Handling Illegal Immigrant Children in Texas

Open Fax to Gov. Rick Perry (TX):

Dear Gov. Perry,

          The Washington Times says that In a media tour yesterday of a U.S. Border Patrol processing facility at Nogales, AZ, at least 100 children were doing what children normally do: playing basketball with border agents, watching World Cup soccer, resting on mats with Mylar blankets, talking in groups. But mainly waiting.

          For what? It’s unclear. The Border Patrol has set up 40 telephones at the giant air-conditioned warehouse in order to contact the children’s relatives, but the unaccompanied minors who spilled over the border in the past year weren’t lost.

          They came to stay, but officials stressed Wednesday that the Nogales processing center is only temporary. From there, children are sent to private shelters or temporary housing at military bases in California, Oklahoma and Texas, but even those facilities are filling up.

          At least 90,000 children, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, will be caught this year, and more than 140,000 will be apprehended in 2015, according to an internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection memo.

          Apparently the illegal immigrant children are detainees of the US Border Control. Note above that from the US border control detention facilities, the children are sent to private shelters or temporary housing at military bases in several states. I will speak only concerning Texas.

          Texas has its own border control agents and you just recently appointed more to the job. The Texas Border Control should ask for custody from US Border Control of all illegal immigrant children presently being held in Texas facilities. Texas Border Control should put these children on buses and send them back to their home countries, as I have previously advised in a separate essay.

          We don’t want to waste time with telephone calls trying to find relatives in the US or on court hearings. Ship the children back home and they can look for US-based relatives from their home countries. When they are back home, we also don’t need court hearings.

          For those persons who have an abused compassion for the welfare of the children, we handle that by accepting volunteers to accompany the children to their home countries and see that they are well taken care of during the trip and after their arrival at home. Those volunteers should immediately apply for transit visas through Mexico and visas to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.