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On Immigrant Surge, White House Story Falls Apart
At any other time, the growing crisis on the Mexican border, with tens of thousands of unaccompanied young people crossing illegally into the United States, might dominate the news. Yet the situation has received less attention than it might amid the furor over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's primary defeat, the collapse of Iraq, the continuing Bergdahl matter, and Hillary Clinton's book tour. They're all genuinely important news stories, and they've crowded out disaster at the border.
But whether or not many people noticed, this was the week in which the Obama administration's attempts to deflect blame for the border crisis fell apart.
Most of the illegal immigrants are what Border Patrol officials call OTMs. That is, while they are crossing into the United States from Mexico, they are actually from other countries -- in this case, mostly Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador -- and are classified as Other Than Mexican immigrants.
Top administration officials have tried to attribute the surge in crossings to violence and poverty in those countries. "The situation is motivated primarily by the conditions in the countries that they're leaving -- El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala," said Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnsonin testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday. "Violence, poverty -- I believe that is principally what is motivating the situation."
For its part, the White House dismissed arguments from Republicans that President Obama's DACA decree -- Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allowed thousands of illegal immigrants to stay in this country if they came at a young age -- created, in effect, a magnet for young people to try to enter the U.S. illegally. At the White House briefing on June 9, deputy press secretary Josh Earnest was asked about statements from House and Senate Republicans "that this was sort of the byproduct of the president putting together DACA, and so, because of the way that that's been sort of filtered through, immigrant children believe that they can cross the border and stay here."
"I wouldn't put a lot of stock in the ability of Republican members of Congress to divine the thoughts and insights of children in Central American countries," Earnest answered. "My point is, I'm not sure this withstands a whole lot of scrutiny."
As it turns out, the Republican explanation does withstand a whole lot of scrutiny. Recent days have been filled with anecdotal reports, from local news outlets in Central America to major American newspapers, citing immigrants who say they came because they believe U.S. law has been changed to allow them to stay. And now comes word that Border Patrol agents in the most heavily-trafficked area of the surge, the Rio Grande Valley sector of Texas, recently questioned 230 illegal immigrants about why they came. The results showed overwhelmingly that the immigrants, including those classified as UACs, or unaccompanied children, were motivated by the belief that they would be allowed to stay in the United States -- and not by conditions in their homelands. . . .
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