Around 30 people gathered at the overpass on Hwy. 301 overlooking I-4 in Tampa this afternoon, protesting the recent influx of tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants — mostly children — that have crossed the U.S. border illegally since last October. A similar protest was scheduled in St. Petersburg and in cities around the country today, as the humanitarian crisis taking place in Southwest Texas continues.
"Absolutely!" blurted James McWhirter, 65, when asked if the estimated 57,000 unaccompanied children who have been apprehended at the U.S. border in recent months should all be deported to their native lands. McWhirter, a veteran who lives in Land O' Lakes, said that he didn't buy the narrative that most of these children are escaping from extremely violent situations in Central America.
"A lot of that has been a lie, fostered to con people," he told CL. "Some of them have been subjected to violence, but we have violence in Chicago. Every city in America we have this — we have children who have been shot and everything else, so it's not a valid argument. One call to Mexico would stop this!"
Last week the Obama administration requested $3.7 billion in emergency funding to take care of the new arrivals, but protesters like the ones who gathered in Tampa said they don't want to pay for facilities that will aid the refugees.
The only place in the Tampa Bay area where such repatriations are taking place is in Pasco County. Officials at the Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services in Holiday announced last week that they hoped to expand its beds from 16 to 32 to handle less than 20 undocumented immigrants coming into the area. James McWhiter says he was the lone protester sitting in his wheelchair across the street from the facility when that news broke last week, other than "a couple of people who showed up because the TV cameras were there," he says.
Tampa resident William Bailey appeared at the protest with his teenage son and a sign that honored American veterans. He said that if all the estimated 11-12 million undocumented people in the U.S. were deported, "There'd be enough jobs for everybody. You know what I mean?"
But when asked if in fact Americans want to do the hard job of picking fruits and vegetables all day long, Bailey demurred, saying, "That's hard. Because even if everybody had a high school diploma, somebody down the line would have to do those jobs, so you have to be on both sides of the fence."
There were several people in the crowd wearing Tampa Tea Party T-shirts, like Tim Lukens, a Tampa area Republican leader and Tea Party activist. He called plight of the tens of thousands of Central Americans now in the U.S. a "sad situation," but insisted that "we have to maintain the integrity of our country, and when we have open borders and people crossing them at will, we don’t have a nation anymore."
There were several signs in the crowd calling for President Obama's impeachment, a charge that Sarah Palin recently made that was rejected by House Speaker John Boehner. But the Tea Party contingent present at Saturday's rally appeared to be backing Palin's call.
"He’s doing everything in his power to totally destroy the U.S.," said a woman who only wanted to be identified as Susan. She referred to the V.A. crisis, Benghazi and the situation with the I.R.S. as examples of the president's malfeasance. "It's just one thing after another," she said disgustedly.
Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn has been working on a bill that would reverse the 2008 child trafficking provision that created a special processing system for migrants from Central America, a bill that has split Democrats (Nancy Pelosi is against it). Meanwhile Ted Cruz wants to defund President Obama's Deferred Status for Childhood Arrivals order from 2012 that granted temporary deportation reprieve and legal presence to more than 550,000 undocumented youth.
The “National Days of Protest against Immigration Reform Amnesty & The illegal Immigration Surge” protests are scheduled to take place through Sunday and are also being organized by the Overpasses for America and Make Them Listen groups