WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has a new secret weapon in the challenging effort to keep thousands of unaccompanied children from streaming across the border: a stern lecture from Vice President Joe Biden.
Biden — who’s known in DC for his ability to crack up a room with a gaffe or bore an audience to tears with a soliloquy — visits Guatemala Friday to try to convince parents not to send their children on a perilous trip across the border through Mexico.
“He has a way to be blunt. And I would be disappointed in this case if he were not that — I fully expect him to be,” said Sen. Tom Carper, Biden’s former Senate colleague from his home state of Delaware.
Carper, who heads the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, says he put in a call to Biden before his trip to “help make him a guided missile — not that he isn’t already.”
Biden is scheduled to meet with Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina.
The pair will “discuss the influx of migrants crossing without authorization” and “ask for support to more quickly process and safely return immigrants to their home countries,” a senior administration official said before the trip.
Tens of thousands of unaccompanied children have streamed across the border this year, causing a logistical nightmare for the administration, which is obliged by law to process and care for them.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) blasted President Obama Thursday for encouraging the inflow by halting deportations of immigrant children and pushing an immigration bill with a path to citizenship.
“We’re seeing a humanitarian disaster — one of the administration’s own making,” Boehner said.
“The administration’s actions only serve to encourage more illegal crossings. It’s another situation that appears to have caught the administration flat-footed.”
Democrats in Congress said crime, fear and instability at home were driving the influx, not the expectation that children would get a free pass to stay in the United States.
“Why are they coming if it isn’t the lure of these laws? They’re fleeing for their lives,” said Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.)
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) released a series of policy recommendations for the administration, including dispatching lawyers to the borders to assist children in hearings to determine if they have a valid claim to stay, more assistance for health services at overcrowded holding areas, and new ways of detaining families and children.