Ahhhhh! It is insane!
When Robin sent me this story yesterday, my first thought was that the $2 billion would be spread around the various agencies including FEMA, Homeland Security and possibly the Defense Department (now housing some of the “refugee” kids), but this $2 billion is destined for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Dept. of Health and Human Services, the agency legally responsible for unaccompanied alien minors!
From ORR, millions could be doled out to the refugee contractors including the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (ActOfLove, what a joke!).
And, those contractors are busy lobbying for more money, more refugees, and more immigrant “clients” generally (they lobbied for the Senate “comprehensive immigration reform” bill as well). Are they using your money for lobbying?
Here is the story according to Reuters:
A Senate appropriations panel voted Tuesday to give the Obama administration $2 billion it requested to handle the dramatic increase in child immigrants caught trying to illegally cross the Mexican border without their parents, Reuters reported.
The money is more than $1.1 billion more than President Barack Obama initially asked for in his budget proposal for the Health and Human Services division that cares for and houses immigrant children caught alone at the border, according to Reuters. It would effectively come from yet unspecified changes in mandatory programs.
The number of children found trying to cross the Mexican border without parents has skyrocketed in recent years, Reuters reported. Between 2008 and 2011, the number of children landing in the custody of HHS’s Refugee Resettlement fluctuated between 6,000 and 7,500 per year.
In 2012 border agents apprehended 13,625 unaccompanied children and that number surged even more, to over 24,000 last year with the total is expected to be as high as 90,000 this year, according to Reuters.
[….]
The HHS budget approved by the committee would also allow the government to move money from other areas if the flow of child immigrants grows beyond the latest estimate of up to 90,000, according to Reuters.
[….]
The full Senate will have the final say on its version of the HHS budget, and the House has not yet acted on the issue, Reuters reported.
[….]
Under federal law, the children are supposed to be turned over to HHS within 72 hours, Reuters reported. Most are then reunited with parents or other relatives already living in the United States.
And then this line really ticks me off (as if the above isn’t bad enough)!
Most children caught crossing the border alone are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala and cannot be quickly repatriated, according to Reuters.
If anyone in leadership had any guts they would propose what I put forward, here, yesterday. Airlift the mostly teenaged boys back to their respective state capitals and turn them over to their own governments and threaten to cut off all aid to the country if they ever return to the US.
For background, see our complete archive on ‘unaccompanied minors’ by clicking here.