WASHINGTON — The surge of Central American children crossing the southern border into the United States that made headlines last summer has abated, but one Republican Senate leader insists the Obama administration is still not aggressive enough in kicking the kids out and sending them home.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told officials from the departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services that he believes the administration is giving incentives to Central Americans to journey north by not moving fast enough with deportation and asylum procedures.
“People’s lives are put at risk because of these incentives,” he said at a hearing, citing statistics that show upwards of 90 percent of the children arriving from Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala last year are still living in the U.S.
Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said that despite the administration’s stated policy of deporting minors who cannot prove a history of persecution in their home countries or enroute, delays in adjudicating the immigrants’ cases encourage more youths to try their luck at the border.
“If you do not show the population in Central America that you are sending people back, more will likely embark on a dangerous, sometimes deadly, journey to enter the United States illegally,” he said in a statement opening the committee hearing.
Under existing law, undocumented migrants from contiguous nations – Mexico and Canada – can be repatriated without any due process in the U.S. But migrants from non-contiguous countries, including the Northern Triangle nations of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, are all detained and issued court dates.
Officials said that those child migrants – such as the ones flooding the border last summer — could wait several months before appearing before a judge.
According to statistics presented at the hearing by the Department of Homeland Security, only 22,869 minors were apprehended by border patrol units in the first eight months of the 2015 fiscal year. Last year, 73,471 were apprehended.
At the hearing Tuesday, Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the panel’s top Democrat, took a less hawkish approach than Johnson, expressing interest in attacking what he called the root causes of children leaving home: endemic levels of poverty and violence.
“For a number of years, they’ve lived hellacious lives that we’ve contributed directly to,” he said, citing the availability of firearms in the U.S, and the consumption of illegal drugs by Americans.
Carper and several administration officials, especially Juan Osuna, director of the executive office for immigration review, called on Congress to expand funding for immigration courts, including the hiring of 55 new judges to hear the cases of thousands of undocumented minors.
Carper and Osuna said that a backlog of court cases — not bad policy — is causing the slow rate of deportations.
Despite their disagreements, both Johnson and Carper said they believed that last summer’s surge, which the United Nations declared to be a humanitarian crisis, had largely ended.
“It’s no longer a humanitarian crisis,” Johnson said. But he cautioned that the thousands of underage migrants still arriving at the border are cause for great concern.
But advocates for migrant rights — none of whom testified Tuesday — said that while the Obama administration’s approach to the crisis may have stemmed the flow of underage immigrants to the states, the refugee crisis in Central America is far from over.
Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said that the crisis is ongoing — the Obama administration has only managed to relocate it.
“We’ve just shifted the crisis further south,” she said. “We’ve pushed it down into Central America and Mexico for the moment, but it will come back.”