$13 Mil to Help Central American Youths That Don’t Make it to U.S.
It’s not enough that the U.S. government is spending enormous sums to care for the recent influx of Central American illegal immigrants, the Obama administration also keeps sending large amounts of taxpayer dollars to the countries they came from to help those who stayed behind.
Judicial Watch first reported on this last year after discovering that the administration dedicated $2.5 million for juvenile justice reform in the Central American nations that had just bombarded the U.S. with tens of thousands of illegal alien minors. Officially coined Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) by the U.S. government, they came in herds from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala via Mexico. The Obama administration blamed the sudden surge on violence in the three countries even though they have long been plagued by serious crime and rampant bloodshed.
Now American taxpayers are funding the UACs education, housing and medical care in this country as well as programs back home for those who don’t make it north. For instance, the $2.5 million allocated last year will help “improve corrections administration and professionalism” in the Central American countries. It will also create opportunities for “re-socialization” of the offenders through community service, paid work or studies to learn a profession or trade and pay for legal representation. The administration claims the investment will help minimize the impact of international crime and illegal drugs on the United States, its citizens and partner nations.
This month Uncle Sam sent over another $13 million to provide job training to at-risk youth in El Salvador and Honduras. The goal is to help them develop “mark-relevant skills and secure good employment,” according to the official government announcement. It’s part of a four-year project called Youth Pathways-Central America and it’s expected to help 5,100 low-income youth, ages 14 to 20, who reside in areas with high rates of violence. Social services and emergency shelter will also be available and so will training services for 1,900 of the youth’s family members.
This is the same demographic that’s entered the U.S. in droves in the last year, 60,000 by the government’s latest count. They have mostly made their way into the country through the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, brought in dangerous diseases—including swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis— and occupied our military bases as shelters. Many have been disbursed throughout the U.S., igniting a crisis for overwhelmed public school districts nationwide. Last year Judicial Watch reported on a study that revealed states are spending an astounding $761 million a year to educate the UACs in public schools around the country.
This includes special Limited English Proficient (LEP) classes conducted in Spanish or in other indigenous Central American languages as well as free school meals for the new arrivals. In many cases the UACs have very little if any education, making the task all the more difficult. Texas and New York will get hit the hardest, the study reveals. Texas has the most UACs—5,280—and it will cost $78 million a year to educate them, the figures show. New York has less—4,244—but will spend more, $148 million, because evidently it’s more expensive to school kids in the state.
Soon Americans will inevitably get stuck with exorbitant incarceration costs for some of these UACs. Just a few weeks ago JW reported that many have joined the nation’s most violent street gang, Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13. The information comes from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which reveals in a 19-page report that MS-13 has emerged as a top tier gang in the state thanks to the new arrivals. A year earlier JW had already reported that gangs were actively recruiting UACs at shelters immediately after arriving in the U.S. and they were using Red Cross phones to communicate.
