The House GOP's Out of Touch Plan for the Border
- Their plan imposes a sham legal process for unaccompanied children, prioritizing courtroom speed at the expense of the best interests of children and raising the likelihood that children who may be entitled to legal protections are wrongly repatriated to face violence, persecution, torture and murder. Their proposal makes it even more difficult for individuals with legitimate cases to seek asylum!
Prominent evangelical groups have already urged Boehner and Members of Congress not to weaken the legal protections children are afforded in a bipartisan, anti-human trafficking law that President George W. Bush signed into law in 2008.
There's more to this cruel House Republican ruse. They deploy the National Guard to our southern border, dismissing President George W. Bush's former National Guard Chief's concern that "merely sending the Guard to the border is not a panacea for the myriad complex problems of the current situation." In fact, law enforcement personnel from the border had this to say:
"The National Guard — they're trained in warfare; they're not trained in law enforcement," Hidalgo County Sheriff Eddie Guerra.
"…I don't know that it helps," said Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio. "I don't know what good they can do…You just can't come out here and be a police officer…they're trained fordifferent things."
As the bishop of the Diocese of El Paso mentioned: "Jesus Himself was a child migrant fleeing violence…" If we send the children back, it's "akin to sending these children back into a burning building they just fled."
The humanitarian crisis of unaccompanied children at the southern border demands commonsense, compassionate, and thoughtful solutions – not the meaningless schemes of House Republicans aimed solely at scoring political points.