Steve Neavling

A Border Patrol agent claims that gang members from Central America are being released into the U.S., Fox News reports.

Agent Chris Cabrera said the federal government is releasing gang members if they have family members in the U.S.

“If they have family in the United States, they’ll release them to the family, even if they’re admitted gang members,” Cabrera explained to Fox News. “We’ve had a couple that had admitted to murders in their home country. They were 17 years old, 16 years old, and the United States government thought it fit to release them to their parents here in the United States.

“Even if he’s a confirmed gang member, a confirmed criminal even by self-admission, we for some reason don’t send them back to their home country, we release them into our country.”

Cabrera blames the release on a “loophole.”

“They found a loophole with the unaccompanied women and children,” Cabrera told Fox News. “We don’t have anywhere to house these women and children and if the child has no family back in his home country, or claims he has no family back in his home country, we have to release him to a parent who is here.”

The crippling influx of migrant children escaping violence in Central America is a “side issue” to tackling the wave of crime from undocumented immigrants, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Sunday.

While most politicians in Washington expressed concerns about the 62,000 unaccompanied minors crossing the border, Perry said he is “substantially more concerned about” the criminals coming into the state.

“That’s the real issue here, and one that all too often gets deflected by the conversation about unaccompanied minor children,” Perry said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

Perry said last week that he plans to deploy up to 1,000 National Guard troops to “combat” crime.

“We’ll continue to do what we have to do to keep our citizens safe,” he said.

Steve Neavling

The Obama administration is going explore the need for deploying National Guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border, the Washington Post reports. The administration has dispatched a team of military and national security officials to examine whether the Rio Grande Valley would benefit from a military “temporary assist.”

Despite objections from Democrats, Texas Gov. Rick Perry decided earlier this week to send 1,000 of his state’s National Guard troops to the border over the next month.

“The assessment team will review support options that increase U.S. Customs and Border Protection capacity to conduct enforcement and processing activities and to enable DHS to implement a surge plan that addresses spikes in the influx of UACs [unaccompanied alien children]/migrants along the Southwest Border,” a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

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Tex. Gov. Rick Perry/official photo

Gov. Rick Perry urged President Obama to deploy 1,000 National Guard troops to southern Texas in a show of force designed to dissuade more Central Americans from crossing the Mexican border the American-Statesman reports.

Perry said the solution should not be spending an additional $3.7 billion in taxes to address the crisis.

“Pick up the phone, be a leader, make a difference,” Perry said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Perry said the problem could have been avoided had Obama heeded the governor’s warnings about the influx in May 2012.

“I gave the President a head’s up on what was happening with these unaccompanied children, these alien children who were coming in on the tops of trains,” Perry told “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer. “And we laid out exactly what we felt was going to happen if we didn’t address that, and now we’re seeing that become reality with literally tens of thousands of these young children, making this long, arduous, very dangerous trip, being separated from their parents, and it could have been stopped years ago, had the administration listened, had the administration been focused on the border with Texas.”

Pres. Obama/ white house photo

Based on this fiscal year’s eight-and-a-half months of activity so far, the number of unaccompanied alien children from Honduras apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol will increase 22 times from what it was in 2009.

That’s a jump from fewer than 1,000 children five years ago to more than 21,000 this year. Similar increases are predicted for unaccompanied alien children from Guatemala — from 1,115 in 2009 to a projected 17,887 — and a 13-fold increase in UACs from El Salvador, from 1,221 to a projected total of 16,145.
In 2012, when immigration was a key issue during the presidential election, the Border Patrol recorded 24,481 apprehensions of UACs. The year before, (ending September 2011), there were 16,067. Since 2012, the numbers have grown dramatically. In 2013, the total was 38,833, and this year’s figure is expected to reach 90,000.

Before 2012, children from Mexico made up more than 75 percent of UACs. Now, according to the Migration Policy Institute, Hondurans make up the highest percentage of children (28 percent), followed by Mexicans (25 percent), Guatemalans (24 percent), and Salvadorans (21 percent).
This seismic shift in children seeking to enter the United States is due to several factors: a change in immigration policy; an increase in violence in their home countries; an increase in smuggling activity; continued poverty in their countries of origin.

The numerous causes make finding a simple solution impossible. There will have to be changes made on many fronts to create a solution.

Steve Neavling

The first lady of Honduras is visiting South Texas immigration shelters beginning today after news broke about a growing crisis involving tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who were confined to overcrowded, squalid conditions at the border, KXAN reports.

Ana Garcia de Hernandez is just the latest in a growing number of politicians arriving in Texas to get a firsthand look at the plight of the children, who are spilling over the Mexico border without adult supervision.

Since October, more than 150,000 of those children came from Honduras.

Experts said more people are fleeing Honduras because of widespread gang violence and chronic joblessness.

Steve Neavling

Union leaders for the Border Patrol told lawmakers Wednesday that the agency is understaffed and unable to handle the influx of immigrants as a crisis unfolds at the border with unaccompanied children, the Houston Chronicle reports.

The agency is “drastically understaffed with morale plummeting to record lows,” Chris Crane, president of the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council 118 of the American Federation of Government Employees, told the House Judiciary Committee.

“I hope that Congress will also consider the future consequences of allowing (enforcement and removal activity) to continue in its current state.”

Making matters worse is a heightening crisis involving the detainment of thousand of unaccompanied children from Central America. Up to 40% of Border Patrol’s manpower has been diverted to caring for the immigrants, said Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd. “This manpower decrease did not go unnoticed and for those trying to enter the country illegally – it was a good time to try,” Judd said.

By James Lyall, ACLU attorney
Huffington Post

Detainees wrested from sleep every 30 minutes, the lights in their frigid cells never turned off. One detainee told by officials, don’t lie or you’ll be raped. Another detainee sexually abused by guards. Detainees forced to stand in stress positions. Others denied adequate food, water, and medical treatment and held in dehumanizing conditions. “Welcome to hell,” one guard told a detainee, a good metaphor for what occurs across these sites of torment.

These incidents don’t come from military prisons in Iraq or Afghanistan or CIA black sites. This has been happening for years along the Southwest border in U.S. government facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and its Border Patrol. The victims: children, some as young as infants, as documented in a recent complaint filed by a group of immigrant rights advocates who interviewed 116 unaccompanied children previously held in CBP custody.

Just as appalling, government agencies have known about these abuses for a long time, but failed to take action. Now, more children are vulnerable to harm in Border Patrol custody than ever before. Since October, 47,000 children have left their homes in Central America, mainly in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, for the United States. They flee destabilizing violence and crime fomented by criminal syndicates and gangs, more often than not without a loved one leading the way. With their fate far from certain, they make an arduous, perilous trek, sometimes spanning thousands of miles, in search of refuge in America. They risk it all, not so much in search of a better life, but simply to live.

Once here, many of these brave and resourceful children — who have already suffered abuse many times before throughout their lives — encounter not compassion and empathy from U.S. immigration officials but abuse. The most vulnerable are once again taught a cruel lesson: There’s nowhere safe for them to lay their heads down and just be children.

To read more click here.

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