It's not going to happen, but here's the best way for the United States to start returning those illegal alien youngsters to Central America:
By a caravan of big, ominous-looking Greyhound buses – all carrying large signs in Spanish saying something like "the young ones are back."
It should be done soon and carefully to get the message back to Guatemalan, Honduran, and Salvadoran villages that sending young people to the United States is not a good idea. It should be publicized thoroughly and, of course, worked out with the governments of the sending countries ahead of time so that the buses, and their drivers, for example, are fully licensed to operate in those nations.
The notion, of course, is that a picture is worth a thousand words – the views of the buses driving down Central American highways and through small villages would be picked up by local television and newspapers – and the bus routes would be selected to give the caravan maximum exposure to street-side viewers. (The buses need not be Greyhounds, per se, but they must be large, safe, and modern.)
As I see it, this would be a two-step operation.
First, a caravan of a dozen or so buses and supporting vehicles would take some 500 youngsters back by road through Mexico. This would be the more expensive part of the plan, as we will see shortly. TV feeds of the buses moving through Mexico would be sent to Central American TV stations in real time.
Second, subsequent batches of youngsters would be flown into an airport in Southern Mexico, near the Guatemalan border, and then transferred to buses for the trips to and through the Central American countryside. These trips would be arranged not to get from point A to point B in the most efficient manner, but to get the message to as many villages as possible.
The initial trip south, to get the buses in place for their continuing mission, would have to be arranged with care. There would be two or three drivers for each bus, so that they could drive through the night safely. There would be accompanying security cars, with armed men inside, preferably U.S. police officers, to protect the convoy. There would be a bus mechanic or two, and a bus-strength tow-truck, to keep the whole activity moving south.
There also would be a physician and a couple of nurses on board; as well as a DHS camera crew and a Spanish-speaking publicist. Caravan stops would be few and far between, and only at thoroughly fenced and guarded locations so that none of the youngsters could escape, or be attacked by bandits.
Even if only a tiny minority of the captured (or surrendered) youngsters were actually returned – and some would be likely to volunteer for a safe ride home – their voyages back to Central America would continue day after day, and hopefully the drum-beat of messages would soon have some effect.
Needless to say, the conditions of the return trip, both via bus alone and via plane and bus, would have to be safe and comfortable – a far cry from what the migrants' experience had been on the way north. The buses would be designed for sleeping and would be complete with in-bus bathrooms. They would never be driven beyond a modest speed.
And, on the initial trip south, the publicist would see to it that TV cameras focused on the buses moving in a stately, safe way to the south, and were seen doing just that with the notorious "Train of Death" in the background, moving in the opposite direction. The latter is the south-to-north freight train that routinely carries many Central Americans up to the Texas border, and some to their death along the way, as we reported in an earlier blog.
It would be good footage.