“Obama’s resurrected Children’s Crusade” is the title of Saturday’s column by Doug McIntyre of the Los Angeles Daily News, excerpts below.
The United States of America is tearing families apart but not for the reasons we’ve been told.
The tail wagging the dog of immigration “reform” is the oft-repeated accusation that America’s mean-spirited immigration policies split up families by deporting the parents of children carried into this country as infants, and even children born in the United States.
This charge is and always has been phony, a heartstrings sob story the media laps up like catnip. The U.S. government does not prevent a deportee from taking their children with them back to their country of origin.
If an illegal immigrant is deported and their children remain behind in the United States, that is a choice. Their choice.
But now we actually are splitting up families by dangling a carrot so attractive that desperate parents are willing to entrust their children to human traffickers or send them alone across the desert.
When President Obama announced a moratorium on the deportation of children, he opened the floodgates.
The Associated Press reported last week that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement expects to catch 60,000 children attempting to enter the United States illegally this year, a tenfold increase since 2011.
ICE estimates they catch only 1 out of 5 illegal border crossers. If that same ratio applies to children crossing the border illegally, we could be talking about 300,000 kids, many younger than 13.
Last Monday President Obama called this mushrooming disaster an “urgent humanitarian situation” and asked Congress for an emergency appropriation of $1.4 billion to house, feed, clothe and transport the thousands upon thousands of children his policies helped lure across the border.
The Office of Management and Budget says the actual cost could be as high as $2.28 billion, not counting the $166 million ICE needs to cover increases in overtime.
Television news programs in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are widely reporting Obama’s non-deportation policy for children.
If the president had announced the United States would no longer deport left-handed people, we’d undoubtedly see a flood of left-handed people crossing the border illegally.
This humanitarian disaster was created by bad policy and can only be undone by a change in course. Tragically, the president seems determined to steam full speed ahead.
Source: http://www.dailynews.com/social-affairs/20140607/obamas-resurrected-childrens-crusade
Posted 6/7/14 by Andrew Lewis