Tag: GUATEMALA

One-Third of Guatemalans Want to Move to America

CAP

By Jose Nino

A recent survey shows that more than one-third of Guatemalans want to move to the United States.

The survey was conducted by the Association for Research and Social Studies and Barometro de las Americas which found that 39.2 percent of Guatemalans. 85 percent of those migrants would like to come to the United States.

Daniel Horowitz notes that roughly 5.6 million Guatemalans would like to come to America.

Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre highlighted how 58 percent of respondents claimed they had relatives in the United States. This same article attributes family reunifications and “lack of employment and poverty” as the motives for Guatemalans’ desire to migrate stateside.

The Center for Immigration Studies reports that “the number of immigrants from Central America (legal and illegal) has grown 28-fold since 1970, from 118,000 to nearly 3.3 million in 2018 — six times faster than the overall immigrant population.”

Other costs to immigration include assimilation struggles, which have been on display in immigrant communities throughout Europe.

These factors have American voters worried, with GOP voters viewing immigration as the #1 issue during the 2020 elections.

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One in Five Salvadorans Now Live in US — Remittances Account for 20% of Country’s GDP – Democrats Support This

by Jim Hoft May 8, 2019

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According to Gallup five million third world migrants from Latin America to the United States in the next 12 months.

And according to Breitbart.com an estimated 42 million more say they want to enter the country.

One-fifth of El Salvador already resides in the US.

There currently are at least 1.1 million Salvadoran immigrants in the United States.

The number represents about one-fifth (19.1 percent) of the total population of El Salvador (5.7 million in 2007 according to the Salvadoran Department of Statistics and Censuses).

Remittances back home make up 20% of El Salvador’s economy.

Over 1% of Guatemala and Honduras entered the US since September.

This is an invasion.  And Democrats support this.

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Ramos calls for open borders: ‘Nobody can stop them’…

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By

TONY LEE

Jorge Ramos: Amnesty for Illegals, Migrants—‘Nothing We Can Do to Stop Them’

Univision anchor Jorge Ramos said on Tuesday evening that he believes the solution to the migrant crisis at U.S.-Mexico border is to just legalize illegal immigrants because “nobody can really stop them” from entering the United States.

“The U.S. economy has been absorbing them and it seems that we have to realize that the only way to deal with this is in a legal way,” Ramos told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Just to understand that legally they are going to keep coming and there is really nothing we can do to stop them.”

Ramos said Americans have to understand that 300,000 to a million illegal immigrants have entered the United States every year for decades and if more “of these immigrants want to come to the United States, it is very difficult to stop them at the border.” Ramos added that “Central American countries and Mexico are not the immigration police of Donald Trump” and insisted that no matter how much money is spent trying to solve the migrant crisis, governments “simply don’t have the power to stop that from becoming reality.”

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“But the truth is that, Anderson, nobody can stop them,” Ramos said. “Nobody can really stop them.”

Ramos, the amnesty advocate who has said that the United States has a responsibility to “absorb” the caravan migrants, made his remarks just a week after Border Patrol officials announced that they are seeing the “highest total of apprehensions and encounters in over a decade.”

President Donald Trump will head to the border town of Calexico, California, on Friday and has threatened to close the U.S.-Mexico border if Mexico does not do more to curb the migrant caravans. This weekend, Trump announced that he will be cutting off aid to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, but Ramos said doing so will only encourage more migrants to trek to the United States.

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Earlier this year, Ramos called for the legalization of all the country’s illegal immigrations while saying that the border wall is a “symbol of hate and racism” for “those who want to make America white again.” He has also insisted that Americans must “accept” that the U.S.-Mexico border is “nothing more than an invention.”

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Texans Living Over 70 Miles North of Border Terrorized by Illegals, Cartels

By Dan Lyman Tuesday, April 02, 2019

Terrified residents desperate for border wall, protection

Americans living roughly 75 miles north of the Mexican border are being terrorized by foreign gang members and illegal aliens, according to a resident of Encino, Texas, who says a border wall is needed to protect U.S. citizens.

A woman identified only as “Soila” told NBC affiliate KVEO that “hundreds” of illegal aliens pass through her neighborhood on any given day, while Mexican cartel members threaten her family and friends — and even attempt to invade her property.

“We no longer can go out without a gun; you can’t go for a walk,” Soila said. “My neighbor and his daughter were chased by men with masks. She was riding her 4-wheeler down 281 — they saw her and they jumped the fence and started chasing her.”

“Huge groups — and we’re not talking 10 or 15, we’re talking about 40, 70 — and the last few months it’s getting worse. They really need to go after the coyotes because we have seen so many abandoned families, women with children just left out there. These people are not educated — they don’t know east or west, they don’t know where the sun rises and sets. You ask them, ‘Have you ever seen a map of Texas?’ They don’t even know how big Texas is.”

Soila tells of multiple confrontations between her husband and gang members who use intimidation to silence and control opposition, adding that her neighbors are scared to call Border Patrol due to threats.

“12 young men dressed in black — my husband automatically stops, and they just put a finger to their lips and it’s like, ‘You better not say anything,’” Soila said. “They know what we drive, they know where we live.”

“There was a young man, [my husband] kept telling him to stop right at the gate, but he kept coming. My husband cocked the gun, and right on his left-hand side, 12-15 more pop out. They were trying to get in towards the house.”

Soila says a border wall is desperately needed, and that those who oppose it are foolish or protecting their short-term financial interests.

“Whoever tells you there is no danger out here and we don’t need the wall, they have no idea what they’re talking about,” she said. “They don’t care as long as the businesses keep thriving in McAllen or Brownsville.”

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MEXICO WARNS: ‘Mother of all caravans’ pushes north…

CAP

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico is bracing for the possible arrival of the “mother of all caravans,” even as doubts arise over whether the group of Central American migrants will be all that big.

Interior Secretary Olga Sanchez Cordero has said a caravan of migrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala could be forming.

“We have information that a new caravan is forming in Honduras, that they’re calling ‘the mother of all caravans,’ and they are thinking it could have more than 20,000 people,” Sanchez Cordero said Wednesday.

But a WhatsApp group calling for people to gather Saturday in El Salvador to set off for Guatemala only has about 206 members.

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Activist Irineo Mujica, who has accompanied several caravans in Mexico, said reports about “the mother of all caravans” were false, claiming “this is information that (U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen) Nielsen is using to create fear.”

His group, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, said in a statement there was no evidence the new caravan would be that large, noting “there has never been a caravan of the size that Sanchez Cordero mentioned.” Indeed, past caravans hit very serious logistical hurdles at 7,000-strong.

He and others suspect the administration of President Donald Trump may be trying to fan fears of a big caravan to turn the U.S. national agenda back to the immigration issue.

Honduran activist Bartolo Fuentes, who accompanied a large caravan last year, dismissed the new reports as “part of the U.S. government’s plans, something made up to justify their actions.”

Later Thursday, Honduras’ deputy foreign minister, Nelly Jerez, denied that a “mother of all caravans” was forming in her country.

“There is no indication of such a caravan,” Jerez said. “This type of information promotes that people leave the country.”

A caravan of about 2,500 Central Americans and Cubans is currently making its way through Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. The largest of last year’s caravans in Mexico contained about 7,000 people at its peak, though some estimates ran as high as 10,000 at some points.

Mexico appears to be both tiring of the caravans and eager not to anger the United States. It has stopped granting migrants humanitarian visas at the border, and towns along the well-traveled route to Mexico City sometimes no longer allow caravans to spend the night.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Thursday that Mexico is doing its part to fight immigrant smuggling.

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“We are going to do everything we can to help. We don’t in any way want a confrontation with the U.S. government,” he said. “It is legitimate that they are displeased and they voice these concerns.”

Sanchez Cordero has pledged to form a police line of “containment” around Mexico’s narrow Tehuantepec Isthmus to stop migrants from continuing north to the U.S. border.

The containment belt would consist of federal police and immigration agents, but such highway blockades and checkpoints have not stopped large and determined groups of migrants in the past.

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Border Patrol says detention centers are full; Starts releasing migrants…

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske And Molly O’Toole

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MCALLEN, TEXAS

The Border Patrol released 50 recently apprehended migrants here Tuesday, the first of several hundred border-crossers who officials say will soon be freed because there is no room to hold them.

Normally, the Border Patrol would transfer the migrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be “processed” and in many cases placed in detention facilities. But officials said that both agencies have run out of space due to a recent influx of Central American families.

Immigrant advocates suggested the release was intended to create chaos at the border and further President Donald Trump’s argument that there is a national emergency there.

“Why do this now? It doesn’t make sense,” said Zenen Jaimes Perez, advocacy director for the Texas Civil Rights Project, which sent lawyers to the McAllen bus station to assist the migrants. “This is not something they’ve done before.”

He pointed out that the federal government has dealt with bigger influxes of migrants in the recent past.

A Border Patrol official — who spoke on the condition that he not be identified — denied that the release was a political stunt and said that crowding the facilities would threaten the safety of agents and migrants.

“It is a crisis,” he said. “It’s not a self-proclaimed crisis.”

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The agency plans to make similar releases along other parts of the border, he said.

In February, the Border Patrol caught 66,450 migrants, a 38 percent increase from January and one of the highest monthly totals of the last decade. More than half of those arrested were parents and children, and 40 percent of those were in the Rio Grande Valley.

The number of families arriving in the Rio Grande Valley sector since October has jumped nearly 210 percent over the same period in the last fiscal year, according to Customs and Border Protection reports.

Still, migrant apprehensions are far below levels seen for decades until the mid-2000s, when they reached more than a million per year before falling dramatically.

That hasn’t stopped Trump from declaring a national emergency at the southern border in order to tap into billions in federal funding for his long-promised border wall, with administration officials pointing to the spike in migrant families as evidence of a crisis. In recent weeks, officials have warned the U.S. immigration system is “at a breaking point.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is scheduled to visit McAllen Thursday.

Border Patrol spokesman Carlos Diaz said the 50 migrants were given notices to appear in court and released to Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, which operates a local respite center.

He said 200 more migrants would be released to the center Wednesday.

Volunteers in the area are already accustomed to helping large numbers of newly released migrants. Elizabeth Cavazos, a leader of the migrant advocacy group Angry Tias & Abuelas of RGV, said ICE typically releases 300 to 500 migrants a day in McAllen.

But additional releases in large numbers by the Border Patrol are likely to strain the system, she said.

“I feel like they’re trying to put some stress on the volunteer and advocacy groups, all of us touting ‘There’s no crisis down here,’” Cavazos said. “Maybe it’s for them to save face because they’ve been calling this a border crisis and everything’s peachy keen down here. That’s what it feels like.”

The respite center is already at capacity, with 900 migrants spread between the main facility and a temporary site opened this week.

The Border Patrol has been moving 700 to 800 migrants a day to ICE over the last week. But that was 300 a day less than the Border Patrol wanted to transfer.

As a result, the Border Patrol’s Central Processing Center in McAllen quickly filled, leading to the release this week.

Another possible factor in the release is that the agency has been under pressure to improve conditions for migrants since two Guatemalan children died in its custody in December.

It is not the first time the federal government has released large numbers of migrants. During the Christmas holiday, ICE officials dropped more than a thousand migrants in downtown El Paso, straining local churches and nonprofit shelters, which had to pay to house migrants in hotels.

Before the release of migrants Tuesday, the Border Patrol official said his agency notified McAllen Mayor Jim Darling and Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.

Many more migrants remain in detention awaiting court hearings on asylum claims. Record numbers of asylum seekers have contributed to a backlog of 830,000 cases.

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More Than 2,000 People In ICE Custody QUARANTINED In Outbeak Of Infectious Diseases

By EMILY ZANOTTI

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers say that more than two thousand illegal immigrants, currently being held in ICE custody, are quarantined for exhibiting signs of infectious diseases, including the mumps.

CNN reports that the number of asylum seekers and other immigrant detainees, being held along the border in towns like El Paso, Texas, has spiked since last year, and that ICE and United States Customs and Border Protection are dealing with more seriously ill immigrants than every before.

“As of March 7, 2019, there was a total of 2,287 detainees cohorted for exposure to a detainee with a contagious condition,” an ICE spokesman said in a statement to media made earlier this week.

“In the past 12 months, there have been health investigations at 51 ICE detention facilities for mumps, chickenpox and influenza, according to [ICE officials],” CNN reports. “There have been 236 reported cases of mumps, with another 16 suspected cases during this time period.”

At least three children have died in CBP custody since November, after contrating life-threatening illnesses and infections on their journey north to the United States-Mexico border from their homes in Honduras or Guatemala. In at least two cases, border patrol tried to provide emergency medical care but they were simply too late; the childrens’ illnesses had advanced too far.

American immigration authorities are used to illegal immigrants and asylum seekers showing up to border patrol facilities exhibiting signs of illness, but over the past several years, most have eventually been disagnosed with influenza or the chicken pox — diseases that are still fairly common in the United States.

This past year, however, ICE and CBP officials have seen a major uptick in migrants with more serious, life-threatening illnesses, and dangerous communicable diseases like the mumps, which is spread through contact with bodily fluids and which could begin an outbreak among Americans if infected people are allowed to enter the general population.

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The most serious outbreak has been in Texas, where around 200 people, aged 13-66, in a single border patrol facility are currently under quarantine for the mumps.

The situation poses problems not just for Americans, but also for migrants, and for the border patrol, whose facilities can’t withstand an influx of illegal immigrants with serious medical issues.

The New York Times reports that border facilities are already woefully understaffed to handle the sharp increase in asylum seekers — border patrol can now see up to 2,000 people crossing the border per day — and the facilities lag even further behind when called upon to handle hundreds of patients with life-threatening illnesses.

Border patrol knows the situation is critical, and is expected to announce major medical facility expansions “in the coming days,” the NYT says, and the Trump Administration is looking for a major health care provider to contract with the CBP to provide medical services — a contract they may be willing to pay more than $47 million to complete.

But the problem is that Border Protection isn’t a “humanitarian agency,” and isn’t supposed to be handling major disease outbreaks, leaving it at a loss for what to do about the thousands of criticially ill migrants who are showing up at the border every month.

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76K Migrants Entered Through Southwest Border in February — Most in 12 Years, Says CBP

CAP

By Bob Price

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) reports that 76,103 migrants appeared at ports of entry and illegally crossed between ports in February. This is the largest number of apprehensions and inadmissible migrants for a February reporting period in 12 years, CBP stated Tuesday.

Of the 76,103 migrants who came to the border seeking admission or illegally crossing between ports of entry, 62 percent were family units and unaccompanied minors. This presents both a border security and humanitarian crisis at our southwest border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan said in a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

United States Border Patrol Chief of Operations Brian Hastings told reporters that during February, Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 66,000 migrants who illegally crossed the border from Mexico between ports of entry. This is up from nearly 48,000 in January — a nearly 40 percent increase. When compared to the first five months of Fiscal Year 2018, this fiscal year has seen a 97 percent increase, he stated.

“A lot of folks look at that and they say, ‘we have seen numbers like that in the past,” Hastings explained. He said that many people do not understand the “significant change in the demographics of what we are seeing today is what presents us and our partners with a lot of challenges.”

The Border Patrol operations chief said that historically, agents have apprehended about 70 to 90 percent Mexican nationals. “We could apply a consequence to that demographic,” he stated. “We could return them quickly to Mexico.”

“Today, 70 percent of all of those we are arresting are from the (Central American) northern triangle — Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras,” Hastings continued. He explained that under current laws and court rulings there is no consequence to these migrants and they are nearly all released into the U.S. for an indefinite period of time.

“Without being able to deliver a consequence to these individuals for crossing our border, the Border Patrol has no reason to expect that this trend will decrease — in fact, we believe it will increase,” he surmised. “It’s well known at this time that immigrants with children will not be detained during the immigration proceedings. The word of mouth and social media quickly gets back to those in the northern triangle countries that ‘If you bring a child, you’ll be successful.”

Due to these circumstances, the number of cases of people falsely claiming to be family units has increased substantially. “From April 2018 through February 2019 we have had almost 2,400 fraudulent claims of families,” the operations chief explained. “Of those fraudulent claims, some are people who claim they are under 18 and they’re not. Others have actually been fraudulent familial claims.”

So far this fiscal year, Border Patrol agents apprehended 136,150 migrants claiming to be family units and 26,937 people claiming to be unaccompanied minors, according to the February Southwest Border Migration Report released Tuesday afternoon. This is a total of 163,087 family unit aliens (FMUA) and unaccompanied minors so far this year. In all of Fiscal Year 2018, Border Patrol agents only apprehended 157,248, the 2018 Southwest Border Migration Report stated.

Hastings and Commissioner McAleenan explained that these demographics present substantial challenges for the Border Patrol and CBP. In addition to the demographics, they explained that transnational criminal organizations (Mexican cartels) are shifting the crossing points to the most remote areas of the El Paso, Tucson, and Yuma Border Patrol Sectors and are crossing them in much larger groups in order to tie up Border Patrol resources.

The El Paso Sector witnessed a 1,697 percent increase in the number of family units apprehended in remote areas like the Antelope Wells crossing area. The Yuma and Tucson Sectors have both witnessed increases in excess of 230 percent. Other unsecured areas of the border including the Del Rio Sector in Texas saw an increase of nearly 400 percent over the previous February.

Commissioner McAleenan announced the formation of a new migrant processing center for the El Paso Sector to “provide one location for the processing of family units and children.”

The commissioner cautioned that the new facilities for processing migrants “will assist with managing the increased flows … The fact is that these solutions are temporary and this situation is not sustainable. Remote locations of the United States border are not safe places to cross and they are not places to seek medical care.”

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BETO: ‘WE STAND FOR AMERICA AND WE STAND AGAINST WALLS’

‘I’m glad the country is here to see us’

Feb 11, 2019 10:27 PM
By Tom Elliott

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:

O’ROURKE: “We stand for America and we stand against walls. We know there is no bargain in which we can sacrifice some of our humanity to gain a little of our security. We know that we deserve and will lose both of them if we do. We stand for the best traditions and values of this country. For our fellow humanity and that’s El Paso, Texas. I’m glad the country is here to see us.”

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Trump: ‘Crazy’ Democrats Making ’Brand New Demand’ to Stop Deportations

By Charlie Spiering

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President Donald Trump reacted Monday to new demands from House Democrats to cap the detention of illegal immigrants in the United States.

“The Democrats do not want us to detain, or send back, criminal aliens!” Trump wrote on Twitter. “This is a brand new demand. Crazy!”

Democrats on the bipartisan compromise border security committee to fund the wall issued a demand for a “cap” on the number of beds used for detained illegal immigrants.

“For far too long, the Trump administration has been tearing communities apart with its cruel immigration policies,” Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) said in a statement. “A cap on ICE detention beds will force the Trump administration to prioritize deportation for criminals and people who pose real security threats, not law-abiding immigrants who are contributing to our country.”

Roybal-Allard is one of the members of the conference committee looking for a compromise solution to Trump’s demand for $5.6 billion in wall funding to secure the border.

Trump also reacted to the new demands on Sunday.

“The Border Committee Democrats are behaving, all of a sudden, irrationally,” he wrote. “Not only are they unwilling to give dollars for the obviously needed Wall (they overrode recommendations of Border Patrol experts), but they don’t even want to take muderers (sic) into custody! What’s going on?”

Trump is expected to rally supporters in El Paso, Texas on Monday ahead of the new February 15 deadline to fund the government.

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