Invasion of the Children

“This is an invasion,” complains a 30-something-year-old woman, who lives in Murrieta in Southern California, about one and a half hour’s drive from the Mexican border. “Why isn’t the National Guard stopping them from coming in?” They are illegal immigrants, among whom there have recently been many children and adolescents who have succeeded in entering this hopeful country without parents or relatives. However, these days, the buses that are bringing 140 immigrants a time to a border station to stay until officially being removed are being forced to turn around by the 200 demonstrators in Murrieta. The city with a population of 100,000, famous for its hot springs and horse racing, has been catapulted into the national and even international news bulletins as a result of this problem.

It is a similar story in other states along the border with Mexico: In Tucson, Arizona “College Place,” a dormitory for students, has been converted into a refugee camp. Three hundred children and adolescents who came over the border without parents or relatives are currently living there. “It makes me mad to some extent that it’s our money that is being used,” comments a bearded man in a cowboy hat. “We should be looking after our own people first.”

U.S authorities believe the number of underage immigrants without parents and without entry documents has reached over 70,000 this year. That is almost double the amount compared to last year and almost quadruple the amount compared to 2011. The children are increasingly coming from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, while the proportion of illegal immigrants from Mexico has remained consistent. With regards to Mexican children, if they are apprehended near the border, they are usually deported immediately, following a conversation with a border control officer. Only if they can demonstrate that they are under threat of persecution at home, or that they could become victims of human trafficking, are they allowed to remain initially in the United States. For minors from the countries in Central America, authorities have so far been taking measures to determine the addresses of relatives in the United States, to whom the children can be sent. If neither relatives nor a home address can be found, the children are sent permanently into foster care. This procedure was put into place through the Homeland Security Act in 2002 and a law to protect the victims of human trafficking in 2008.

Gang violence and drug-related crime are the main reasons for the heart-breaking decision parents make to send their children on the dangerous and often fatal journey, often without the prospect of ever being re-united. Every year, around 460 individuals die attempting to cross the border. That is more than one person every day. They drown in the Rio Grande or other rivers and canals; they die of thirst in the deserts of New Mexico or Arizona; and they get caught in accidents while fleeing from state troopers in hopelessly overcrowded scrap cars, which smugglers on the U.S side of the border pick them up in. The proportion of underage children among these deaths is not recorded. In any case, the business of human trafficking is booming.

The “border crisis,” as this mass immigration is known, is exposing the helplessness of the Republicans, as well as the Democrats. “The reason for all this is that the border is not secure,” claims the Texan governor Rick Perry, who will possibly run for for the Republican presidential nomination again in 2016. Talks in Washington about a cross-party reform of the immigration law ended in failure as a result of the Republicans’ fear of the tea party. Last week, Barack Obama announced that his presidential authority had been exhausted in trying to break the blockade. However, the executive orders allow the president only limited possibilities, starting with accelerating the deportation of non-Mexican illegal immigrants. The White House now wants to become more active in appeasing the simmering population, not just in Murrieta.

Only a few days ago, Obama advised Congress about the provision of additional emergency resources, which reaches $2 billion. Part of the plan is to deport those children emigrating from Central America without lengthy administrative procedures in the future.

Wendy Young of the human rights organization Kids in Need of Defense or KIND is outraged at the idea: “Four-year-olds, standing before a Border Patrol station, trying to articulate a fear of persecution or a fear of trafficking.”

Obama’s Democratic Party colleagues, who are based even further from the border, are endorsing a different solution. They would like a gradual legalizing of the status of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. There are more and more of them every day. Meanwhile, in an incapacitated Washington, the party members look on without speaking or acting to solve this crisis.