Illegal immigrants under the age of 18, including unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors, will likely cost taxpayers $2 billion next year, according to Reuters.
With the Obama administration already grappling with a veritable onslaught of unaccompanied children crossing the southern border into the United State, the flow is only expected to grow.
Reuters reports that administration officials are estimating that the number of these illegal immigrant minors are likely to double in 2015 to nearly 130,000, causing an increase in the cost to taxpayers from $868 million to $2 billion.
In March HHS estimated that 60,000 unaccompanied minors would be caught trying to cross the border this year. In FY 2011 a vastly few 6,560 unaccompanied minors were caught attempting to cross the border.
Many have pointed to the poverty and violence in Mexico and Central America as an impetus for these minors to see a better live northward to the United States.
Customs and Border Protection commissioner Gil Kerlikowske admitted at a House appropriations subcommittee hearing in April, however, that Obama administration policies have also been a factor in the increase of illegal youths crossing the border unaccompanied.
“The deferred action, the family reunification, is an issue,” Kerlikowske told the House panel. “But I’ve also looked at the surveys of some of these people that were talked to back in 2013. The violence within their own countries, Guatemala, Honduras –Honduras now having, I believe the highest homicide rate in the world — and the crime in El Salvador.”
Late last year a federal judge rebuked the Department of Homeland Security for reuniting unaccompanied illegal immigrant children with their illegal immigrant parents living in the United States.
“This Court is quite concerned with the apparent policy of the Department of Homeland Security (hereinafter ‘DHS’) of completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States,” United States District Judge for the Southern District of Texas Brownsville Division Andrew S. Hanen wrote in a December court order about the reunification of unaccompanied minors with their illegal parents living in the United States.
The situation has become so dire, with minors attempting to cross at the Southern border alone however, that DHS Sec. Jeh Johnson recently declared a “level-four condition of readiness” in the Rio Grande Valley. Lackland Air Force Base is also being used to house unaccompanied minors.
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