Thousands of illegal immigrants from Central America — many of them unaccompanied children — are flooding into Texas and other border states every day, prompting one lawman to compare the deluge to Hurricane Katrina.
“How do you prepare for that?” Don Ray, the director of the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition, told CBS News.
“You can’t have an influx of people like that without having an impact. I think we saw that after Katrina. You have that many people in one place — you have the potential for illnesses that could spread that could have an impact on the local community.”
The number of minors travelling alone from Central America has soared over 1,000 percent, according to Border Patrol data.
In fiscal year 2009, border agents stopped 3,304 children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. That number is nearing 50,000 this year and is expected to continue to soar.
To deal with the deluge, the Obama administration authorized emergency housing at three military bases for kids entering the country without parents or guardians. But conditions at the centers are leaving hundreds sick — mostly due to poor sanitation and overcrowding.
A top Republican predicted many of the children trying to get to the US would die during the journey — or from disease after arriving.
“This flood is going to mean children dying trying to get in,” California Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told Fox News Radio.
“And more important, children coming here with the anticipation that somehow they’re going to be granted citizenship and then they will bring the rest of their family . . . that’s a false narrative,” Issa said.
This flood is going to mean children dying trying to get in… with the anticipation that somehow they’re going to be granted citizenship.
- California Rep. Darrell Issa
He and others critics blame the Obama administration’s DREAM act, which has young people from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries believing they can cross the border freely.
“When the president made a decision that he was not going to enforce immigration laws . . . he created a real magnet to pull in a great deal of new illegals, particularly children, who would qualify under the president’s own executive DREAM Act,” Issa told Fox.
The surge is largely due to US policies, according to a Border Patrol intelligence memo.
That would contradict the administration’s contention that violence in Central America is the reason so many young people are streaming northward.
According to the memo, which was brought up at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, agents grilled more than 200 non-Mexican immigrants in late May, and 95 percent of them said they headed to the US because they’d heard they could get a “permiso,” or “free pass” simply by showing up at the border.
“This information is apparently common knowledge in Central America and is spread by word of mouth, and international and local media,” the memo reads. “A high percentage of the subjects interviewed stated their family members in the US urged them to travel immediately, because the United States government was only issuing immigration ‘permisos’ until the end of June 2014.”