Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that Congress approved for El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is stalled at the White House budget office
, an impasse that threatens ongoing efforts to stem the influx of asylum seekers from the region.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen will meet with officials from the three countries in Honduras on Wednesday to discuss a migration pact that aims to increase cooperation on security issues and prevent the “caravans” that have provoked the president’s ire over the past year. The person added that some staff within the White House budget office — overseen by acting chief of staff and deficit hawk Mick Mulvaney — oppose the assistance. “They find ways of slow-rolling things, they find ways of pushing back,” the person said. “It’s just the bureaucratic resistance.”
Echoing Trump’s message, Nielsen said in a March 18 speech that the situation at the border had reached “a near system-wide meltdown.” Border Patrolmore than 66,000 migrants at the southwest border in February, the highest monthly total since March 2009. “They give us some very bad people,” he said. “People with big, long crime records. People with tremendous violence in their past. Murderers, killers, drug dealers, human traffickers. They want to keep their good people because they're smart. It's so sad to see how stupid we've been.”
The Trump White House has called for slashing aid to Central America in its budget requests, and, to a degree, Congress has followed suit. The funding stream dropped by 30 percent from fiscal years 2016 to 2019, going from $754 million to $528 million, according to“We have a president who thinks the smarter thing to do is to just put $40 billion into a wall, rather than put a fraction of that into helping to turn around these three countries,” Sen. Tom Carper said of the drop in funding.
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