Cruz Gets the Border Crisis Wrong
SAN DIEGO -- Ted Cruz doesn't "get" immigration. Nor does he understand the need to give due process to refugees.
This is clear now that thousands of children from Central America have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.
I've known the senator from Texas for a dozen years. And he's scary smart. Yet on immigration and asylum -- where one would expect him to bring his A-game because his father, Rafael, emigrated from Cuba in 1957 -- Cruz doesn't sound smart, just scary.
On NBC's "Meet the Press," Cruz blamed the crisis on "the failures of (President Obama's) immigration policy and his lawlessness."
The president's immigration policy has caused the deportation of 2 million people. You don't get much more law-and-order than that.
On "Fox News Sunday," Cruz accused Democrats of "holding these kids ransom" to pass a Senate immigration bill that he called "one of the causes of this problem." He said kids are coming "because they believe they will get amnesty."
The Senate bill would grant legal status to about half of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States -- but doesn't cover new arrivals.
It's true that many of the children told authorities that they thought they would get a "permiso" (permit) to stay in the United States. The White House insists that smuggling cartels planted the rumor to gin up business. By charging about $8,000 per child to transport at least 57,000 kids across the border, smugglers could have conceivably earned more than $450 million.
Cruz isn't blaming the cartels. He's blaming Obama. However, my sources familiar with the border crisis say that some kids claim the rumor was that "Congress" had passed an amnesty. So why isn't Cruz blaming House Speaker John Boehner?
In trying to solve the border crisis, the senator mixes together three unrelated things: the DREAM Act, which offered undocumented youth legal status if they went to college or joined the military and which was defeated in December 2010; a 2008 anti-human trafficking law, signed by President George W. Bush, that lets undocumented minors from Central America live with relatives in the United States while awaiting a hearing; and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a 2012 policy change by the Department of Homeland Security that lets undocumented youth brought here as children avoid deportation and apply for work permits. DACA, like the Senate bill, would not apply to the child refugees.
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