By Peter Lucas

President Barack Obama said he will send some of the 50,000 children who illegally crossed the border back to their homes in Central America; the problem is nobody believes him.

The president has gone rogue.

Certainly John Boehner doesn’t believe the president, and that is why the Republican-controlled House is blocking action on Obama’s immigration-reform bill, which they call amnesty. If Obama does not enforce border and immigration laws as written, they say, how can he be trusted to enforce new border and enforcement laws yet to be written?

Obama has made a lot of promises and, unfortunately, he has kept very few of them. That is why Boehner and others do not believe him when he talks about immigration reform or sending any of the children back to their parents.

It is more realistic to believe that not only will these children be allowed to remain in the U.S., but you can expect that more will be coming, and there will be a move to bring their parents into the U.S. as well.

Since it would be inhumane to send these children back to the violence-ridden places they come from, like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, it would also be inhumane to keep them separated from their parents. So why not bring the parents here so that they can be reunited with their children? What liberal in his right mind would be opposed to reuniting families?

This is especially likely as Obama goes rogue with his plans to continue to bypass Congress on immigration — and everything else — for the remainder of his term, despite rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court that have been critical of his unconstitutional, Lone Ranger strategy.

Obama has not only gone rogue, he has done so with a vengeance. “So sue me,” he said the other day, sounding more wise guy than wise. So it is no wonder that he has fallen so far in the polls that he is ranked as the worst president since World War II, worse even than Jimmy Carter.

And speaking of Carter, it is worth comparing the children’s invasion of the United States along the Southern Border to the “Mariel boatlift,” or the Cuban “boat people” crisis 34 years ago.

That was when Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, feeling pressure from Cuba’s shrinking basket-case economy, and rising internal dissent, announced that anyone who wanted to leave his Cuban Socialist paradise could do so. There was a stampede for the exits.

Thousands of Cubans mobbed the Cuban port of Mariel for boatlifts to the United States, where many had relatives living in Florida. Cuban Americans arranged for boats to sail to Mariel to pick up refugees and bring them to Florida. Others were forced to pay thousands of dollars to smugglers to get on a boat. As the crisis grew, the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy dispatched ships to the region to provide humanitarian assistance to refugees in need.

The U.S. suddenly faced a humanitarian disaster as it scurried around to find places to house, feed and process the unexpected deluge of Cuban immigrants.

President Jimmy Carter, like Obama with the children’s invasion, was caught by surprise by the extent of the Cuban exodus. Some 125,000 Cubans landed in the United States, with 250,000 more left waiting in the wings, before the program was shut down.

But before it ended, Castro emptied out his prisons and mental institutions and herded criminals and mental patients among the ordinary refugees. It was estimated that more than 20,000 of the refugees were criminals or people with mental problems, but no one really ever knew.

Carter, like Obama, promised that all “undesirables” would be sent back to Cuba, but they never were. They were absorbed by the United States, just as these uninvited 50,000 children are being absorbed.

So there is precedent for the invasion of these unattended children escaping from poverty and violence. And just as there were an additional 250,000 Cubans lined up to follow the 125,000 who made it to the U.S., so are there another 50,000 or 100,000 Central American children expected to follow the already 50,000 who are here. The borders are open. Our rogue president has turned the United States into a bad joke.

And Obama’s answer to all of this? It is to attend several fundraisers in Texas this week, even as he spurned the invitation of Texas Gov. Rick Perry to visit the Texas border to see for himself the humanitarian disaster his immigration policies have brought about.

If I were Obama, I wouldn’t want to see it either.

Peter Lucas’ political column appears Tuesday and Friday. Email him at luke1825@aol.com.