Since we’re talking immigration:

Senate Democrats double funding for child migrants

Senate Democrats moved Tuesday to double the available funding for the care and resettlement of child migrants on the Southwest border — a $1 billion increase that comes at the expense of President Barack Obama’s prized education initiatives.

The action by the Senate Appropriations Committee is the strongest response yet by Congress to the growing humanitarian crisis in the Rio Grande Valley. But it also captures the conflicts between the president and his own party — each subject to strict spending caps adopted last December.

SNIP

All these forces were at play Tuesday in shaping the underlying bill: a nearly $156.8 billion measure funding the departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services for the new fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

It is the largest of the annual domestic spending bills and a task greatly complicated this spring by the unprecedented flood of young Central American migrants who have been crossing the U.S. border unaccompanied by their parents or any adult relatives.

Obama’s March budget provided no increased funding to deal with this problem — a decision that helped him have the room under the budget caps for his education priorities. But after repeated prodding by Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), the White House acknowledged May 30 that it could need as much as $2.28 billion in 2015, a $1.4 billion increase over what it requested just months ago.

The Senate bill seeks to fill that hole in two steps. The first is to provide $1.94 billion for the refugee office within HHS that bears the heaviest responsibility for the young migrants, labeled Unaccompanied Alien Children or UAC in Washington’s shorthand. Second, the bill gives HHS greater authority to transfer money from other accounts if the number of UAC cases more than doubles to 140,000 in 2015.

The paragraph I cut out is an analysis paragraph that does not contribute as much as what I excerpted and it might have made it look like I was trolling with this post. I’m not; I’m trying to contribute relevantly.

Dark_Falcon is not pulling a Killgore here, people. ;)