MRC TV – by Brittany M. Hughes
Recent government data shows that more than two-thirds of the aliens the Obama administration has brought to the United States under the president’s Central American Minors program weren’t actually minors at all.
To date, more than 10,600 Central Americans from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have applied for refugee status or humanitarian parole under the CAM program, the State Department said Wednesday. The controversial initiative was launched in December 2014 as part of President Obama’s executive actions on immigrant, and was touted as a way to bring illegal alien children from certain Central American countries into the United States to be reunited with their families, who are often here illegally themselves.
The move was allegedly designed to keep underage children from relying on dangerous human smugglers to bring them across the U.S. –Mexico border illegally.
Unfortunately for the Obama administration, the program struggled to convince potential applicants that its long, extensive application process was more appealing than simply paying a smuggler to transport them across the border. To help bolster the floundering program, the administration expanded CAM in August to include adult relatives of “qualifying” children, effectively nullifying the whole original point of the program.
Under these new guidelines, the administration now transports not only Central American minors into the United States, but also their adult siblings, aunts, uncles, or other related “caregivers.”
Now, under the CAM program, the State Department told MRCTV in an email Wednesday that of the 1,600 aliens who have traveled to the United States to date, only 480 of them – just 30 percent – are children under the age of 18.
Conversely, a full 70 percent of those aliens who’ve been allowed into the United States under the president’s program for “minors” are adults.
On top of failing to provide much help to many child “refugees,” the CAM program hasn’t made a notable impact on the number of unaccompanied children and families who’ve elected to come into the United States illegally via the Mexican border – which is the very problem the initiative was supposedly created to alleviate.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports it apprehended another 4,973 unaccompanied illegal alien children (UACs) at the U.S.-Mexico border in October, up 97 percent from the 2,519 UACs that border agents apprehended in October of last year. That same month, the Obama administration released more than 6,000 illegal alien children to sponsors living in the United States.
CBP also caught another 6,029 family units crossing the Southwest U.S. border illegally during the month of October, a total 179 percent higher than the 2,162 family units the agency caught in October of last year. The border surge has increased so much, in fact, that officials are now warning the wave is already threatening to overwhelm their resources.
In fact, CBP data shows that since President Obama launched the costly CAM program in December 2014, nearly 100,000 unaccompanied alien children and more than 123,000 family units have been apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Unfortunately for Obama – or at least, his narrative – it’s pretty clear that the CAM program (which cost American taxpayers $948 million in FY 2016 alone) is much more tailored toward helping Central American adults than it is minors, and isn’t doing a thing to deter illegal immigration.
http://www.mrctv.org/blog/23-aliens-admitted-under-obamas-minor-program-are-adults
A ‘bedder liiife’ for them.
A plethora of targets for us.