WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Monday made two major immigration-related announcements that rights groups and immigration advocates say are not only incongruous but could violate multiple international rights obligations.
On the one hand, the president expressed his exasperation with the House Republicans and announced that attempts at forging a broad deal on immigration reform legislation would be shelved for the rest of this year. Instead, Obama said he would begin looking at his options to act unilaterally to “make the immigration system work better.”
On the other hand, the president formally pushed lawmakers to grant him some $2 billion in additional border-enforcement funding, as well as new authorities to significantly speed up a deportation process that has already reached record levels under the Obama administration. (Full details will come after Congress returns from its current recess, in mid-July.)
These actions come in response to what some have described as a refugee crisis along the southern U.S. border, with tens of thousands of children flooding U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints.
The U.S. will take “aggressive steps to … deter both adults and children from making this dangerous journey, increase capacity for enforcement and removal proceedings, and quickly return unlawful migrants to their home countries,” the president stated in a letter to congressional leaders Monday.
Yet the president, some worry, appears to have decided to respond to the situation’s political rather than humanitarian exigencies.
“These two announcements seem kind of contradictory,” Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, a rights group that works on immigration issues, told MintPress News. “There is a lot of concern around the administration saying that it needs to restart family detention and to focus on detention as opposed to other options — such as acknowledging that people are fleeing violence and need support.”
The Obama administration stopped detaining families in 2009, following litigation, activist outrage, and stories of poor conditions and mistreatment.
“Kids were being held in horrible conditions of confinement — being warned, for instance, that they wouldn’t be able to see their families if they didn’t stop crying,” Shah recalled. “And remember, these people weren’t serving time for any crime. They were just waiting while officials could determine their immigration status.”
On Friday, federal officials announced the opening of Artesia, a repurposed training facility in New Mexico that will now house some 700 “adults with children,” according to a fact sheet from the Department of Homeland Security. Further, the new facility is one of “several” family detention centers federal officials are now looking at opening.
“The fact is there is no way to humanely detain families,” Michelle Brane, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, a rights group, told journalists on Monday.
“Further, using detention as a deterrent is a violation of international law and has never been shown to work … International law also doesn’t allow [victims of violence] to be sent back to their tormenter. Yet the U.S. government is not mentioning that these children need protection.”
Sending messages
Obama has previously used his executive powers around immigration issues, most notably by unilaterally halting the threat of deportation for children born in the United States to undocumented migrants.
In recent months, he’s pledged that he would think about doing so again, and advocates have been hoping for a range of actions. In particular, many have been pushing for a temporary end to deportations pending reform of federal immigration policies, or the elimination of a congressionally mandated quota that requires a minimum of 34,000 individuals be held in immigration detention every day.
In his address on Monday afternoon, Obama didn’t elaborate on what executive actions he could take, though a series of federal studies will offer related recommendations by the end of the summer. However, the president did directly discuss the influx of child migrants, seen by many as having definitively brought about the end to immigration reform discussions for the time being.
“Some in the House Republican Caucus are using the situation with unaccompanied children as their newest excuse to do nothing … Their argument seems to be that because the system is broken, we shouldn’t make an effort to fix it,” the president stated. “We now have an actual humanitarian crisis on the border that only underscores the need to drop the politics and fix our immigration system once and for all.”
Over the past eight months, an estimated 52,000 unaccompanied minors have arrived at the U.S. border from Central America — mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — more than double the number recorded during the entire previous 12 months. While these figures have been spiking since at least 2011, in recent weeks U.S. Border Patrol agents have reportedly been apprehending as many as 3,000 children and some women per day.
In his remarks, the president noted that “in most cases” these children will be sent back home. Obama also said that his administration was working to send a “clear message to parents in these countries not to put their kids through this.”
The administration has indeed been holding repeated executive-level meetings with Central American leaders in recent days. Vice President Joe Biden was in Guatemala to discuss the influx two weeks ago, and Secretary of State John Kerry is holding similar talks this week in Panama.
Yet the primary way that the administration is sending a “clear message” appears to be around being as tough as possible in its reaction to the unaccompanied minors. This trend would likely only strengthen under Obama’s new proposals.
“A lot of this looks like it will be aimed at helping those in charge of deporting people do their job more quickly,” Adam Isacson, a senior associate for regional security policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank here, told MintPress.
“That has some form of deterrent message, but the danger is we could be sending back hundreds to thousands of children who will be in danger in their home countries. It doesn’t appear that there will be any increase in [funding for] asylum lawyers.”
Advocates say children arriving at the border today are being forced to immediately make a case to Border Patrol agents — alone and without assistance from counsel — for why they should be allowed to stay in the U.S. Lawyers who have worked on similar cases in the past say such conditions would make it essentially impossible for the children to navigate the process.
Protection vs. interdiction
It’s important to note that migration outflows from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have increased substantially in recent years, not just to the U.S., but to neighbors throughout Central America, as well. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, asylum claims from those fleeing these three countries grew by more than 700 percent between 2008 and 2013 — not to the U.S., but to Belize, Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama.
Yet at the heart of the U.S. policy debate over the ongoing influx of minors remains a war of contextualization. Are children being pulled toward the U.S. due to lax U.S. policy, or are they being pushed out of their home countries due to an increase in violence there? How lawmakers and the broader public analyze that question influences views on whether the government should be treating the issue as a migration problem or, as some are suggesting, a refugee crisis.
“We have very serious concerns that the administration’s response thus far has been to abdicate our responsibility and global leadership role by denying refugees and trafficked families U.S. protection,” the Women’s Refugee Commission’s Brane said Monday. “This is a refugee-like situation, and instead of rolling back our protection and engaging in interdiction, we should be reinforcing our protection systems.”
Brane warned that the U.S. could also be sending a problematic signal to countries in the region and around the world regarding their obligation to provide protection to refugees and asylum-seekers. She pointed to Washington’s demand that countries in the Middle East accept Syrian refugees, including those that are already stretched in this regard, such as Lebanon.
“Yet here we are with a much smaller number,” Brane said, “and focusing entirely on stemming the flow and turning people back.”
Preliminary findings from the United Nations have already suggested that nearly two-thirds of the new wave of unaccompanied youths would likely qualify for international protection, given their experiences back home — an estimate that some say is likely conservative.
“Unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have multiple reasons for leaving, but fear of violence is the tragic, common factor,” Leslie E. Velez, a U.N. protection officer, told lawmakers last week at a House hearing, according to prepared remarks.
“Shockingly, 58 percent of the children cited violence in their home countries as at least one key reason for leaving. This number varied by country: El Salvador (72%), Honduras (57%) and Guatemala (38%).”
The agency released a full report on this data, gathered through interviews with more than 400 children, in March.
‘Not war zones’
The Obama administration, meanwhile, has stated that it would keep an open mind with regard to potential asylum claims from these minors. In reality, though, it appears already to have made up its mind that most of the children will not qualify for protection — at least not in the U.S.
“Under international laws, these are not places that are war zones, despite the high level of insecurity,” a senior State Department official, briefing journalists on Tuesday, said on condition of anonymity.
“And I think all of us have to keep working harder to make sure that these children and their families can make their lives in their homes in ways that are more secure. But I don’t think it’s a question of should we be returning them.”
The official, traveling with Secretary of State Kerry en route to Panama to discuss the issue with regional leaders, noted that no unaccompanied minors have yet been sent back to their home countries, though adult individuals and families are being deported.
“And the president has made clear, as did the vice president last weekend, that we have plans to try, and everyone’s getting notices to appear,” the official noted. “It’s only a question of expediting those processes.”