At the National Governors Association meeting on Friday in Tennessee, Maryland Democrat Governor Martin O’Malley said the illegal immigrant children who are flooding across the border are “refugees” who should not be sent back to be killed in their home countries.
“It is contrary to everything we stand for to try to summarily send children back to death,” he said, according to TIME.
O’Malley reportedly also said that he could “only imagine, as a father of four, the heartbreak that those parents must have felt in sending their children across a desert where they can be muled and trafficked or used or killed or tortured. But with the hope, the hope, that they would reach the United States and that their children would be protected from what they were facing at home, which was the likelihood of being recruited into gangs and dying a violent death.”
O’Malley, a potential 2016 candidate the Beltway press and the chattering class seem intent on hyping, received a whopping 1% in the most recent Quinnipiac poll of national Democrats. That is why he is trying to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton, who said the illegal immigrant children “should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who responsible adults in their families are.” President Barack Obama has also told Central American countries that their migrants are not eligible for amnesty, even though his actions and words have contributed to “misunderstandings” where migrants believe they will be eligible for amnesty in the United States.
As Breitbart News has noted, at least 57,000 illegal immigrants, mostly from Central America, have crossed the border since October of last year, and another 150,000 are estimated to do so next year. The number of illegal immigrant children flooding across the border spiked just after President Barack Obama enacted his temporary amnesty program for certain DREAMers in 2012, and many migrants have said they made the journey to America because they did not fear that the Obama administration would deport them.
Under a 2008 law, illegal immigrant children from countries other than Mexico and Canada cannot be deported immediately. If they were classified as “refugees,” as O’Malley and the United Nations have suggested, they would be eligible for asylum.
That may be something that black Democrats, whom Hillary Clinton has actively courted and O’Malley would need if he has any chance of making waves in 2016, may not be as comfortable with. On Friday, a black caller from Baltimore, Maryland told Laura Ingraham on her radio show that she was “living a nightmare” because her “whole neighborhood is so violent.” She wanted to know where she could get refugee status in her own country.
“There’s so much crime,” she said. “I have gangs everywhere here in Baltimore! I can’t let my daughter ride her bicycle outside – I can’t do anything, Laura! I’m trapped here.”
Elaine, the caller, said President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) want billions to help illegal immigrant children, but “nobody is saying a word” about poor Americans or Americans trapped in violent neighborhoods.
“Well, what about my neighborhood? You don’t have to do it in Beverly Hills, but in the inner cities where we are suffering,” she said. “My children cannot play outside. I cannot take my trash out without locking the door – it’s awful. Who is going to give us anything? Where can I get asylum? Where can I get refugee status? I don’t know what I can do. Nobody cares what happens to my children.”
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