Let Obama own immigration mess on our border

By Liz Peek,

Give him the money! Republicans in Congress need to stifle their hostility towards President Obama, and approve his emergency request for funds to alleviate our border disaster. Only by signing on for the $3.7 billion “fix” will the GOP place this “urgent humanitarian crisis” squarely in Mr. Obama’s lap, where it belongs.

As House Speaker John Boehner recently said, Obama has been president for five and a half years; it’s time he took responsibility for something, and this border mess is a good place to start.

The flood of young unaccompanied minors across our border is a catastrophe – for the children and for the country. There’s no place to put them, no way to process all of them, we have legal impediments to deporting them; really, nobody knows what to do. President Obama has a plan — let’s see if it works. Instead of allowing him to shirk responsibility by refusing to go along with his program, Congress needs to quickly climb aboard. Let him own the fruits of his labors.

Only by signing on for the $3.7 billion “fix” will the GOP place this “urgent humanitarian crisis” squarely in Mr. Obama’s lap, where it belongs.

Make no mistake, President Obama is to blame for the immigration fiasco. Despite front-page articles in the New York Times and elsewhere blaming a 2008 sex trafficking bill or rampant gang violence in Central America for the crush of illegal youngsters flooding our border, it is clear that the trigger for the sudden influx was President Obama’s campaign-motivated Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA), aka the “Dream Act.”

So far this fiscal year there have been more than 52,000 children unaccompanied children taken into custody, mostly from Central America; that’s nearly twice the total from last year and 10 times the number from 2009.

For the record, countries like El Salvador and Honduras have long been violent. Since the mid- 1990s those two countries have ranked in the top ten most violent countries in the world. What’s changed is the perceived likelihood of these kids being allowed to stay in the U.S.

In passing the DACA, Obama said “it makes no sense to expel talented young people who are, for all intents and purposes, Americans.”

This message trickled south — the U.S. president was easing up on deportations of children who had grown up in the States. Parents took this as an invitation and began to ship their kids north.

As Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson told NBC, “The criminal smuggling organizations are putting out a lot of disinformation about supposed free passes.” Right — disinformation coming directly from the White House.

Republicans should not stand in the way of President Obama’s plan to solve this border crisis. The country is alarmed; it wants a solution. Like it or not (and it’s not how I would like to see my tax dollars spent), we do need more judges to handle the overflow of cases and more money will need to be spent on border security.

Politically, the GOP will lose by being obstructionist. As important, they will win by letting the president spend $1.8 billion on new detention centers.

How will that sit with the Hispanic voter?

Also, let’s see how President Obama deals with Democrats alarmed about his proposals to speed deportations of the children. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy has said he will fight “tooth and nail” any changes in the laws prohibiting returning minors to Central America.Others, like Sen. Richard Durbin, have also expressed reservations.

Maybe, after all, it’s not just Republicans who hinder our activist president. Maybe President Obama just isn’t very good at working with Congress.

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