The director of immigration policy at a bipartisan think tank on Wednesday called the Trump administration’s statements that non-Central Americans and “gang members” are among the caravan migrants an “unsupported notion.”
Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, called into question President Trump’s Tuesday claim that “unknown Middle Easterners'” were among the estimated 7,000 people traveling north to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Let’s move past the unsupported notion that this caravan includes ‘unknown Middle Easterners,'” Brown said in a statement Wednesday morning.
The Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday defended claims by Trump and Vice President Mike Pence that violent criminals are a component of the Honduran caravan making its way through Mexico toward the U.S., after reporters at the White House questioned how they know that.
“@DHSgov can confirm that there are individuals within the caravan who are gang members or have significant criminal histories,” DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton wrote in a series of tweets Tuesday evening.
“Citizens of countries outside Central America, including countries in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere are currently traveling through Mexico toward the U.S.,” he said.
Brown said the greater issue is the “desperate families of men, women, and children seeking protection from violence, crime, and poverty in Central America” who are the ones “driving what is a long-term shift in migration patterns at the southern border.”
New data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Tuesday found the number of families and unaccompanied children arriving at the U.S. southwest border spiked in fiscal 2018 to its highest level in history.
More than 90 percent of those two groups were people from Northern Triangle countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
In the early 2000s, the majority of people caught illegally entering the country were adult men from Mexico who would have been referred for prosecution. Families and children from noncontiguous countries are protected groups under U.S. law and are generally not prosecuted even if found to have entered by going around an official port of entry.
Brown said the current system was not built to address the steady flow of Central Americans moving to the U.S. She said Trump’s threat this week to cut financial aid to the region would be a mistake and could further push people to leave and head north to the U.S.
“Those factors pushing families to the U.S.-Mexico border are not changing soon, and the government must accept that reality,” Brown said.
