Also in today’s Jolt:
How Many Unaccompanied Minors Did HHS Release to Sponsors in Your County?
Here’s a nice way to localize a national issue:
Congressman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) denounced the Obama Administration’s practice of sending illegal immigrants to Louisiana. The Obama Administration released state-by-state and county-level breakdowns of the number of illegal immigrants, showing there were 1,275 UAC released to sponsors in Louisiana between January 1 to July 31, 2014.
Parish-level breakdown of UAC in Louisiana:
East Baton Rouge Parish (Baton Rouge) — 173
Jefferson Parish (Southwest of NOLA) — 533
Lafayette Parish (Lafayette) — 51
Orleans Parish (New Orleans) — 237
St. Tammany Parish (Slidell, N. of NOLA) — 54
Total in Louisiana — 1,275
Cassidy released the following statement:
“The Obama Administration announced that more than 1,200 illegal immigrants have been placed in Louisiana. This highlights how President Obama’s failure to secure the borders and properly enforce our immigration laws has impacted Louisiana. This crisis has further highlighted the inability of President Obama to lead on important issues. Senate Democrats are equally responsible. They left Washington without taking action. We must secure our borders and stop President Obama’s executive amnesty.”
That’s aspiring senator Cassidy, of course.
See how many unaccompanied border children HHS released to sponsors in your county here. For example, HHS announced they released 1,023 unaccompanied border children to sponsors in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Morning Jolt reader William Perry Pendley, an attorney and president of Mountain States Legal Foundation, writes in to point out that the government is not actually legally obligated to provide a free education to children who come here illegally.
The administration contends it is simple:
Under Federal law, State and local educational agencies (hereinafter “districts”) are required to provide all children with equal access to public education at the elementary and secondary level. Recently, we have become aware of student enrollment practices that may chill or discourage the participation, or lead to the exclusion, of students based on their or their parents’ or guardians’ actual or perceived citizenship or immigration status.
“The Obama administration is asserting that a Supreme Court decision in 1982, Plyler v. Doe, mandates that all schools in the country educate kids who are here illegally free of charge,” he said. “They’re taking it a step further and saying you can’t even ask about a student’s citizenship. They are also saying the Civil Rights Act says we have to educate people regardless of their citizenship, but that’s untrue, what the Civil Rights Act says is that we cannot discriminate on the basis of national origin, but what that means is ethnicity.”
Pendley said times have changed drastically since the Plyler decision, and government policies should reflect that.
U.S. taxpayers pay taxes to create public-school systems to educate American children. While it may be nice or generous or charitable to educate children here illegally, it is hard to conclude that it would be criminal for a school system to bar children who entered the country illegally. A school system does not have unlimited resources. (There are more than a million children on the wait lists for charter schools nationwide.) Our lax border-security policies are adding tens of thousands of children — most of whom are ESL — to America’s school systems.