And yet they were caught on their heels…
##Obama aides were warned of brewing border crisis##
Nearly a year before President Obama declared a humanitarian crisis on the border,
a team of experts arrived at the Fort Brown patrol station in
Brownsville, Tex., and discovered a makeshift transportation depot for a
deluge of foreign children. Thirty Border Patrol agents were
assigned in August 2013 to drive the children to off-site showers, wash
their clothes and make them sandwiches. As soon as those children were
placed in temporary shelters, more arrived. An average of 66 were
apprehended each day on the border and more than 24,000 cycled through
Texas patrol stations in 2013. In a 41-page report to the Department of Homeland Security,
the team from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) raised alarms
about the federal government’s capacity to manage a situation that was
expected to grow worse.
The researchers’
observations were among the warning signs conveyed to the Obama
administration over the past two years as a surge of Central American
minors has crossed into south Texas illegally. More than 57,000 have
entered the United States this year, swamping federal resources and
catching the government unprepared.
The administration did too little to heed those warnings, according
to interviews with former government officials, outside experts and
immigrant advocates, leading to an inadequate response that contributed
to this summer’s escalating crisis.
Federal officials viewed the
situation as a “local problem,” said Victor Manjarrez Jr., a former
Border Patrol station chief who led the UTEP study. The research,
conducted last year, was funded by the Department of Homeland Security
and published in March. A broader crisis was “not on anyone’s radar,”
Manjarrez added, even though “it was pretty clear this number of kids
was going to be the new baseline.”
Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s domestic policy adviser, said the
administration and key agencies had made adjustments over time to deal
with the influx of children but then responded with urgency once federal
officials realized in May that the numbers would far exceed internal
projections of 60,000 minors crossing the border in 2014. Revised Border Patrol estimates now suggest the number could reach 90,000 by the end of September. Last
month, Obama ordered an emergency response overseen by the National
Security Council and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and he asked Congress to approve $3.7 billion in emergency funds. “What happened this year was . . .
off-the-charts different,” Muñoz said. “It was not the same pattern. We
assumed a significant increase, but this was not the same kind of trend
line.
“This trend was more like a hockey stick, going up and up
and up,” Muñoz added. “Nobody could have predicted the scale of the
increase we saw this year. The minute we saw it, we responded in an
aggressive way.”
But top officials at the White House and the
State Department had been warned repeatedly of the potential for a
further explosion in the number of migrant children since the crisis
began escalating two years ago, according to former federal officials
and others familiar with internal discussions. The White House was
directly involved in efforts in early 2012 to care for the children when
it helped negotiate a temporary shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.
“There were warning signs, operational folks raising red flags to high
levels in terms of this being a potential issue,” said one former senior
federal law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to talk candidly about internal operations.