I think it doesn't make sense to compare this to a natural disaster. This is a humanitarian situation that we have been on top of from the very beginning. It involves the entire federal government, it involves our partners in Central America who have acknowledged that we all share a responsibility to make sure we stop this situation before it starts.
If the White House had been on top of the situation from the beginning, why has it gotten so bad (from the beginning)? The beginning of just this phase was more than three years ago, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures. Those figures show that child refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador have both increased more than twelve-fold since 2010. The number of children from each country is now about as many as Mexican child refugees (whose numbers have been declining for more than a year, but still remain high). The most child refugees now come from Honduras, whose numbers have increased fifteen-fold since 2010. (The number of child refugees continues to climb: between October 2013 and June 2014, some 52,000 child refugees were taken into custody by the U.S., about 75% from the three Central American countries).
Despite the White House statement, it's obvious that the humanitarian crisis does not involve "the entire federal government" in any meaningful way. Or if it does, what is the role of the Marines? Or the IRS? Or the ambassador to Iceland?
But the rest of the statement -- "it involves our partners in Central America who have acknowledged that we all share a responsibility to make sure we stop this situation before it starts" -- is perhaps as revealing as it is strange (since it's already decades past the situation's start).
What do El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have in common?
Insofar as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are "our partners" rather than free and independent states, they are decidedly junior partners. Each of them shares borders with the other two. More than anything, they share more than a century of exploitation by Americans, both governmental and corporate. Since the 1950s, they have all suffered brutal, anti-democratic coups d'etats orchestrated or approved by the United States. They have all suffered especially brutal dictatorships supported by the United States for the benefit of a tiny elite that controls most of the wealth in each country. The United States has brutalized these countries for decades, has helped make them unlivable, and now pretends to wonder why people don't want to live there.
El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras account for almost 75% of all the refugee children coming out of Central America.
These three countries also share the honor of having served in recent decades as American proxies in wars against their own people or their neighbors, or both. By way of illustration of what it means to be an American "ally," the streams of children from these three countries are unmatched by other countries in the region. Almost no children are fleeing Nicaragua, a former American enemy (full of phantom threat and against whom the U.S. committed war crimes). On the contrary, Nicaragua is a host country for asylum seekers, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) found in a study ("Children on the Run") released in March 2014:
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