Congressman Kildee spoke with me about the possibility that a small number of the unaccompanied alien children (UAC) who are flooding across the U.S. border could be housed temporarily at Wolverine Human Services in Vassar, in Michigan’s 5th District.

Kildee is a co-sponsor of legislation to increase spending on housing and adjudicating the exploding number of refugee claims being made by children from Central America who are crossing into the United States.  Since 2012 the number of such claims has been increasing dramatically.  In the case of these claims, increased spending on border security will not alleviate the problem, since the children who are flooding across the border are claiming refuge status.

The Wilberforce Act, signed by President Bush in 2008 as Kildee pointed out, has indeed made it more difficult to "turn the buses around."  This law does not apply to children coming from Mexico or Canada, however, which may explain why we have not seen the same explosion in claims coming from unaccompanied alien children from the countries on our border.  The question is whether the law should be changed to confer the same legal status to children coming from Central America, as applies to children from Mexico and Canada, or if we should attempt to speed up the process of adjudicating the exploding number of refugee claims, even if the majority of these claims turn out to be spurious.  I fear that until we see pictures of Central American children being returned to their home countries, rather than pictures of them being escorted into the U.S. to await a hearing on their claims, concerned parents in Central America will continue to send their children on the long and very dangerous journey through Mexico, often in the hands of dangerous criminals, to the U.S. border.

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