Another surge of unaccompanied illegal alien minors at border

Immigration officials are saying that with the weather improving, another surge of unaccompanied illegal alien children from Central America is expected at the border.

While the numbers are nowhere near the crisis numbers seen last year, the surge is once again overloading facilities.

Washington Times:

The second wave of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children has begun, with more than 3,000 of them surging across the Mexican border into the U.S. last month — the highest rate since the peak of last summer’s crisis and a warning that another rough season could be ahead.

Immigration officials warned that they expected another surge as the weather improved. Although the numbers are down some 40 percent compared with last year’s frenetic pace that sparked a political crisis for the Obama administration, fiscal year 2015 is shaping up to mark the second-biggest surge on record.

Authorities report having captured 15,647 children traveling without parents who tried to jump the border in the first six months of the fiscal year. Through this point in 2014, they had apprehended 28,579.

Just as worrisome is the rate of whole families — usually mothers with young children — who are crossing. So far this fiscal year, authorities have captured 13,911 “family units,” down 30 percent from last year.

“These statistics show that the surge of illegal arrivals from Central America was never really over,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

She said the Obama administration and Congress have not taken steps to end the “pull factors.”

Among those is the policy that requires children from Central America to be released into the U.S. rather than quickly returned to their home countries. Once released, those children usually fail to appear for deportation proceedings.

The Congressional Research Service told Congress in late March that 62 percent of the children failed to show up for their cases before immigration judges from July through February. All of them were ordered deported, but the workload of officials made deportation unlikely in most cases.

The burden placed on local communities in housing, clothing, feeding, and educating these children has strained budgets across the country. And if the president;'s immigration executive orders are ever implemented, we can expect the situation to get worse. There simply is no disincentive for illegal aliens to leave, much .less stop jumping the border. 

As the Obama administration welcomes the illegal arrivals, they are now flying illegal children whose parents have successfully crossed the border.That number is also expected to skyrocket if these parents are given legal status as a result of Obama's executive orders.

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