STONEWALLED:
Feds Hide Fiscal Details About Vast Operation to Resettle Illegal Alien Minors,
by Julia Hahn, 8/20/15
Illegal aliens who show up at
the border have been resettled all across United States of America instead of
being detained and deported, as Donald Trump recently called for in his new immigration plan.
According to data from the Justice Department obtained by Breitbart
News, 96 percent of
Central Americans caught illegally crossing into the country last summer are
still in the United States. Now Breitbart News has learned
exclusively that a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from a
pro-security group about the cost of this operation is being stonewalled.
In January of 2015, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, on behalf of the
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), filed a FOIA request to
discover the cost of accommodating the tens of thousands of illegal
unaccompanied minors who came across the border encouraged by
President Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty for illegal youths.
The FOIA letter made five requests of the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agency: that the federal agency detail (1) the costs of
building of family detention centers; (2) the costs of apprehending, processing
and detaining unaccompanied minors; (3) the costs transporting, transferring,
removing and repatriating unaccompanied minors; (4) the costs related to ICE’s
representation of government in removal procedures involving unaccompanied
minors; and (5) the number of instances where objections to the return of
unaccompanied minors were raised by the governments of Guatemala, Honduras and
El Salvador.
The federal agency, however, refused to answer many of these questions–
instead only partially answering two of the five requests. The
agency provided only the costs of transporting, transferring and removing
illegal minors, as well as the costs of the man-hours such tasks required.
Those costs totaled $58.2 million—quadrupling ICE’s costs of $15.6 million in
the year previous.
FAIR told Breitbart News that the agency did not provide
clear documentation nor explanation as to how it arrived at this estimation.
FAIR asserts that, “The failure to provide most of the cost information
related to the surge of [unaccompanied minors] indicates that the government
has either failed to properly document those costs, or is refusing to reveal
them.”
Because this FOIA request only inquired into the fiscal impact on the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency– it does not at all take into
account the cost incurred by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
nor the public education system. Because most of the unaccompanied
minors were turned over to HHS following their apprehension, FAIR notes that
HHS’ costs “for providing shelter, food, education, health care and other
services, likely vastly exceed additional costs incurred by ICE.”
The flood of minors has also placed fiscal strains on
our public education system. FAIR notes that, “68,541 [unaccompanied minors] were apprehended entering the U.S. Virtually all
of them have been allowed to remain in the U.S., at least temporarily.”
Because federal law dictates that all children are entitled to an education
regardless of their immigration status, the fiscal burden of educating these
students has fallen onto our public education system.
As FAIR notes, educating 68,541 illegal immigrant children at “an
average annual cost of $12,401 per child enrolled in K-12 education, the annual
cost to local schools is at least $850 million. However, since virtually all of
the [unaccompanied minors] are non-English proficient, the actual costs are
likely substantially greater.”
The increased costs and difficulties associated with educating illegal
minors from poor and developing countries has been well-documented. As Fox News
Latino reported in June
of this year, the border surge has left many “schools struggling with influx of
unaccompanied minors.” While the federal government’s policy of releasing
illegal minors into American communities imposes burdens
all across our nation’s education system, it will perhaps hurt
minority American students most profoundly, by straining the educational
resources needed in their communities.
For instance, New York’s Hempstead School District, which is a 96 percent
black and Hispanic district, had about 6,700 students dispersed amongst its 10
schools and usually receives an average of a couple hundred new
students every year. “However, last summer’s enrollment skyrocketed to about
1,500 new kids – most of them undocumented immigrants.” Fox News Latino writes,
“The crush of new enrollees left the district scrambling, forcing it to dip
into its emergency reserves to shell out more than $6 million to hire more
English as a Second Language teachers and additional staff to alleviate
overcrowded classrooms. Still, it has not been enough. The average classroom in
the district now has about 40 to 50 children and [as one teacher explained is]
posing a safety issue… ‘You have to understand,’ [one teacher said], ‘many of
the children are not even proficient in their native language, Spanish, and now
we have to teach them how to speak English. That can be very difficult.’”
Deporting instead of resettling illegal immigrants would save taxpayer
dollars in two ways.
First, by deterring future border crossings, it would reduce the
amount of illegal immigration in the future. As FAIR explains,
refusing to implement immigration law has only encouraged
more illegal immigrants to unlawfully enter the United States: “In July
2015, the Government Accountability Office confirmed that President Obama’s Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA] program played a substantial role in
triggering the surge of [unaccompanied minors] in 2014.”
Second, deporting rather than resettling illegal immigrants would save
the costs of feeding, clothing, housing, educating, hospitalizing, and caring
for illegal immigrants and their relatives. A previous study conducted
by FAIR documented that illegal immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers about
$113 billion every year. After FAIR explains that by comparison, “The
estimated cost of deporting an illegal alien is $8,318. Using just
the partial enumerated $58.2 million costs to ICE and the conservative $850
million estimate for education of [unaccompanied minors] resettled in the U.S.,
the amount of taxpayer money spent on dealing with unaccompanied minors would
have paid for the removal of an additional 109,000 illegal aliens.”
Comments
We’re
broke. The federal government spends $1 trillion a year more than it takes in
revenue. Our current deficit is $800
billion. Why are we spending this money
?
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment