All talk, Dingy won’t bring it up for a vote.
Via Daily Caller
An Arizona Congressman is set to propose legislation that would allow federal authorities to immediately return Central American illegal child immigrants apprehended at the U.S. border back to their home countries.
U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon will introduce the bill early this week, according to the Arizona Republic.
If passed, the bill would undo a part of a 2008 law that requires U.S. Customs and Border Protection to turn over unaccompanied immigrant children from countries that do not border the U.S. to the Department of Health and Human Services.
“I think the first step to fix it is to give our CBP guys the authority to immediately repatriate them back to their countries,” Salmon told the Arizona Republic. “Then we are going to have to have communications with Mexico and work with them to secure Mexico’s southern border.”
Federal immigration agencies have been inundated with a surge of unaccompanied child immigrants and parents with children, most of whom are from the Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
An estimated 52,000 unaccompanied children and 39,000 parents with children were apprehended between Oct. 1 and June 15 – a drastic increase over previous years.
Because of a 2008 anti-human trafficking law, the apprehended immigrants are given over to HHS which then houses them while they await deportation proceedings. It has been unclear how many unaccompanied children have avoided deportation altogether.
With the recent surge in apprehensions, HHS has been left scrambling to find housing for the immigrants. Thousands have been placed at military installations in Texas, Oklahoma and California.
But some attempts to place them at facilities throughout the U.S. have been met with protest from locals. At a town hall meeting last month, outrage from residents of Lawrenceville, Va., forced HHS officials to scrap plans to house unaccompanied child immigrants at a nearby abandoned college.