The Obama administration says a campaign of misinformation spread by drug cartels and criminal gangs in Central America is driving unaccompanied children to illegally cross the border, but the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said the “misinformation comes from the president’s own programs.”
“I actually think that this is an administration made disaster of his own making, and folks in Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras have actually said things that contradict what he has claimed about this. He’s claimed this is due to Central American violence. The Guatemalan ambassador to the U.S. said it’s not about Central American violence and pointed to revolutions that took place down there, civil wars that took place that didn’t generate this kind of movement toward our border by children and, by the way, by other people too, it’s not just children. And the Honduran president said it’s all about misinformation about U.S. laws,” Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) told Fox.
“…The Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals, DACA, which now over 500,000 people have applied for and received. Word’s getting back home, if you come to the United States and you’re a child, you just tell them you want to come in and they’re going to let you in.”
Goodlatte also criticized the handling of the influx of illegal immigrants — “the rubber stamping, the granting of political asylum cases — most of these cases are not well founded but it is easy to make the claim, get a court date, be let into the country, be given work authorization and then disappear.”
“And more than 90 percent of the people never come back to appear at those hearings that are set to determine whether they really had a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country,” he added. “…These are people who are showing right up at our border crossing stations and turning themselves into the Border Patrol saying, ‘Here I am. I want political asylum in the United States.’ Abuse of this law.”
He said it’s “absolutely criminal” that parents are “paying thousands of dollars to criminals who are engaged in human trafficking to take their children to do this.”
“The Mexicans do not want their southern border to be as unsecure as it’s been. This new Mexican government has said they would like to work with the U.S. to secure that border. Why not do that? That certainly would be a major part of stopping this problem — which has grown from 6,000 people at the beginning of last year making political asylum claims, what are called credible fear claims, to projected 142,000 by next year, by 2015,” Goodlatte said.
“It is an administration-made disaster.”
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