Years ago, there was a movie called “A River Runs Through It” based on a novel by Norman Maclean. I didn’t see the movie, but the title has been running through my head for several days now.
Louie Gohmert, a Texas Congressman describes his recent trip to the river during the pre-dawn hours.
He saw pregnant women and those with nursing infants and small children, and many teenagers, 72 people in all that morning and a third of them were children unaccompanied by adults.
Border agents pulled on blue latex gloves when they saw them arriving. One told the Congressman that many of them have scabies, lice and even more serious infectious diseases that probably won’t be noticed until after they have traveled with others on buses and airplanes to unknown destinations in the US.
The Congressman also learned from the border patrol that there were only three agents assigned to this large place of crossing and that it remained pretty much undefended while the agents were working to process the steady flow of children and families.
This means that dangerous drug and weapons traffickers, as well as those involved in the human sex trade were free to conduct their lucrative and nefarious business of preying on the innocent children and youth crossing the border daily.
Many of the young illegals report horrific abuse at the hands of immigrant smugglers, including being raped, being physically assaulted, and being forced to perform slave labor to 'pay off' the costs of their transportation.
Remember my “just suppose” question a few weeks ago about how Lebanon city officials would handle it if the government sent a busload of illegal immigrant children to Lebanon and dropped them off at the corner of Jefferson and Commercial at midnight, leaving them to fend for themselves without supervision of any kind?
That is now happening in random cities throughout the United States. So far the government has refused to give advance notice to the communities to which they are busing or flying these children, citing privacy concerns.
U.S. Rep Henry Cuellar said this week that each one of these minors is costing U.S. taxpayers $252 a day. That’s just for sheltering and feeding them, but the real cost is bound to have a major impact upon the health of our own children here in the US.
An ENT specialist and other medical staff checking the children at one of the intake centers just this week report seeing children with tuberculosis, meningitis, swine flu, bacterial pneumonia, scabies and lice.
All these children will be integrated into classrooms across the nation this fall because the Department of Justice and Department of Education issued guidance documents to all schools on May 8, 2014 demanding compliance.
Lynn, Massachusetts is a microcosm of what may be happening all over the country if something isn’t done quickly.
The mayor of Lynn has given a good overview of what she has been dealing with since the school system there became overwhelmed with illegal minors, stating her town is “stressing almost every service from trash collection to healthcare”.
According to the school superintendent there, they had 128 illegal undocumented minors from Guatemala last year. They could not speak English or Spanish, but used a regional dialect which made it impossible for them to communicate with anyone at the school. She had to hire more staff, and the increase in students has impacted state testing scores and drop-out numbers.
The Public Health Director in Lynn has also had to hire additional staff members as well as starting a tuberculosis clinic due to the huge spike in cases.
I am aware that there are those who say we must take care of these children no matter what the cost, and they accuse those of us who are concerned about how it will affect American families of not having compassion and being hard of heart.
But as I wrote in my previous column, it doesn’t matter how much we do for them or how much money we throw at the problem, there comes a time when we just can’t do any more. It’s not a matter of compassion, it’s a matter of facing reality.
Besides, are we showing compassion as a nation when the White House puts out a false narrative about what we will do for the children thus providing an incentive for parents of small children to use their life savings to pay a smuggler to take their children to America?
Hiring a smuggler to take a 13 year old from Honduras to the United States is said to cost $9,000, or far more than the average Honduran family makes in a year.
Is it showing compassion to encourage a young child to leave home and family and put them in the hands of possibly criminals and child molesters to cross a river or trudge hundreds of miles through rugged terrain? Boarder Guards now tell us that little lifeless bodies are being washed up on the banks of the Rio Grande, bodies of children who didn’t make it across. Is that the kind of compassion we want to see?
Those of us who have raised children know that no matter how independent children want to be, “when push comes to shove”, those children need and want their parents. We can only imagine how these little ones must be crying themselves to sleep at night, uncomfortable on a hard floor, covered only with a foil blanket, eating food that may be strange to them, and being surrounded by strangers?
The only compassionate thing to do is to return them to their families in their native lands. If we have the funds to fly them from our southern borders to Massachusetts, then we have the funds to fly them home.
© Joan Rowden Hart 2014
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