immigrants

Authorities in Mexico have found more than 370 children dumped by people smugglers while trying to make their way into the United States.

The National Institute of Migration (INM) said the huge number of children, from different nations in Central America, were discovered in just a single one-week period in March.

The figure included some 163 children who were abandoned because they were not traveling with an adult family member or an acquaintance, the INM said in a statement.

In many cases, the children had been left in dangerous or difficult transit points by guides who had been paid between $3,000 and $5,000, it said.

The children were found between March 17 and 24 across 14 states, the INM said, without specifying the ages and nationalities of the children.

"The children showed signs of extreme fatigue, foot injuries, dehydration, disorientation and not knowing where they were abandoned," it said.

Immigration agents tried to deport only about a fourth of the cases they encountered in 2013, said a report being released Monday from the Center for Immigration Studies that shows just how much President Obama’s policies have cut down on potential enforcement.
 
Jessica Vaughan, the report’s author, called it a form of “catch and release.” She said agents at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement received more than 720,000 hits on immigrants who could be eligible for deportation but filed charges against fewer than 195,000 of them.
 
Of those let go, 68,000 had criminal convictions on their records. All told, more than 870,000 immigrants have been ordered removed from the U.S. but are defying the government and refusing to leave.
 
“These numbers confirm that interior enforcement has been anything but tough — that in fact, ICE is releasing more illegal aliens and more criminal aliens than they’re trying to remove,” said Ms. Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates a crackdown on immigration.
 

Christian ministers pushing for immigration reform, even suggesting that the Bible requires illegals to receive work permits, are out of touch with their flock of hundreds of millions, according to an extraordinary new poll that revealed the sharp division among evangelicals worshipers and their leaders.
 
On the eve of a major Christian convention Monday, the new NumbersUSA poll provided in advance to Secrets found that just 12 percent of 1,000 likely evangelical voters believe that the Old Testament verses on the “stranger among us” mean the government should give work permits and legal status to illegal immigrants.
 
In addition, 29 percent said the border should be shut to future immigration and that the government and employers should offer jobs, and even higher than minimum wage pay, first to poor Americans, especially blacks, Hispanics and younger workers.

Jon Feere is the Legal Policy Analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies.

 
For months, some Republicans in the House of Representatives have been promising to introduce immigration legislation that would legalize a significant portion of illegal aliens living in the United States. Though no text has been released, one of the more high-profile GOP proposals is known as the Kids Act, an amnesty that would provide legal status to an as yet unknown number of presumably younger illegal aliens.
 
Many questions about how the Kids Act might operate remain unanswered. But if the amnesty is similar to the often-introduced but always-rejected Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, it may contain a number of problematic provisions that raise the following questions:
 
1. Will the Kids Act Amnesty Only Benefit Minors?Advocates of the DREAM Act and the Kids Act sell their amnesty by focusing entirely on sympathetic young children. But even though the "M" in the acronymous DREAM Act stands for "Minors", the amnesty has never been limited to people 17 years of age or younger and most beneficiaries would, in fact, be adults. While some versions of the DREAM Act restricted recipients to illegal aliens under age 35, the most recent version had no upper age limit. But advocates know that infants and toddlers make for better marketing and so children are exploited in the push to legalize millions of adult illegal aliens who are legally and morally culpable of various immigration-related crimes.
 
The age of initial entry is also an issue. While an infant has certainly not begun to identify with a nationality, teenagers certainly identify with their homelands and have embraced their languages and cultures, not least through attending school there for many years. In other words, their identities have already been formed. To suggest that such individuals "know no other home than the United States", as amnesty advocates do, is simply not accurate for those who enter illegally at an older age.
 
It is possible that the Kids Act will only benefit minors, but if it involves dishonest marketing it will make the amnesty a tough sell. Thus far, the proposal sounds like it is being designed to convert President Obama's lawless Deferred Action decree — which legalizes illegal aliens as old as 30 — into actual law. Instead of going after Obama for making an end run around Congress and the Constitution, the GOP is apparently following his lead, thereby encouraging similar lawlessness in the future.