On Friday, Vice President Joe Biden told Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández that illegal immigrant children who are flooding across the border will not qualify for amnesty under the Deferred Action program or the Senate’s amnesty bill that the White House has been pushing.
Biden, according to the White House, spoke to the Honduran President while on his way to “Guatemala to discuss a regional strategy to address the influx of unaccompanied children coming from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border” with “the Presidents of Guatemala and El Salvador, as well as representatives from the governments of Mexico.”
On Thursday, President Barack Obama told Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto that illegal immigrants coming across the border now would not qualify for amnesty as well. The White House’s recent rhetoric comes at a time when two in three Americans disapprove of how the Obama administration is handling the immigration issue, and illegal immigrants are not believing it, thinking they will receive “permits” to indefinitely remain in the United States if they make it across the border.
In March, Biden said that he thought illegal immigrants are “already American citizens.” He then walked back those comments in May. And during a commencement address in Miami, Florida in May, Biden said that it was only a matter of time before the Obama administration unilaterally stops deportations.
When a protester yelled, “stop deportations!” Biden responded by saying,”We’ll do that, too, kid, but let me finish my speech.”
Critics of the Obama administration’s immigration policy, like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, have accused the White House of exploiting illegal immigrant children to advance their political agenda.