Amid a resurgence in the pace of unaccompanied migrant children crossing the U.S. border, President Barack Obama is facing opposition as he searches for places to house them temporarily.
The administration is attempting to assemble a network of shelters on military bases and other federal facilities to lodge thousands of children awaiting immigration proceedings after fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. That's hit a nerve in communities where potential facilities were announced without community input.
"I don't want a military base to be an orphanage," said Veronica Kemeny, president of the Republican Veterans of Florida, who lives in Panama City near an Air Force base that was named as a potential shelter.
Since Oct. 1, 20,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended at the U.S. border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That compares with nearly 70,000 in all of 2014, when the humanitarian crisis was at its worst. The influx that year stunned officials, who crammed children into school gymnasiums and onto concrete floors of Border Patrol stations.
The recent surge of unaccompanied minors is the latest dispute surrounding Obama's immigration policies that have angered Democrats and Republicans and alienated Hispanics, a critical voting bloc. There's a push in Congress to see the children deported, a position that follows Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's call to build a border wall to keep out undocumented migrants. A separate bill sponsored by Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, would prohibit them from being kept at military installations.
"They're politicizing the kids," said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill. "They're saying, 'Let's talk about what we feel like are issues that are going to encourage Republicans to come out to vote in the upcoming election."'
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton distanced herself from Obama after he ordered raids targeting undocumented Central Americans. Obama has formally deported more people than any other president. A congressional investigation found that the federal government had delivered some unaccompanied children into the hands of human traffickers amid a rush to process them.
"We want the Democrats to realize that there's a political cost to some of these Obama actions," said Lynn Tramonte, deputy director at America's Voice, a Washington immigration-policy group. "Democrats cannot afford to leave Latino votes on the table."
Under a 2008 law, unaccompanied children from countries other than Mexico and Canada are granted access to the U.S. pending their asylum claim. In December, the Health and Human Services Department, which cares for them until they can be placed with relatives, announced it would establish temporary shelters to avoid a crisis like the one two years ago. The first such facilities were to include a total of 2,500 beds at a federal building near Denver; a Job Corps site in Homestead, Fla.; and an Air Force base outside Alamogordo, N.M.
Ten additional military bases were placed under review by the government. Six were dropped as potential sites last week, leaving under consideration bases in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Alabama and California, according to Defense Department spokesman Tom Crosson.
"As a nation, we must secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws consistent with our priorities," said White House spokesman Peter Boogaard. "At all times, we endeavor to do this consistent with American values, and basic principles of decency, fairness and humanity."
In Colorado, residents and elected officials demanded answers from the Health and Human Services Department about how the government planned to convert and manage parts of a federal complex outside Denver to shelter as many as 1,000 migrant children by April.
More than 3,000 people joined an hourlong call Jan. 19 with federal officials to discuss the plan. Residents asked who would pay for the shelter, how long it would remain, where children would be placed and how the federal government would ensure they didn't present a security risk.
"I respect the fact that the children have to go somewhere," said U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo. "The fundamental problem to me is the Obama administration has brought this problem on themselves."
Last week, the Health and Human Services Department abandoned plans to use the Denver site, saying architects and engineers concluded that necessary renovations would be too costly and time consuming.
A Section on 02/17/2016