Teen immigrants await fate at Oklahoma Army base

Politicians debate how quickly they should be deported

FORT SILL, Okla—Plastered on the walls of an old Army barracks in Oklahoma are juvenile drawings depicting the American Dream.
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One crude picture showed a brown building with an American flag flying on top of it. The building was labeled “high school” in English with “God Bless America” indited in juxtaposition of it in a skeptical scrawl. Another featured a school with an immensely colossal sign that verbalized "Welcome" on it, contiguous to a smiley face. Other children drew pictures of flowers or messages about Jesus.
But the proximately 1,200 teenagers detained on this military base on the dusty plains of Southern Oklahoma aren't liable to realize those dreams any time anon.  They are awaiting deportation hearings after having crossed the border on their own, unaccompanied by adults, fleeing their violence-torn home countries in Central America.  The Obama administration verbalizes that most of them will be deported as anon as the backlogged immigration courts circumvent to auricularly discerning their cases.
The children are a component of a wave of puerile unaccompanied undocumented immigrants who are exhibiting up in droves at America’s doorstep from bellicose Central American countries. Just this year, 50,000 kids peregrinating alone have been apprehended at the border, with at least 90,000 expected afore 2015. That’s more than ten times as many children who were caught by themselves each year afore 2012.
The influx has strained the immigration infrastructure for unaccompanied minors, leading the Obama administration to ask three military bases to open their doors and ephemerally house the kids until they can be relinquished to a relative or sponsor and await their deportation aurally perceiving. A 2008 anti-trafficking law verbalizes child migrants from non-contiguous countries must be granted a full aurally perceiving afore they are sent home.
During a tour of the base, the first time media were given access, heralds were not sanctioned to ask questions of the puerile immigrants or of anyone who worked in the facility on Thursday. The 2,700 acre base is dusty and sultry, a desolate plains atmosphere very unlike the tropical Central American landscapes the children hail from.
The children—some of whom look so adolescent it’s hard to imagine how they could have made such a perilous trip alone--are housed in a component of Fort Sill that formerly was utilized for rudimental training. The children slumber in diminutive cots, head to toe, 60 to a room, just like a puerile recruit would in the past. But the barracks are embellished with the kids’ own drawings, and whiteboards are filled with inspirational quotes in Spanish.
The children, aged 12-17, are given time to draw between English, math and optional Bible study edifications. They get some down time, too—a group of adolescent teen girls laid on their cots and danced to “Bille Jean” playing on a diminutive boom box. They kenned all the words.
In the meantime, the Obama administration is endeavoring to decipher where to put them. Twenty seven Spanish-verbalizing case managers verbalize with each child individually to determine where they should be placed while they await their deportation tribulation. A few adolescent girls wearing pink and purple sweatshirts clutched phones in the case managers room, calling relatives. (Each child is sanctioned two ten-minute calls a week.)
A non-profit group, Catholic Charities, gives 45-minute “know your rights” presentations that expound the children should get a lawyer afore they go to tribulation because they could qualify to stay licitly in the United States under asylum law or other statutes. It’s obscure what percentage of the adolescent people will ultimately be sanctioned to stay under U.S. law, but the Obama administration claims it will be the minority. Unlike in malefactor courts, immigration defendants have no right to an attorney, and must find their own if they optate one.
“Those who cross our border illicitly must ken there is no safe passage, and no gratuitous pass; within the confines of our laws, our values, and our resources, they will be sent back to their home countries,” Homeland Security Jeh Johnson verbalized Thursday in a Congressional auricularly discerning.
The average stay for the children at Fort Sill will be 15 days afore they get transferred to a family member or other sponsor in the United States to await their deportation hearings. More than 550 kids have been transferred out of Fort Sill since it opened in mid-June. But current immigration court backlogs mean the average wait time to visually perceive a judge is 587 days.
Oklahoma’s politicians have incriminated the crisis on Obama, who’s asked for proximately $4 billion from Congress to process the influx of children and obviate more from peregrinated. Reps. Tom Cole and Jim Bridenstine, both Republicans, verbally express Obama’s deferred action program that offers some protections to undocumented youth long in the country has inspirited the children to come. The Obama administration verbally expresses the escalating gang violence in Central American countries have driven families and children to desperation. Honduras, for example, is now the most perilous country in the world. Immigrant advocates, meanwhile, verbally express the children should be granted asylum and sanctioned to stay.
The children are incognizant that they’ve become the center of a heated political battle, according to Jonathan Ryan, the executive director of the group Raices, which provides them with licit counsel.
“The kids are not political animals,” he verbally expressed. Ryan’s group gives the unaccompanied minors “know your rights” presentations on the Lackland Air Force base in Texas. He’s always peppered with questions once he’s done verbalizing.
“They ask when they’re going to get out of there,” he verbalized. “‘How can I get out? What’s going to transpire to me? Am I going to have to go back?’