Ambitious Democrat Maryland Governor and former Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley is insisting that the illegal immigrant children flooding across the border from Central America should be treated as “refugees” and given asylum so they are not sent back to “certain death.”
But the murder rate in Baltimore while O’Malley was mayor was often greater than those in the countries that the illegal immigrants are fleeing. Nearly 75 percent of the illegal immigrant children who are unlawfully entering the country are arriving from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. O’Malley, a potential 2016 presidential candidate currently languishing at one percent in the polls, criticized those said wanted to send children back to countries where they would would be “recruited into gangs” and die “a violent death.”
According to a 2013 United Nations report, Honduras has the world’s top homicide rate at 91 per 100,000 people. But El Salvador’s and Guatemala’s rivals Baltimore’s during O’Malley’s tenure as mayor. El Salvador, which ranks fourth, has a murder rate of 41.2 per 100,000 and Guatemala, which ranks fifth, has a murder rate of 39.9 per 100,000.
During O’Malley’s last five years as Baltimore’s mayor, the city’s homicide rate was higher than Guatemala’s and El Salvador’s. And O’Malley’s final year in office was the most murderous of his eight-year tenure. According to official data, Baltimore’s homicide rates remained high during O’Malley’s tenure:
2000: 40.3 (per 100,000)
2001: 38.7
2002: 37.7
2003: 41.9
2004: 43.5
2005: 42.0
2006: 43.3
2007: 45.2
Residents in O’Malley’s state and former city are frustrated with the federal government’s handling of the illegal immigrant children. This weekend, residents and local officials in Carroll County, Maryland forced the Health and Human Services Department to halt its plans to transport illegal immigrants to an Army Reserve facility 35 miles from Baltimore.
And last Friday, as Breitbart News reported, Elaine, “a black caller from Baltimore, Maryland told Laura Ingraham on her radio show that she was ‘living a nightmare’ because her ‘whole neighborhood is so violent.’ She wanted to know where she could get refugee status in her own country.”
“There’s so much crime,” she said. “I have gangs everywhere here in Baltimore! I can’t let my daughter ride her bicycle outside — I can’t do anything, Laura! I’m trapped here.”
Elaine said Democrats like President Barack Obama “want billions to help illegal immigrant children, but ‘nobody is saying a word’ about poor Americans or Americans trapped in violent neighborhoods.”
“Well, what about my neighborhood? You don’t have to do it in Beverly Hills, but in the inner cities where we are suffering,” she said. “My children cannot play outside. I cannot take my trash out without locking the door — it’s awful. Who is going to give us anything? Where can I get asylum? Where can I get refugee status? I don’t know what I can do. Nobody cares what happens to my children.”
As Breitbart News has noted, “at least 57,000 illegal immigrants, mostly from Central America, have crossed the border since October of last year, and another 150,000 are estimated to do so next year. The number of illegal immigrant children flooding across the border spiked just after Obama enacted his temporary amnesty program for certain DREAMers in 2012.
As the Christian Science Monitor noted, “during the decade preceding fiscal year 2012, the federal government agency tasked with caring for unaccompanied minors who cross the border illegally dealt with an average of 7,000 to 8,000 cases a year.” In fiscal year 2011, there were 6,560, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. But during the fiscal year after Obama enacted DACA, “the number jumped to 13,625” and has significantly increased since, with officials expecting at least 90,000 illegal immigrant children to unlawfully enter the country this fiscal year.
The Obama administration has recently started a public relations campaign in Central America to discourage migrants from leaving their countries. But many migrants who made the treacherous journey to America have said they did so because they were enticed by the Obama administration’s actions and words and believed they would not be deported once they unlawfully crossed the border.
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