President Barack Obama traveled to Texas, Republican opposition hardened to his $3.7 billion request. At the same time, some Democrats began to join GOP demands for him to visit the U.S.-Mexican border -- calls the White House continued to reject.

Obama discussed the immigration situation with Texas leaders, including Republican Gov. Rick Perry, on Wednesday -- but in Dallas, not at the border.

The president said after the meeting that he was open to all of Perry's suggestions for addressing the wave of unaccompanied youths crossing the border from Mexico, urging Congress to approve his request for more funding so that those and other ideas can be put in place.

Obama said he was willing to consider dispatching National Guard troops to the border, as Perry suggested, but warned that it would only be a temporary solution. He said that if Perry and other Republicans want the problem to be fixed in the longer term, they should press Congress to move quickly to fund his request.

"There's nothing the governor indicated that he'd like to see that I have a philosophical objection to," Obama said after the meeting.

The president said Perry raised four areas of concern, dealing with the number of Border Patrol agents, the positioning of those agents, the different policies for illegal aliens traveling from Mexico versus Central America and the functioning of the U.S. immigrant judicial system.

Obama said that if Congress passes the emergency funding request, the government will have to resources to take some of the steps Perry recommended. He said the problem is fixable if lawmakers are interested in solving it, but that if the preference is for politics, it won't be solved.

In Washington, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has supported Obama's stalled quest to remake the nation's immigration laws, said he could not support the president's spending request as it was outlined Tuesday.

"I cannot vote for a provision which will then just perpetuate an unacceptable humanitarian crisis that's taking place on our southern border," McCain said on the Senate floor, where he was joined by fellow Arizonan Jeff Flake, a Republican, and Texas Republicans John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.

They took take turns blaming Obama's policies for causing the border situation, contending that his efforts to relax some deportations have contributed to rumors circulating in Central America that once in the U.S., migrant children will be allowed to stay.

"Amnesty is unfolding before our very eyes," Cruz said.

New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, a Democrat, accused Republicans of misleading the public by saying Obama's policies caused the increased migration.

"My Republican colleagues make it sound as if parents are willingly choosing to risk their children's lives," said Menendez, calling the children "refugees" who are fleeing violence and extreme poverty at home.

In public comments in the House, Speaker John Boehner was noncommittal about bringing the spending measure to a vote.

"If we don't secure the border, nothing's going to change. And if you look at the president's request, it's all more about continuing to deal with the problem," Boehner said.

He later told Republicans in a closed meeting that he wants to deal with the issue this month, said party aides familiar with the talks.

Meanwhile, some Democrats joined Republicans in saying Obama would be well-advised to visit the border and see the situation for himself.

"Going out there and talking to people who live this day in and day out -- that's the perspective that's missing," said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz.

Other Democrats said they have questions about Obama's plans before declaring their support for the funding request.

Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri questioned how U.S. contracts in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are being managed to address conditions, including gang activity, that the administration says are driving the children north.

"We don't have any real indicators that the money we are spending down there" is working, McCaskill said. "Maybe what we're doing is not working very well."

'sudden influxes'

The head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Gil Kerlikowske, told senators in Washington on Wednesday that the number of unaccompanied Central American youths picked up since October now stands at 57,000, up from 52,000 in mid-June, and more than double what it was at the same time last year.

The situation, Kerlikowske said, "is difficult and distressing on a lot of levels."

"We have not been what I would say successful yet" in ensuring that the children are processed by the Border Patrol as quickly as required, said Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate as he testified alongside Kerlikowske before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

"The children continue to come across the border. It's a very fluid situation," Fugate said. "Although we have made progress, that progress is oftentimes disrupted when we see sudden influxes of kids coming in faster than we can discharge them, and we back up."

Juan Osuna, director of the executive office of immigration review at the Department of Justice, said, "We are facing the largest caseload that the agency has ever seen."

Osuna said deportation cases involving families and unaccompanied children would be moved to the top of court dockets. That means lower-priority cases will take even longer to wend through a system where there's a backlog of more than 360,000 pending deportation cases.

Obama's emergency-spending request would add more judges, increase detention facilities, help care for the children and pay for programs in Central America to try to keep them from coming.

McCain and other Republicans dismissed those measures as inadequate, saying the only way to stem the tide would be to deport the children more rapidly.

The Obama administration says it wants more flexibility to turn the children around more quickly, since current law requires minors from countries other than Mexico or Canada to go through the court system in what is often a lengthy process. But immigration advocates and some Democrats are balking at that idea, arguing that it would jeopardize the children's legal protections and put them at risk.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued the U.S. government Wednesday, saying the children haven't been provided with lawyers for deportation hearings in violation of the Constitution and immigration law.

In a complaint filed in Seattle, the groups said the government is denying the children due process of law and the "full and fair hearing" before immigration judges required by the federal Immigration and Nationality Act.

The law doesn't require the government to provide attorneys at the hearings, said Ahilan Arulanantham, an ACLU attorney in Los Angeles. The organizations are seeking a court order to change that.

The Justice Department's proposals to beef up legal resources for immigrants fall short of ensuring each child has a lawyer present at removal proceedings, he said. Law firms' free legal services help only a small fraction of the children who need legal representation, the ACLU said.

"The government provides an attorney in every case for itself," Arulanantham said.

Besides the ACLU, the children are represented by the American Immigration Council, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Public Counsel and the law firm K&L Gates LLP, the Immigration Council said in a statement.

"Deportation carries serious consequences for children, whether it is return to a country they fled because of violence and persecution or being separated from their homes and families," Beth Werlin, deputy legal director for the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group with offices in Washington, D.C., said in the statement.

Legal representation is "a basic protection most would assume is required whenever someone's liberty is at stake," she said.

The Justice Department said Wednesday in a statement that the government will hire more immigration judges and expand legal assistance to people in removal proceedings. Nicole Navas, a department spokesman, said the agency is reviewing the lawsuit.

Information for this article was contributed by Erica Werner, Alicia A. Caldwell, Julie Pace, Jim Kuhnhenn and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press and by Karen Gullo, Heidi Przybyla, Erik Wasson, Michael C. Bender, James Rowley and Derek Wallbank of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 07/10/2014