SAN ANTONIO — Gov. Rick Perry has jumped with both feet into the political fray over the thousands of Central American children who have streamed across the Rio Grande.

Perry, who went on a helicopter tour of the border Thursday while President Barack Obama was in Austin, is pointing the finger at Obama for policies he says encouraged the surge of undocumented immigrants.

In past weeks, Perry has gone so far as to raise the specter of White House involvement in a conspiracy to bring the children here.

“We either have an incredibly inept administration, or they're in on this somehow or another,” he told Fox News. “I mean I hate to be conspiratorial, but I mean how do you move that many people from Central America across Mexico and then into the United States without there being a fairly coordinated effort?”

But border policy experts characterize Perry's assertion of a conspiracy as inaccurate and say it distracts from a reality that is more complicated.

“I don't think it serves anyone's political purposes to have a large number of children showing up on our doorstep who are vulnerable, needy, by law — U.S. and international law — need to be protected, that are expensive, that have been put in harm's way to get here,” said Randy Capps, the director of research for U.S. programs at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

Read More

Also, political scholars say Perry is speaking to the political base he would need in a potential 2016 presidential run.

“This is political gold for Perry,” said Mark Jones, a Rice University political science professor, who also studies Central America. “In all fairness to Perry, I think he's done a very good job of walking the tightrope between things appealing to the Republican base, that's very concerned about immigration, without ever saying or doing things that might be construed as anti-Hispanic.”

For his part, Perry didn't back down from the remarks when asked about them on ABC's “This Week” program: “I have to believe that when you do not respond in any way, that you are either inept or you have some ulterior motive of which you are functioning from.”

And Perry continued to hammer the White House on Thursday, taking Fox News host Sean Hannity on a tour of the Rio Grande.

Perry says the blame lies squarely with Washington.

“Washington's failure to secure the border has perpetuated a problem Gov. Perry has warned the federal government about since 2009,” Travis Considine, a Perry spokesman, said in a statement.

Perry sent a letter in 2012 to the White House complaining about the rise in unaccompanied children crossing the border.

That letter is one of at least seven Perry has sent the Obama administration about various aspects of border security.

As politicians point fingers, the surge of children traversing a dangerous path from Central America to America's Southern border has continued.

The decision to flee, the experts say, has been driven, at least in part, by ever-worsening violence in their already impoverished and gang-ravaged countries.

For instance, Honduras has seen its homicide rate more than double in recent years, figures from the United Nations show, making it the deadliest country in the world.

Once they get here, experts add, those children are entered into an immigration court system that simply is unable to keep up with the number of cases it must deal with.

The dramatic uptick in unaccompanied minors crossing the border from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador began in 2012, Border Patrol records show.

In 2011, 3,933 were apprehended; in 2012, that had grown to 10,146; and since October 2013, there have been 39,133 apprehensions.

Unlike unaccompanied minors from Canada or Mexico, border officials are prohibited by a 2008 anti-child-trafficking law, signed by President George W. Bush, from quickly dispatching unaccompanied children from these Central American countries back home.

Instead, the statute requires children from countries that don't border the United States be given an opportunity to appear at an immigration hearing and consult with an advocate. It also recommends these children be allowed access to attorneys.

Additionally, while waiting for their court date, the law mandates the children be turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services, be placed in the “least restrictive setting that is in the interest of the child” and explore reuniting those children with family members.

“The single biggest factor driving this crisis is the fact that it takes so long to get a deportation hearing in an immigration court,” Capps said, adding that the waiting list for such a hearing now is more than a year on average. “That is an issue of resources, it is not something by policy design and it's a real problem, it's not an easy problem to solve.”

The long wait times for immigration hearings, combined with reuniting families, has left the impression that children crossing the border are being given permission to stay the U.S.

Smugglers “have added this by helping to spread the rumor — that's based in part on fact — that children who make it to the United States, because of delays in our immigration court system, will be, if they have families here, placed with those families,” Jones said.

While the vast majority of children and adults leaving El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala appear to be making their way to the U.S., many also have attempted to claim asylum in neighboring countries.

Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize saw the number of individuals from those three troubled Central American countries increase by 435 percent between 2009 and 2012, according to figures published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in March.

Obama reiterated his request that Congress to give him additional “flexibility” in dealing with the requirements of the 2008 law to “move them through the system faster” Wednesday, after meeting with Perry and other officials in Dallas.

However, both Capps and Adam Isacson, with the Washington Organization on Latin America, warned against gutting the provisions of the law that allow the children to stay to make their case to a judge, in order to send them back more quickly.

“Each one of these kids has to be processed, and if you find that even 10 percent of them has a credible claim that if returned, they would be killed or raped, or recruited into a gang; we can't send them back,” Isacson said. “You can't put these kids in harms way like that.”

Additional reporting from Express-News archives and wire services

nhicks@express-news.net