ImmigrationSharp increase in the number of unaccompanied children crossing into U.S.
DHS’ Office of Immigration Statisticsreports that U.S. Border Patrolagents apprehended 30,000 children traveling alone illegally across the Mexican border in 2013. The Border Patrol expects to arrest as many as 90,000 children this year, and about 142,000 children in 2015. The Office of Management and Budgethas notified the Senate Appropriations Committeethat the increase in the number of children crossing the border alone would cost the government at least $2.28 billion, about $1.4 billion more than the Obama administration had budgeted for in its Unaccompanied Alien Childrenprogram.
Child border-crossers: a growing segment // Source: migua.org
DHS’ Office of Immigration Statisticsreports that U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 30,000 children traveling alone illegally across the Mexican border in 2013. The Border Patrol expect to arrest as many as 90,000 children this year, and about 142,000 children in 2015, according to a recent internal DHS memorandum from Border Patrol Deputy Chief Ronald Vitiello to the National Security Council’s Transborder Security Directorate.
The San Jose Mercury News reports that most children crossing the border alone are from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala and have been apprehended in the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector in South Texas, the agency’s busiest area along the Mexican border. The increase in children crossing the border has forced the Border Patrol to divert resources away from other missions, including fighting human and drug trafficking. Some children from countries other than Mexico have had to be transported to less-busy sectors of the border for processing while they await deportation or to be reunited with their parents or relatives in the United States. Vitiello notes that releasing those children and reuniting them with their parents in the states often serve as “incentives to additional individuals to follow the same path.”
Detained children are expected to be transferred within seventy-two hours to the Health and Human Services Department’s (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement, which saw 6,000 to 7,500 children per year between 2008 and 2011. Officials are then tasked with reuniting the children with their families or potential guardians in the United States. The average stay for a child in a HHS shelter in 2013 was forty-five days.
President Barack Obama has declared the situation on the border as an “urgent humanitarian situation,” and has said the government would temporarily house some of the children at two military bases.
The Office of Management and Budget has notified the Senate Appropriations Committee that the increase in the number of children crossing the border alone would cost the government at least $2.28 billion, about $1.4 billion more than the Obama administration had budgeted for in its Unaccompanied Alien Children program.
