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29 views • October 30, 2018
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Migrant Caravan Puts Pressure on Border Security Loopholes

Della Sun
The migrant caravan from Central America is inching closer to the US-Mexico border. And AT LEAST eight hundreds troops have been approved to help intercept the group. On Friday, Defense Secretary James Mattis approved the deployment of active-duty troops to assist the Department of Homeland Security along the Southwest Border. They will help set up temporary barriers and offer transportation and medical support. It’s not yet clear where the caravan will land at the border, but THIS is the closest, and most likely spot -- Rio Grande Valley,Texas--Here every day almost six hundred illegal border crossers are processed. Right now the number of people in the caravan is somewhere between seven to fourteen thousand. Most of them are from Honduras and around seventy five percent are men. Last week at the Houston rally, President Trump called it an assault on the US. [SOUNDBITE #3, President Trump, Houston Rally] The Catch-and-release loophole allows illegal aliens to claim asylum, then stay and work in the US for years until their immigration court date. And most, fail to show up for it. The President wants to fix the problem by detaining asylum-seekers and illegal border crossers until their case is solved. For example, in Imperial, California a case for a non-detained individual takes an average of one thousand, four hundred and ninety days to complete. Meanwhile, for someone who IS detained, that number goes down to just one hundred and fourteen. The biggest obstacle here is the Flores Settlement Agreement. Under this law, adults with children are recognized as the LARGEST group of asylum-seekers—and they cannot be detained for more than twenty days—a deadline that cannot be met by by courts ALREADY processing about seven hundred thousand active cases. Another obstacle is the lack of detention space. When detention facilities get full, the Department of Homeland Security has to release the illegal immigrants into local communities. In June alone, the department helped house and care for an alien family population of up to twelve thousand people. Meanwhile the US is obligated to allow asylum-seekers to enter the country, and it is expected that many migrants in the current caravan will apply for it. [SOUNDBITE #1, Jeff Benjamin, 47, Engineer, Veteran @1:00-1:17 Many of the President’s supporters we talked to at the Houston rally echoed similar sentiments. [SOUNDBITE #2, Grace White @0:49-1:05 Vice President Mike Pence says that he’s learned from intelligence that the migrant caravan has been organized by leftist political organization. He told fox news “the American people, I think, see through this—they understand this is not a spontaneous caravan of vulnerable people.” He also added, Anyone coming up in this caravan should just turn around. They should go home, or they should apply for asylum in Mexico.”
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