The Obama administration is formally asking for $3.7 billion in emergency funds from Congress to address the flood of unaccompanied minor children coming illegally into the United States, more than the White House previously signaled it would request.

The funds include $1.1 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $433 million to Customs and Border Protection, $64 million for the Department of Justice, $300 million to the State Department and $1.8 billion to the Department of Health and Human Services.

The administration previously indicated that it would request about $2 billion but would wait to release the details until Congress returned from a week-long break.

The White House says the money is necessary to cover costs like increased man-hours for border patrol agents and aerial surveillance teams, legal services for children in immigration proceedings, the hiring of 40 additional teams of immigration judges, and care for unaccompanied children while they are in the country. Almost $300 million would go towards efforts to “repatriate and reintegrate migrants to Central America” and address the underlying economic and security causes of the spike in child migrants.

It’s not clear how the GOP-led House will approach the funding request, which must pass both Houses of Congress.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner said: "The Appropriations Committee and other Members, including the working group on the border crisis led by Rep. Kay Granger, will review the White House proposal. The Speaker still supports deploying the National Guard to provide humanitarian support in the affected areas - which this proposal does not address."

UN makes push for border children to be called refugees

United Nations officials are pushing for many of the Central American children and families crossing the border to be treated as refugees fleeing armed conflict. While this would lack legal weight in the U.S., officials with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) hope this will increase pressure on the U.S. and Mexico to accept thousands of immigrants not currently eligible for asylum.

On Thursday migration and interior department representatives from the U.S., Mexico, and Central America will meet in Nicaragua. The group will discuss updating a 30-year-old declaration on the obligations nations have to aid refugees.

Central Americans would be among the first modern migrants considered refugees for fleeing violence and extortion at the hands of criminal gangs. Honduras has the world's highest homicide rate for a nation not at war. In El Salvador, the end of a truce between street gangs has led to a sharp rise in homicides. Violence spread in recent decades after members of California street gangs were deported to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, where they overwhelmed weak and corrupt police forces.

Americans are accustomed to seeing reports of refugees swamping the borders of countries abroad, Syrians fleeing to Turkey, Sudanese streaming to South Sudan. But they aren’t accustomed to seeing such flights of humanity on their doorstep.

The issue has brought to light a divide; those who believe in stronger immigration enforcement blame the president and consider the arrivals an immigration enforcement problem. Groups who work with children who have crossed the border alone say the nation is experiencing its own refugee crisis as children flee violence in their home countries.

Wendy Young is president of Kids In Need of Defense, a group started by Angelina Jolie and Microsoft that assists immigrant and refugee children. Young said the key difference is that in this case the children are being forced to leave their home countries. Not all children fall into the situation of being refugees, but refugee crises abroad often are a mixed population too, Young said.

“I give the administration credit for identifying this as a humanitarian crisis. It gives them a lot of latitude to triage an emergency response,” said Young. But in coming days and weeks the response will need to become more sophisticated because many of the kids have been forced to leave home and many won’t be able to return.

Refugee carries a specific definition in immigration law as someone who has a founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Many of the kids would fit in the latter category, Young said.

Michelle Brané, of the Women’s Refugee Commission, said she hopes the president declaring the children's arrivals a humanitarian crisis reminds people of the nation’s responsibility.

In a U.N. report on refugees, 38 percent of the Mexican children interviewed said they were being recruited and exploited by human smugglers.

Recent reports have documented some of the harrowing journeys of the children and life threatening encounters.

"We had kids tell us really awful, awful traumatizing stories. One girl told us of opening her door and finding a chopped up body in a plastic bag as a warning from a gang," said Brané, whose group first reported on unaccompanied children in 2009.

The rise in apprehensions of children crossing the border illegally and alone is happening as overall border apprehensions have increased only slightly and remain at historic lows, according to Customs and Border Protection.

From Oct. 1 to May 31st of the 2014 fiscal year, 47,017 children had been apprehended at the Southwest border, up from 24,493 in fiscal year 2013, CBP data shows. Most of the children are entering the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.

The children’s arrivals are becoming entangled in the immigration debate and Republican displeasure with the administration’s immigration and border enforcement policies. (Source: NBC News)

Story Date: July 9, 2014