Johnson: “This is shameful what has happened”
Click here to watch Sen. Johnson’s full opening remarks.
“We have to recognize what our policies are doing. We took a trip down to Central America – visited Guatemala and Honduras with Sen. Heitkamp and Sen. Carper and Sen. Peters. In meeting with the President of Honduras, one of his requests of our delegation was – would you please look at your laws and end the ambiguity in your laws that actually incentivize our children, their future, from leaving our country and coming to America. And the tragedy is they come in to some of these circumstances because we’ve become efficient at processing and dispersing this and sweeping it under the rug. We have to end that sweeping under the rug process, recognize the reality and change our laws.”
Sen. Johnson also highlighted how the crisis at our border is far from over. In fact, a new surge is occurring today. “Look at where we are in just the first quarter of 2016. [In] 2014, I mean the massive surge, the crisis level, we had, again, a total of 51,705 in that entire fiscal year, but in that first quarter there were about 8,600. We are already up to 14,000 in the first quarter of 2016. Why isn’t this big news? Again, it is because we have become more efficient at apprehending, processing, disbursing, and we see the horrific results of that efficiency.”
For first quarter apprehensions of unaccompanied children between FY2009 – FY2016 click here.
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