Obama wants more money as illegals flood the borders

The White House formally requested more than $3 billion from Congress in emergency funding to deal with the rapid flood of illegal Central American immigrants, a far greater amount than President Barack Obama's administration had previously requested.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The July 8 request would split the money to several federal agencies: $1.6 billion to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security; $1.8 billion to Health and Human Services; and $300 million to the State Department.

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These funds would be allocated to send more immigration judges to the southern border, build additional detention facilities and add border patrol agents. These decisions would be aimed at quicker deportations of the tens of thousands of women and children who have illegally entered the country, mot of them through the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

"Today, I ask the Congress to consider the enclosed emergency supplemental appropriations request . to comprehensively address this urgent humanitarian situation," said the president in a letter to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R. Ohio).

This proposal would also include an additional $615 million to help the federal government fight wildfires.

Officials from the administration previously said they would be requesting more than $2 billion to help stem the recent influx of women and children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. That than 52,000 unaccompanied minors and 39,000 women and children have been apprehended at the southern border in 2014, much more than in past years.

Boehner's office said that the House Appropriations Committee and a separate working-group of seven Republicans on border issues would review the White House's proposal.

"The speaker still supports deploying the National Guard to provide humanitarian support in the affected areas-which this proposal does not address," said the spokesman, Michael Steel.

Rep. Hal Rogers (R. Kentucky), the Appropriations Committee chairman said that the border crisis is "extremely dire," and said that it is "clear that additional funding will be needed to ensure the proper care of these unaccompanied children, to enforce the law, and to further secure our border so that these problems can be mitigated in the short term."

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