On Monday, Nebraska Republican Senate nominee Ben Sasse urged President Barack Obama to fly to Central America and directly–and unambiguously–tell Central Americans that America will not give migrants amnesty if they make it across the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The American people are sick and tired of political gamesmanship,” Sasse says to Obama in a “Border Crisis” video. “Go to Central America and stop the bleeding.”
Calling the border crisis a “human tragedy,” Sasse says, “The only two questions that should matter to Americans, to human parents everywhere, at this moment are these: Why is this happening? And how do we stop it?”
He said that Obama, “whether deliberately or not,” has let the “belief take hold” that migrants will be given amnesty, and that “is the reason that we have this crisis today.”
“President Obama needs to go to Central America this week and make a major speech,” Sasse says. “He needs to say to the people of Latin America, ‘The United States’ borders are not open, we are not going to have amnesty. Please, keep your babies with you, don’t break up your families, don’t load your kids onto trains.”
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez said last week that the “lack of clarity” of America’s immigration laws is luring migrants from his country to America. Sasse mentioned a July U.S. El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) report, which Breitbart Texas first obtained, that found that “94 percent of these kids and their families who are coming to our border say they are doing it because they believe that President Obama is currently giving amnesty and citizenship to all Central American kids, and then subsequently their families, if they show up on our southern border now.”
There have been nearly 60,000 illegal immigrant juveniles who have been apprehended at the border since October of last year. Federal officials expect at least 150,000 more will be in the next fiscal year. The number of illegal immigrant juveniles who have been caught at the border drastically spiked after Obama enacted his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for certain DREAMers in 2012. Since then, the murder rates in Central American nations have declined.
“The level of inactivity by the President here is just stunning,” Sasse says, especially in light of such reports and data. “I’ve been talking to a lot of Nebraskans the last few days, and they want to say this to him: ‘Mr. President, you are not a passive actor here, you’re not primarily a partisan fund-raiser; you’re not just an observer just along for a ride–you’re the leader of the Free World. Get on a plane and go solve this problem.'”
He emphasizes that “the time to act is now,” especially since “little kids, many of them barely out of diapers,” are “being loaded onto the rooftops of trains as we speak today” because “of a false impression that the President could fix.”
“Every day that this is allowed to continue, more little kids are going to get hurt–more human trafficking, more assaults, and more grief,” he says. “The central problem here isn’t the 50,000 kids who have already survived the journey. We can solve that. We can figure out how to expedite their processing. The real problem is the untold millions that could be coming this way in the coming weeks and months, risking the same fate as some of those who have already been lost.”
Sasse then asks, “How many more kids are going to be put on top of trains? Half-a-million? A million? Five million? Does anybody really know? How many more will be hurt and lost on their way north?”
“This problem should already have been fixed,” he says. “Mr. President, the time to act is now. Not out of a political motive but because it’s the right thing to do and because you’re a dad too.”
Sasse tells Obama that this “is actually one of those places where your pen and your phone – actually, your megaphone – is needed.”
“Use it,” he says. “Let’s fix the problem.”
After winning the GOP Senate nomination earlier in the year, Sasse is favored to win the general election in November.