Though the Obama administration has insisted that illegal immigrant children from Central America are flooding across the border primarily to escape rampant violence, a leaked intelligence report concludes that is not necessarily the case, especially because the murder rate in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras has declined since 2012.
Democrats like Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley have said the illegal immigrant children should be granted refugee status and asylum, and the White House said Monday that many of the kids would “likely” qualify for asylum.
But according to an “elite, law-enforcement sensitive El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) intel report from July 7, 2014” that Breitbart Texas obtained, “violence is likely not the principal factor driving the increase” in the migration of illegal immigrant children. The report notes that United Nations statistics show “a decline in per capita homicide rates” in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador since fiscal year 2011.
According to the report, the United Nations interviewed 302 migrants in 2013, and not even a majority (43%) said they were fleeing “violence from gangs or organized crime as a factor leaving their country.” In fact, 44% did not even “cite fear of serious harm as a deciding factor for leaving.”
While the murder rate was declining in Central American nations, President Barack Obama enacted, via executive fiat, his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012, and the number of illegal immigrant children from Central America who have unlawfully entered the country has spiked since then.
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.” After 6,560 illegal immigrants unlawfully entered the country in 2011, 13,635 – twice as many as in the previous year – entered the country in the fiscal year after Obama enacted his temporary amnesty program. Federal officials estimate that 90,000 illegal immigrant children will enter the country this fiscal year and another 150,000 more will try to next year.
Though the Obama administration has engaged in various public relations campaigns in Central America to discourage migrants from making the treacherous journey to America, the damage may already have been done. The report also found that 219 of the 230 illegal immigrant children interviewed said the primary reason that compelled them to make the journey to America was the belief that they would receive “free passes” to indefinitely remain in the country once they made it across the border.
As Breitbart Texas noted, EPIC contains representatives from a host of law enforcement agencies, including:
the Drug Enforcement Administration; Department of Homeland Security; Customs & Border Protection; Immigration & Customs Enforcement; U.S. Coast Guard; Federal Bureau of Investigation; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; Department of Transportation; Internal Revenue Service; U.S. Department of the Interior; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; U.S. Department of Defense/IC; Joint Task Force-North; Joint Interagency Task Force-South; Texas Department of Public Safety; Texas Air National Guard; National Guard Counter Narcotics Bureau; Department of State; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Union Pacific Railroad Police; Kansas City Southern Railroad Police; El Paso Police Department; and the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.
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