The United Nations continues to attempt to exert its unfounded authority in the affairs of the United States, this time by involving itself in the border crisis.
On the southern border of the United States, an influx of thousands of illegal immigrants, including unaccompanied children, has been migrating from Central America and finding that housing facilities are overflowing. Local communities across the country, including in California and New York, have refused to permit overflow shelters to house the immigrant children to be opened.
The cost of the crisis for the American people is staggering. Taxpayer money is used to secure space for the detention and feeding of the illegal immigrants. In June, the White House announced a plan to spend millions by sending aid to governments in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to help reduce crime and violence in an “effort” to reduce immigration.
The response from the Obama administration has been ineffectual at best, and the president has taken what some critics view as an “aloof” position on the crisis. Enter the United Nations, which, unsurprisingly, has interests other than that of the United States to protect in this crisis.
WorldNetDaily reported, “Representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHRC, are ‘intensely discussing in meetings’ the possibility of extending U.N. protection to the thousands of Central Americans crossing the U.S. border with Mexico illegally by defining them as ‘refugees’ who are seeking asylum from political and domestic violence in their home nations, WND has confirmed.”
A 10-nation meeting in Nicaragua was held last week with ministers from the United States, Mexico and various Central American countries. Those in attendance included representatives from SICA, an El-Salvador-headquartered non-government organization endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 1993 to create regional bodies authorized to interact with the United Nations.
Preliminary reports indicate that the officials concluded that the illegal aliens are “refugees” and therefore deserve international protection. The ministers cited the United Nation’s declaration on the rights of refugees.
“They are leaving for some reason. Let’s not send them back in a mechanical way, but rather evaluate the reasons they left their country,” Fernando Protti, regional representative for the UN refugee agency, told the Associated Press.
Officials close to the UN discussions have told WND that it’s a “tricky situation” since the Central American immigrants do not belong to any group that has been designated by the United Nations as victims of political or religious persecution.
NBC News observed that the designation would be unprecedented. “Central Americans would be among the first modern migrants considered refugees for fleeing violence and extortion at the hands of criminal gangs,” writes NBC News.
While a UN resolution asking the illegal immigrants to be declared as “refugees” would lack any legal weight in the United States, the agency said it believes “the U.S. and Mexico should recognize that this is a refugee situation, which implies that they shouldn’t be automatically sent to their home countries but rather receive international protection.”
“Unaccompanied children and families who fear for their lives and freedoms must not be forcibly returned without access to proper asylum procedures,” UNHCR official Leslie Velez said in testimony submitted to the House Judiciary Committee late last month.
It is highly unlikely that the American people would support the designation of the illegal aliens as refugees, particularly since little has changed in Central America, where violence and poverty were always an issue. The American Thinker’s Doris O’Brien wrote:
There’s nothing new about the deplorable conditions in Central America. Poverty and waves of violence have been threatening people there for decades. But not until a way was devised to misinterpret an immigration law did the widespread exodus of children to the Promised Land actually come to pass. Forget the buses and trains. These wayward kids were transported here in … the modern-day equivalent of the Trojan Horse.
Similarly, NBC News reported:
Honduras has the world’s highest homicide rate for a nation not at war. In El Salvador, the end of a truce between street gangs has led to a sharp rise in homicides. Violence spread in recent decades after members of California street gangs were deported to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, where they overwhelmed weak and corrupt police forces.
A press release is expected to be released on the meeting in Nicaragua sometime this week.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s response to the crisis continues to be challenged as inept and inconsistent. Obama has indicated he plans to use executive action to improve border security, an announcement that Politico’s Rich Lowry notes “has a man-bites-dog feel to it after all of the administration’s executive actions to undermine immigration.”
What’s worse is that the Obama administration had reportedly been warned of the impending border crisis over the past two years as a surge of Central American minors had been crossing into south Texas illegally.
The Washington Post reported:
Nearly a year before President Obama declared a humanitarian crisis on the border, a team of experts arrived at the Fort Brown patrol station in Brownsville, Tex., and discovered a makeshift transportation depot for a deluge of foreign children.
Thirty Border Patrol agents were assigned in August 2013 to drive the children to off-site showers, wash their clothes and make them sandwiches. As soon as those children were placed in temporary shelters, more arrived. An average of 66 were apprehended each day on the border and more than 24,000 cycled through Texas patrol stations in 2013.
And one former senior federal law-enforcement official told the Washington Post that Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement had warned the White House of the potential for a significant surge of migrant children at the border as early as 2012.
Further, the border crisis is hurting any chance for President Obama to enact “immigration reform.” According to a July poll by the Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans support expediting the process of deporting Central American children who are in the United States illegally. Likewise, a majority disapprove of the way President Obama has handled illegal immigration.
