Obama’s Manufactured Border Crisis

The Obama administration is causing yet another crisis by allowing pregnant illegal immigrants and illegal immigrant parents with young children to stay in the United States to await 30-day hearings for which they will probably never show up. This is, in many cases, not enforceable. After all, if the pregnant women were to have their children while in the United States, these babies would automatically become American citizens. (Fox News reports, “Many of them are in the advanced stages of pregnancy” and seeking just that.)

With the so-called DREAM regulations created by President Obama, a brighter future lies ahead for many children who were brought here illegally by their parents in the past. Amidst the influx of new illegal immigrants, “Vice President Joe Biden plans to travel to Guatemala to convince young people there that they will not receive the same treatment if they come to the United States now,” reports National Review.

And we have learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement released 36,000 immigrants, some with criminal records, back into the U.S. last year.

If you’re an unaccompanied minor, or in legalese an unaccompanied alien child (UAC), you can count on social services and pro-bono legal support to help you stay in the country and reunite with relatives who already live here. “Our organization, Safe Passage Project, finds that nearly 90 percent of the unaccompanied minors we meet who are facing deportation qualify for immigration relief, allowing them to remain in the United States legally,” Safe Passage Project Director Lenni Benson told The New York Times last month. How many illegal alien parents will choose to go this route to ensure that their children have a chance at U.S. citizenship?

The New York Times fails to connect the Obama administration’s lax immigration policies to the influx of illegal immigrants, but their own reporting hints at the increase in what they term “migrants.” “While most men are held and processed quickly for deportation, border authorities struggling to manage the influx have been releasing pregnant women and parents with young children, allowing them to join family members living here and issuing them a deportation hearing notice,” writes Julia Preston for the Times. “Migrants have sent word back home they received a ‘permit’ to remain at least temporarily in the United States, feeding rumors along migrant routes and spurring others to embark on the long journey.”

In other words, this treatment is encouraging what the Times calls “migration”—what should be correctly called “illegal immigration”—across U.S. borders. “With no immigration detention site equipped for women with children in the area—the closest one, in Pennsylvania, is overbooked—they are freed by the Border Patrol with a bus ticket to travel to where they have relatives in this country, and an order to appear in immigration court in 30 days,” reports Preston. Yes, the U.S. government is even supplying them with bus tickets to speed these illegal aliens to wherever they choose to go.

And, thus, the Times misinforms its readers. Why isn’t it calling for more Border Patrol resources to deal with this problem? Is it because it supports amnesty for illegal aliens, instead? Indeed, following its classic model, the Gray Lady attributes criticisms of the administration to “Republicans,” not concerned citizens, thereby dismissing these views as more partisan politics.

This column was originally published at Accuracy in Media.