Border crisis: GOP falls into a trap

Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced Monday, July 21, that he will deploy up to 1,000 National Guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border, where tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America have crossed into the United States this year. Perry also wants President Obama and Congress to hire an additional 3,000 border patrol agents to eventually replace the temporary guard forces."I will not stand idly by," Perry said. "The price of inaction is too high."

Activists from the group United We Dream stage a mock funeral service for the Republican Party during a protest in Washington on July 21. They staged the funeral, they said, because "the GOP has embraced radical right-wing policies and has actively called for the separation of families and the deportation of Dreamers."

In this handout released by the Honduran government on Friday, July 18, a woman and her son walk on the tarmac after landing at Ramon Villeda Morales International Airport in Honduras. They were among the first group of Central Americans sent home under stepped-up U.S. efforts to crack down on illegal immigration.

Some immigrants caught crossing the border illegally are housed inside the McAllen Border Patrol Station in McAllen, Texas, where they were processed on Tuesday, July 15. The detainees were both men and women, young and old.

Central American migrants climb on a northbound train during their journey toward the U.S.-Mexico border in Ixtepec, Mexico, on Saturday, July 12.

Relatives carry the coffin of Gilberto Francisco Ramos Juarez, an 11-year-old Guatemalan boy whose decomposed body was found in Texas' Rio Grande Valley in June. The undocumented immigrant, who authorities believe may have died from heat stroke, was identified by a phone number on his belt buckle. A series of calls led to Gilberto's father, who described the clothes the boy was wearing.

President Obama delivers a statement in Dallas after meeting with local elected officials and faith leaders on Wednesday, July 9. Obama requested $3.7 billion in emergency funding from Congress to help cope with the surge of unaccompanied child immigrants.

Demonstrators from opposing sides of the immigration issue confront each other outside a U.S. Border Patrol station in Murrieta, California, on Friday, July 4. Some activists are demanding immediate deportation. Others say the migrants are only fleeing violence at home.

In this photo taken Thursday, July 3, Honduran mothers and their children prepare to get into a U.S. Customs and Border Protection truck after crossing the Rio Grande near McAllen, Texas. About 90 Hondurans a day cross there illegally, according to the Honduran Consulate.

People in Murrieta attend a town hall meeting on Wednesday, July 2, to discuss the processing of undocumented immigrants.

A steel border fence separates Nogales, Arizona, from its sister city in Sonora, Mexico. Nogales is Arizona's largest international border town and an entry point for goods and people from Mexico.

Cindy Jimenez, of Olancho, Honduras, wipes away tears at the bus station after she was released from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in McAllen on Friday, June 20. Jimenez crossed illegally at zone nine, one of the busiest corridors on the U.S.-Mexico border for illegal crossings.

Officers in Nogales wait for new arrivals in the area where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children were being processed and held on Wednesday, June 18.

Detainees sleep in a holding cell June 18 at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville, Texas.

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• House votes for spending bill on border crisis and against reprieve program for "dreamers"


• Ruben Navarrette: Democrats set a clever trap on immigration and GOP fell into it


• He says Republicans alienate Latino voters by showing contempt for issues they care about

Editor's note: Ruben Navarrette is a CNN contributor, Daily Beast columnist, and a nationally syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group. Follow him on Twitter: @rubennavarrette. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

San Diego, California (CNN) -- Monitoring the immigration crisis requires keeping one eye on Washington and one on the U.S.-Mexico border.

One place is full of corrupt and mercenary characters who protect their interests, don't follow the rules, play with people's lives and who only care about making money and amassing power and ensuring their own survival.

Then you have the border.

Alarmed over tens of thousands of child refugees coming into the United States, House Republicans last week sent up a flare -- and wound up setting themselves on fire. With the Senate in recess until after Labor Day, Republicans approved a pair of show bills.

The first bill -- a $694 million emergency spending measure to deal with the border crisis and approved by a 223-189 vote -- showed that House Speaker John Boehner could muster just enough support to overcome meddling by outsiders. Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama lobbied to defeat the measure because they wanted to preserve the narrative that President Obama is solely to blame for the fact that at least 57,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America have streamed across the U.S-Mexico border since October 2013. They wanted to punish Obama by denying resources to house and care for the children.

The second bill showed Latino immigrants how much contempt the GOP has for them. By a vote of 216-192, House Republicans and four Democrats -- Reps. John Barrow of Georiga, Nick Rahall from West Virginia, Mike McIntyre of North Carolina and Collin Peterson of Minnesota -- voted out of spite to end the administration's policy offering Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

For Republicans, it was a chance to use the border crisis to attack a dispensation they never liked which offers more than half a million undocumented young people a two-year reprieve from deportation. The bill will never become law, but the damage is done -- to the Republican Party.

Obama: Congress holding up progress

House passes $694 million border bill

The link between immigration & terrorism

As if Latinos didn't have enough reasons to hate the GOP, the attack on the DREAM'ers gives them a fresh batch.

Ironically, in 2016, that could benefit Hillary Clinton, who has decided that on the issue of the refugee children she is pro-choice. Unfortunately, it is multiple choice.

In June, Clinton said in a CNN interview that the border kids "should be sent back." Then, in July, during an interview on Fusion -- the liberal cable network co-owned by ABC News and Univision and aimed at English-speaking Latinos -- Clinton claimed that she was talking about "migrant children" not "refugee children."

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Someone please tell her that Latinos are fond of both.

If children don't have a claim to asylum or family members in the United States, Clinton told Jorge Ramos, they should be returned.

Never mind that the kids would be going back into darkness. Democrats call this a humanitarian crisis. How do you humanely hand a death sentence to an 8-year-old?

"We send kids back all the time," Clinton said coldly.

And to think, this woman began her career protecting children in America. Now that she's a politician, she thinks it's her job to protect America from children.

Still, Clinton insisted, the United States could help set up a screening process in countries like Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to determine whether children qualify for asylum.

In her clumsiness on immigration, Clinton takes after Obama, whose handling of the issue -- in a recent poll from AP-GfK -- earned the disapproval of 68% of Americans. Only 31% approve of the job he's doing. That's what happens when you can't decide whether you want to be tough or compassionate.

No matter. Clinton, Obama and other Democrats have secret weapons. They're called Republicans.

In this go-around, the Democrats played the opposition masterfully. Obama made an initial misstep, saying what Clinton said -- that the kids had to go home -- and setting in motion plans for their expedited removal, without due process. Then he got smart and returned to the Democratic script of doing nothing and watching the GOP implode.

In the new narrative, Obama and other Democrats were actually seen by many Latinos as the good guys, fighting the good fight against those evil Republicans who wanted to send the kids back home.

To think Republicans swallowed the line about how Obama was going to take executive action to loosen immigration laws. Would this be the same Obama who spent the last five and a half years fighting with immigration activists and insisting he didn't have this power? He never wanted to use it before. Why use it now?

Democrats set a clever trap, and Republicans walked into it. The GOP will pay for that mistake for years, and deservedly so.

The rest of us learned a lesson. The next time we face a crisis where desperate people fleeing violence and oppression look to us for help, the most we can hope for is that Congress do what's best for all concerned -- and stay out of it.

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