Obama says “most” child migrants will be sent home

President Obama’s Rose Garden speech today on immigration included a digression on the child migrant crisis. The President didn’t make any mention of the changes he wants to make to the law, but he said that children would be “taken care of” while they “go through the legal process.”

However, he said, “most of those kids will end up being sent back to their home countries.”

That’s an extremely pessimistic assessment. The most official source available, a report from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, estimated that nearly 60 percent of children arriving here from Central America would qualify for legal status on humanitarian grounds.

Either the White House believes that the asylum system is far less generous than the UN does, or this reflects an attempt to tighten the requirements for asylum — or change the process so that fewer children get a full hearing at all.