Obama official says immigrant kids draining funds

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Homeland Security agency responsible for removing immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally will run out of money by mid-August unless Congress approves President Barack Obama's emergency request for $3.7 billion to help deal with a flood of child immigrants crossing the border illegally without their parents, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson says.

Additionally, Customs and Border Protection, whose 20,000-plus Border Patrol agents are responsible for arresting illegal border crossers, will be out of money by mid-September at the "current burn rate," Johnson told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday as he defended the president's emergency budget request.

Johnson said if Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol run out of money, the Homeland Security Department "would need to divert significant funds from other critical programs just to maintain operations."

While Johnson and other administration officials made their pitch for the extra money, outlines of a possible compromise to more quickly deport minors arriving from Central America emerged. More than 57,000 child immigrants, mostly from Central America, have been caught crossing the Mexican border since Oct. 1.

Because of enormous backlogs in the immigration court system, the result in the current crisis is that minors streaming in from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are released to relatives or others in the U.S. with notices to appear at long-distant court hearings that many of them never will attend.

Republicans demanded quicker deportations for Central American immigrant children, which the White House initially had supported but left out of its emergency spending proposal after complaints from immigrant advocates and some Democrats. On Thursday, the top House of Representatives and Senate Democrats pointedly left the door open to faster deportations.

Bill Clinton lost reelection for governor of Arkansas because of that!

“One of those destinations was Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where one-term governor Bill Clinton was turned out of office after riots occurred. The Mariel Boatlift became a cautionary tale to politicians for the next two decades; a lesson seemingly forgotten by President Obama’s team.”

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Initially, the Carter administration had an open-arms policy in regard to Cuban immigrants. Cubans were immediately granted refugee status and all the rights that went with it. Additionally, public opinion towards Cuban refugees was initially favorable.

This situation changed when it was discovered that the refugees included criminals and people from Cuba’s mental hospitals. Castro arranged for the inclusion of criminals and people with mental illness (who were still stigmatized at the time) among the political and economic refugees in order to rid Cuba of undesirables and to damage the image of Cuban exiles.[citation needed] This included homosexuals, such as the poet Reinaldo Arenas. United States media accounts such as a May 11, 1980 New York Times article, and the 1983 movie Scarface, suggested that the refugees consisted largely of undesirables.

The Cuban government subsequently announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so, and an exodus by boat started shortly afterward. The exodus was organized by Cuban-Americans with the agreement of Cuban president Fidel Castro. The exodus started to have negative political implications for U.S. president Jimmy Carter when it was discovered that a number of the exiles had been released from Cuban jails and mental health facilities.

After May 11, 1980, editorial pages of The Miami Herald and other newspapers began to question the wisdom of uncontrolled immigration. It wasn’t just a reaction to the hundreds of pictures taken that day. May 11 also broke all previous records for daily arrivals: 4,588 refugees aboard 58 boats. By nightfall, the total number of refugees that had been clocked in Key West since April 21, when the first boat arrived, had reached 37,000, a number equal to 10 percent of Miami’s total population at the time.

Thus, the narrative of Mariel shifted from one in which thousands of Cubans were fleeing Communism in pursuit of freedom to one in which, in the words of the New York Times columnist James Reston, Fidel Castro was “exporting his failures.”

Before the year was out, President Jimmy Carter had lost his bid for re-election; so had Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, in part because many of the refugees had ended up in his state, at Fort Chaffee. And the Mariel Cubans soon realized they were unwanted. Then, in 1983, came “Scarface,” starring Al Pacino as the violent, cocaine-crazed Mariel refugee, Tony Montana. To this day, some Mariel Cubans don’t admit that they left Cuba in 1980.

There is no doubt that Castro sent criminals in the boatlift. He did it, by most accounts, for three reasons: to get rid of malcontents and misfits; to try to show that those who wanted to abandon his revolution were the scum of society, not hardworking revolutionaries; and to punish the United States, as part of his longstanding antagonism toward Washington.

Statistics released by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the time revealed that 600 people with serious mental problems and 1,200 who were suspected of committing serious crimes in Cuba were among the 125,000 Cubans who arrived in the boatlift. But, by 1987, 3,800 Mariel Cubans were serving sentences for crimes committed in the United States, and another 3,800 were in indefinite detention after completing sentences.

About 2,300 of those ended up in federal prisons in Oakdale, La., and Atlanta. In 1987, when the government announced that it was ready to resume the deportation of those included in the 1984 list, the detainees took over the prisons and rioted for days, ceasing only when the Justice Department agreed to establish review panels to examine each case and release those who were fit to rejoin society.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/weekinreview/16ojito.html?_r=0

The first refugees were processed at Eglin Air Force Base in south Florida. Of the 6,400 Marielitos received before May 2, fifty-five were found to have criminal records. (This counters frequently reported rumors of the time, persisting to the present, that the Cuban government forced thousands of criminals and insane persons onto the boats in Mariel harbor. Popular belief in this rumor may explain the negative reaction of many Arkansans to the presence of Cuban refugees in northwest Arkansas.) Overwhelmed by the effort to handle thousands of refugees in one location, the U.S. government announced plans to use Fort Chaffee as a temporary center for housing and processing refugees.

Between May 9 and May 18, 19,048 Cuban refugees were transported from Florida to Fort Chaffee. Some were quickly processed and released to family members, friends, or other sponsors. Others, lacking sponsors, were held for a longer period of time. At this time, with the refugees living there, Fort Chaffee had become the eleventh largest city in Arkansas. The presence of the Marielitos there, though, was disturbing to many residents of Barling, the small town near the fort. Because the Cubans were not prisoners, soldiers were told at various times that violence or threats of violence in order to keep them on government property were not permitted. By May 20, twenty-one Cubans had left the fort; on May 22, thirty more attempted to leave. The next week, more Marielitos (newspaper reports said 350) left the fort through an unguarded gate. Governor Bill Clinton ordered the National Guard to assist local, county, and state police to prevent refugees from leaving the fort.

On May 29, guards and police officers faced an advance of roughly 1,000 Marielitos out the gate of the fort; all were stopped and returned. Some were halted on the state highway near the town of Barling. On June 1, between 2,000 and 3,000 Marielitos rioted on the fort property. Four buildings were set on fire; sixty-two injuries were reported (including five guards), but there were no deaths. Newspaper reports described the citizens of Barling and other area communities arming themselves for protection against an anticipated Cuban refugee invasion. Governor Clinton gave Gene Eidenberg—the White House official whom President Carter had placed in charge of the Cuban refugee issue—a tour of Barling the night of June 1–2, impressing upon him the danger of confrontation between Marielitos and local residents. On June 2, stronger security standards were issued, and a promise was made that no additional Cuban refugees would be sent to Arkansas.

Upset with the slowness of the screening and processing, Cuban groups staged hunger strikes and occasionally riots. In June, it was estimated that the federal government was spending $1 million each day on Fort Chaffee alone. Later that same month, Governor Clinton sent a bill to the federal government for $213,850 spent by the State of Arkansas due to the Marielitos. A $664,000 grant from the federal Office of Education provided English classes to the Cuban refugees temporarily housed in Arkansas.

Allegations of brutality or torture by U.S. soldiers and guards were occasionally published; although five Fort Chaffee guards were indicted over charges of beating refugees, no one was ever convicted because of these allegations. At the end of July, twelve government workers were removed from their responsibilities at Fort Chaffee after evidence was shown that they were using their contact with the refugees to draw them into The Way, an organization widely regarded as a religious cult.

By the middle of September, fewer than 3,000 Marielitos remained at Fort Chaffee. On September 20, the federal government announced plans to consolidate unprocessed refugees at Fort Chaffee to spare them the cold winters of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The American government transferred 643 Marielitos from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to Fort Chaffee and began moving what would total 3,236 refugees from Camp McCoy in Wisconsin. By October 10, 1980, Marielitos had also been moved from Pennsylvania to Arkansas, raising the Cuban population of Fort Chaffee to over 8,300.

That month, a political commercial for Frank White, Republican candidate for governor of Arkansas, suggested that Governor Clinton had failed to protect the citizens of Arkansas from having dangerous Cubans in the state; the TV commercial included footage of the 1,000 Marielitos leaving Fort Chaffee on May 29. Though it is impossible to measure all the factors that determine the outcome of an election, Clinton is among those who felt that the association of the Cuban refugee problem with Clinton’s term as governor led to White’s victory.

Aftermath
On January 4, 1981, 5,893 Marielitos remained at Fort Chaffee; the last twenty-three Cubans left the fort on February 4, 1982. Records report that 25,390 Cubans had been housed at the fort after arriving in Florida.

http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=4248

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