WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress' must-pass budget bill ignores the Obama administration's request to accelerate spending on immigration courts to handle the flood of unaccompanied minors at the border - even as it boosts spending flexibility for Border Patrol agents and detention centers.
Immigrant advocates complained that House Republicans who wrote the bill focused on detaining Central American youths and families who crossed the border while ignoring the need for more immigration judges to hear their cases, and lawyers to represent the youths.
"The resolution includes only funding for the prison staffing and no accelerated spending for the judges who hear their legal claims," said Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice Program at the Women's Refugee Commission. "House Republicans, believing these women should be returned immediately to often violent situations in their home countries, determined that judges aren't as important as prison guards."
The legislation to keep the government running into December passed the House 319-108 on Wednesday and was headed for passage Thursday in the Senate.
It's not the first time House Republicans have resisted the administration's request to spend money on legal proceedings for migrants. Last month, the Justice Department asked to devote more money to providing legal aid to unaccompanied immigrant minors, and House Republicans objected.
Advocates and Democratic congressional aides said the little-noticed omission of language to accelerate spending on immigration courts upset some Democrats. But given that the legislation was needed to avert a government shutdown at the end of the month and was paired with a vote to authorize arming Syrian rebels, the issue got scant attention.
Jen Hing, spokeswoman for Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, said the panel focused on only critical spending shifts in this week's legislation. She said the intention of the committee was to keep the legislation "as "clean' as possible."
The spending bill freezes government agency budgets at current levels into December. The White House budget office also requested a number of items to deal with urgent cases a budget freeze could not accommodate.
Congress never acted acted on Obama's $3.7 billion request in July to deal with a wave of families and unaccompanied minors fleeing violence in Central America and crossing into Texas from Mexico. Since then the volume of arrivals at the border has dropped sharply and the issue has receded from the spotlight.
But migrants still are coming, and most who arrived never left. The immigration court system has a backlog of nearly 400,000 cases.