Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is Blowing Holes In Agency Budgets
Two years in, President Donald Trump’s promised immigration crackdown is hardly on pace to deliver his stated goal of deporting up to 3 million people. But it has produced something else: gaping budget holes that the administration has scrambled to fill.
A Tent Camp For The Price Of A Luxury Hotel
Perhaps the most glaring example of the wastefulness of the White House’s approach is the creation of the tent shelter for migrant children at Tornillo, Texas. The administration had the camp hastily erected in June as an emergency measure to shelter 400 unaccompanied minors and children it had separated from their families at the border. The Tornillo contract was supposed to expire in September. But as the month wound to a close, officials decided to keep the facility open to solve a new crisis of the administration’s own making.
The new crisis was triggered by the administration’s decision in May to begin fingerprinting the adult sponsors (often relatives) who sought to retrieve children the government had detained — and to share that information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Because sponsors are often unauthorized immigrants themselves and therefore reluctant to be fingerprinted by federal agencies, the outcome was predictable: More children are stuck in shelters for longer periods of time. The system, run by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, is currently housing more than 13,000 of them — about five times as many as a year ago. So instead of shutting down the Tornillo tent camp, the Trump administration is packing more children into it, with plans to hold as many as 3,800 minors.
The expected cost: $750 per night, per bed. For about the same price, the federal government could pay for a deluxe hotel room — with a view of Central Park — at Trump’s Manhattan hotel. For every month that the Trump administration locks up a single undocumented minor in the Texas desert, it pays more than the annual cost of putting a student through state college, complete with room and board.
The policy of fingerprinting sponsors and sharing that information with ICE didn’t exist when Congress approved the HHS budget. But the government is still stuck with the bill. To cover the gap, HHS reshuffled about $260 million last month from other parts of its budget, as Yahoo! News first reported. Among the losers in the battle of priorities are cancer research ($13.3 million), Head Start preschool ($16.7 million) and HIV prevention ($5.7 million).
Full story at Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is Blowing Holes In Agency Budgets
The cruelty of Trump’s immigration policies continue. Hundreds of children remain separated from their families because of Trump’s, not-well-thought-out immigration policy. A policy that is economically hurting Americans and damaging the American brand of being the defenders of freedom, humanity, and justice.
That was something I wondered about with how many deportations could crash the national budget. Then again, programs that should get funded like education, elder care, or health care are absent. Speaking of deporting people, I just found out yesterday that 7000 Ghanaians are going to be deported from the country and that African country wasn’t happy with that. The timing is so suspicious right after Melania’s trip to that country, the announcement of Ghana 2019, and with the protestors against the US military base. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t been on mainstream news. The fact that they will be in chains as they take the planes back brings up obvious horrific imagery.
Curtis, Ghana 2019 seems to be propaganda. I can find nothing concrete on the process or the vision of Ghana 2019. What would success look like? It seems to me Ghana got foreign aid for the program, but that money will be diverted while Ghana 2019 will be more talk than action. Rn, it’s a concept without a clear mission or vision. Why would Americans blacks return to Ghana? What incentives are being offered? May be I’m not looking in the right places.
Deporting Africans in chains: Nothing pleases some whites more than to see black people in chains; it brings out nostalgia for the good old days.
Africa is free for all continent for everyone except Africans. China now determines who enters certain African countries???? That’s not progress. I’m afraid Africans are not thinking about how colonization can work for them. How are they going to get rid of their colonizers and retain control of their country as well as its assets? They need to understand the colonizers’ motives, pain points, and plans.
For starters, I’m sorry for the delayed responses for your comments. Things have been quite busy in my life so far.
Let’s start with the Ghana 2019 issue. Have you tried searching Ghana 2019: Year of Return? I did a basic search and I’m seeing some things like President Akufo-Addo’s speech at that Ghanaian event after the UN Conference. It’s interesting how not many mainstream sources are talking about it, and I think it might be because they don’t want many African-Americans to know about this offer, but that’s a theory. To the best of my knowledge, this involves easy visas and a right to abode. I will do more research into the latter since I still don’t know if this counts as citizenship or not. Why would African-Americans want to go to Ghana? I have a few reasons: English is a major language, it’s stable, lower costs of living, finding people who look like them, or possibly finding a place where they won’t be racially profiled.
It’s sad, but true once I saw those images.
I know, right? China is having Zambia on lockdown and it looks like the DRC and Kenya aren’t far off from what I’ve seen so far (even after that Chinese businessman got arrested and deported for his anti-African racism). Speaking of China, they’re freaking out because some of their people got killed in the Central African Republic, yet I have yet to hear charges with the devils who murdered that Zambian student in their home country. I don’t want to say that hope is lost since Sierra Leone refused a loan from China, so that’s something.
Ghana 2019: If they want black Americans to live in Ghana they have to promise more than that. Black Americans have not had opportunities to leverage their skills in America fully. Many are severely overqualified for their jobs and struggle to pay the bills. It seems we get charged a premium for being black in America. IMO, for Ghana 2019 to have impact, it must offer more than a country with English as the primary language and a low cost of living.
Africa hasn’t learned much since the days of colonization as it appears they are running in that direction again with open arms.
That’s fair to say that. I’m not against the visas and rights to abode since they do have value, but more tangibles could benefit. Perhaps Ghana can expand the 2019 plan or another African country could do their own thing with more benefits. If that were to happen, then I expect it to be another West African nation to do something of that sort which would make sense given how that part of the continent was known as the “slave coast” by the colonizers and Ghana 2019 is meant to coincide with the 400 year anniversary of the first slave coming to the US. Work placement would be a huge plus. I know the African Union is trying to do that, but I don’t know to what extent.
I can see your argument which has a lot of truths to it, but I believe some groups are starting to stand up. Recently, I heard that Kenya actually arrested a bunch of Chinese people who were running a brothel, The DRC exposing colonizers who were stealing high-quality minerals and metals in tanks, Ethiopia banning foreigners from adopting their children, and South Africa accelerating the land reclamation without compensation mandate.