Crossing Borders
BY AMY DAVIDSON
Last Tuesday, a crowd of angry people gathered on a road in Oracle, Arizona, a small town near Tucson. They’d heard that about fifty children from Central America—some of the unaccompanied thousands who have crossed the border in recent months—were being brought to a youth home nearby, and they wanted to turn them back. Then someone spotted a yellow bus down the highway. “Bus coming in,” Adam Kwasman, a Republican state legislator, tweeted. “This is not compassion. This is the abrogation of the rule of law.” With supporters and cameramen in tow, he charged toward the bus. It drove away, but not, Kwasman told a reporter, before he had got a look at the passengers. “I was able to actually see some of the children in the bus—and the fear on their faces,” he said. The reporter replied, “You know that was a bus with Y.M.C.A. kids?” Only slightly ruffled, Kwasman acknowledged that he had made “a mistake,” as did many amused headline writers (“ARIZONA POLITICIAN MISTAKES Y.M.C.A. CAMPERS FOR MIGRANT CHILDREN”).
Since last October, nearly forty-four thousand Central American children have been apprehended at the border, after making their way across Mexico; in the 2012 fiscal year, by comparison, there were about ten thousand. Many were fleeing violence in Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador; their parents, fearing for their lives, had sent them north. Others were looking for relatives who were already in this country. As holding cells in detention centers filled up with small figures wrapped in Red Cross blankets, the situation presented a humanitarian crisis. That is why children were being sent to places like Oracle.
All this, according to Barack Obama’s critics, is his fault—the result of his unwillingness to protect the border. In 2012, after the Dream Act failed to pass, the President signed an executive order allowing undocumented immigrants who arrived in this country as minors prior to 2007, and who met certain other conditions, to remain here, at least temporarily. The children making their way to the border now don’t qualify, but their parents don’t know that, the critics contend. Another problem, as they see it, is the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, signed by George W. Bush, which says that any child from a country not adjacent to the United States—that is, not Mexico or Canada—who appears at the border unaccompanied must be given an immigration hearing. The purpose of the law is to see whether such a child has a legal right to stay, as, perhaps, a political refugee; for that reason, it is wrong to presumptively call the border children illegal.
The President has said that part of his plan for dealing with the crisis is to speed up those hearings; he has asked Congress for three billion seven hundred million dollars, emphasizing that the money would be used not only to shelter the children but also to facilitate deportations. (During Obama’s first term, the average number of deportations per year was close to four hundred thousand, compared with two hundred and fifty thousand under President Bush.) John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said last week that the President would not get anything close to that figure unless changes were made to the 2008 law, which, Boehner said, was being “abused.” Senator Ted Cruz said that he’d require undoing the 2012 executive order as well.
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/28/crossing-borders
