Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘BIDEN BORDER CRISIS’

After Years of Regaling VP As Border Czar, Media Claim Harris Was Never in Charge of the Invasion


BY: JORDAN BOYD | JULY 24, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/07/24/after-years-of-regaling-vp-as-border-czar-media-claim-harris-was-never-in-charge-of-the-invasion/

Vice President Kamala Harris laughs

The real story continues to be that Biden and Harris welcomed the deadliest border invasion in the world without facing any accountability.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

Years after acknowledging and even praising President Joe Biden for naming Vice President Kamala Harris “border czar,” corporate media claimed the presumptive 2024 Democrat nominee was never charged with overseeing the logistics of the record-breaking invasion.

Biden first charged Harris with leading “our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border” in March 2021. At the time, he claimed the former California attorney general and senator was “the most qualified person to do it.” Harris didn’t do much with the title and task. Yet, even her delayed first and only (and heavily staged) visit to the border received celebration from her allies in the press.

This kid-glove treatment intensified recently when corporate media accused those critical of Harris’ failure to do anything but exacerbate the Biden administration-incentivized invasion of making the VP a “convenient scapegoat.”

“Harris’s job was meant to be narrow,” The Wall Street Journal insisted, “and over the years Harris has fulfilled it by announcing tranches of private investments by companies like Pepsi, Cargill and Nestle in Central America.”

Axios insinuated in an X post on Wednesday that Republicans are wrong to point out Harris’ border failures because the Democrat “never actually had” the title border czar.

The outlet’s complaints that the Trump campaign and Republicans like House GOP Chair Elise Stefanik have unfairly labeled Harris’ role, however, fall short in the face of its own reporting, which repeatedly referred to Harris as Biden’s border czar.

The same Axios author who wrote on Wednesday that Harris was only meant “to help with a slice of the migration issue,” penned a March 2021 article claiming Biden put Harris “in charge of the border crisis.”

Axios added an editor’s note to the story shortly after publication with a notice stating three years later it “was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar.’”

Why, other than the usual motivations for the corporate media to deliberately distort the narrative, would publications like Axios lie about something its own pages contradict? It’s because the border has been and continues to be a “political grenade” for the Democrats who wrecked it. Stef W. Kight explicitly stated in her latest story that she aimed to signal it “has become even more critical for Harris to find a clear border message, fast.”

“Making a clear immigration pitch to voters could be critical for Harris’s campaign,” Kight repeated, before noting that illegal border crossing activists are invigorated by Harris’ rise on the ticket because she is “personally well-versed and invested in the issue.”

Politifact, known for aiding Big Tech’s censorship efforts by printing fake fact-checks designed to demonize political dissenters, even joined in the propaganda dogpile when it claimed that Harris was merely “assigned to tackle immigration’s causes, not border security.”

USA Today, similarly, published a “fact-check” that deemed the claim that Harris was the presidential pick to oversee the skyrocketing number of illegal crossings “exaggerates the vice president’s role in addressing migration at the southern border.”

One quick look at Biden’s border czar pronouncement in 2021 suggests the opposite.

Biden noted that he was tasked with a “similar assignment” to “determine the best way to keep people from coming is keep them from wanting to leave” during the Obama administration.

“The Vice President has agreed — among the multiple other things that I have her leading — and I appreciate it — agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders.”

Harris also explicitly emphasized in her acceptance that “we will enforce the law.”

The real border story continues to be that the Biden administration ushered in the deadliest invasion in the world without facing any accountability. Corporate media, however, are more interested in running propaganda to help Democrats’ 2024 election chances instead of covering how Americans are suffering the consequences — like violent crime, fatal drugs, and infrastructure problems — that are directly linked to the ongoing influx of illegal border crossers.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

To Stop the Border Invasion, Get Tough on Mexico


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | MARCH 22, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/22/to-stop-the-border-invasion-get-tough-on-mexico/

riot overwhelms border patrol at the border with Mexico

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

A group of several hundred illegal immigrants forcibly pushed past Texas National Guard troops on Thursday in El Paso, Texas, breaking through razor wire and assaulting guardsmen as they forcibly rushed a border gate. Video of the clash, which was filmed by reporters from the New York Post, quickly went viral. It shows the crowd of migrants, all of them adult men, at first putting their hands up as they crowd around a small group of Texas guardsmen trying to block an opening in the fence the migrants had created. After what appears to be a brief physical altercation, the crowd rushes past the guardsmen. The Post reporter at the scene described it as a “riot.”

The video is shocking. It underscores not only how unstable the border has become but also what has been true for a while now: This is an invasion. What began as a crisis created by the Biden administration’s lax border policies is now an open conflict careening toward disaster.

What can be done to stop this? In the near term, mostly nothing. The riotous scenes at the border, the millions of illegal immigrants processed and released into the country by federal immigration authorities, the chaos of homeless illegal immigrants camped out on the streets of major American cities — all of these were totally predictable policy outcomes that the Biden administration knew would happen. They did it anyway, and they will probably not do anything to stop it.

But even if the Biden administration recognized that the border invasion might be a political liability going into the November presidential election, the steps required to bring the situation under control at this point are so drastic that there’s almost no chance the Biden White House would even consider them.

The key thing to understand about the crisis is that it’s being managed by Mexican cartels, along with their partners inside the Mexican government, as a for-profit enterprise. Under Biden, the cartels have turned illegal immigration into big business, a massive black market in which every illegal immigrant who crosses the border represents a source of income for the cartels. They are all being trafficked, in other words. It is not too much to say the cartels are running slave markets, as my friend Joshua Treviño did in these pages recently, “in which children are bought and sold to increase the chances that the norteamericanos will admit a supposed family unit, and also to provide supply to the vile and ravenous market in sex.”

The Mexican government is complicit in all this. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, has not tried to hide his longstanding connections to the country’s most powerful cartel, Sinaloa, nor has he done anything to rein them in during his presidency, consistently pursuing the drug war policy he outlined when running for president in 2018: “hugs, not bullets.”

In recent years, he has become testy and aggressive on matters related to immigration and the border. AMLO is especially incensed at efforts by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to crack down on illegal immigration. Asked about the new Texas law that would allow state law enforcement officers to arrest and deport illegal border-crossers, which a federal appeals court temporarily blocked this week, AMLO strongly implied the Mexican military would help illegals cross the border. His foreign secretary, Alicia Bárcena, said the government would put “increased vigilance and controls” at border crossings to prevent Texas from carrying out deportations if the law goes into effect. While AMLO would not say clearly what steps he would take, he did suggest some kind of retaliation: “We will not just sit around with our arms crossed.”

This is not how a friendly neighbor talks nor how a partner nation behaves. The truth is, Mexico is neither. One of the great fictions Washington policymakers have labored under for decades is the notion that our southern neighbor is anything but an antagonist on the border issue and that carrots, not sticks, are sufficient to secure its cooperation.

But the truth is just the opposite. Unless Mexico is credibly threatened with concrete measures that would harm its economy, AMLO will not act to alleviate the illegal immigration crisis. During Trump’s term in office, he was only able to get his Mexican counterpart to cooperate with his border agenda by threatening to slap tariffs on Mexican goods coming across the border. In many ways, Trump’s clear-eyed dealing with Mexico is what made policies like Remain in Mexico successful.

Something similar will be required in any future Republican administration. The only way to deal with the border crisis, at this point, is to carry out mass deportations. That will mean forcing Mexico to accept deportees and do more — far more — to control the flow of illegal immigrants north to the U.S. border. Absent the threat of crippling economic sanctions — or something worse — Mexico will not act to stem the tide of illegal immigration.

Until GOP leaders get that through their heads, they will be left in the ridiculous position of doing what House Speaker Mike Johnson did Thursday after the El Paso video went viral: pathetically tweeting about how it’s all Biden’s fault for “refusing to secure our border and protect America.” This, from one of the only Republicans in a position to actually do something about the border. Johnson could shut down the government over the Biden administration’s refusal to address the crisis, but he won’t.

It’s going to take stronger leadership than that to really deal with the invasion at the border, if and when a Republican takes back the White House. It will mean a total shift in conventional thinking about Mexico — and a willingness to treat our southern neighbor like the antagonist it has become.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

A Real Border Solution Would Punish Mexican Cartels, Not Bribe Them


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | FEBRUARY 06, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/06/a-real-border-solution-would-punish-mexican-cartels-not-bribe-them/

AMLO

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

A lot of ink has been spilled in recent days about the Senate’s $118 billion border bill, most of it detailing just how awful the proposed legislation is — awful, that is, if your goal is actually to secure the border. The bill creates a new baseline of admitting 1.8 million illegal immigrants annually, doles out work permits and green cards on the whim of federal bureaucrats, and funnels billions of tax dollars to the same NGOs that have for years facilitated mass illegal border crossings. And that’s just for starters.

But not much has been said about Mexico’s role in the new immigration regime this legislation would create. In fact, Mexico is barely mentioned at all in the 370-page bill. That’s odd considering that no border enforcement mechanism that actually keeps illegal immigrants out of the U.S. will work without some level of Mexican involvement.

Consider that the so-called “bipartisan” legislation, crafted behind closed doors by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, includes a “border emergency authority” to shut down the border if 5,000 illegal immigrants are arrested daily over seven consecutive days or 8,500 are arrested in a single day. Setting aside that this would cement into law nearly 2 million illegal immigrants every year, what would happen to all those illegal immigrants arrested in the U.S. after the border is “shut down” under this emergency authority?

Apparently, they would all be sent back to Mexico. But why would Mexico agree to that? Admitting hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals into northern Mexican border towns after they’ve already crossed into the U.S. would create massive problems for a country already beset by record-breaking violence and crippling levels of corruption.

The answer is that the Senate bill hopes to bribe Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Buried in the bill (on page 85) is a $415 million slush fund “to increase foreign country capacity to accept and integrate returned and removed individuals.” The unnamed foreign country here is almost certainly Mexico, which is where the “removed individuals” would be sent once the border is “shut down.” Another $850 million in the bill is set aside for undefined “International Disaster Assistance” to “address humanitarian needs in the Western Hemisphere.” Again, the likely recipient of the bulk of these funds will be Mexico.

For his part, López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, has been candid about his desire for the United States to pay for Mexico’s cooperation on the border. Last month, following a high-level visit of Biden officials to Mexico City in December, AMLO reportedly demanded $20 billion from the Biden administration to help tackle the “root causes” of illegal immigration, as well as sweeping reforms to U.S.-Cuba policy and 10 million visas for Mexican nationals currently living in the United States.

In this context, it’s hard not to see the hundreds of millions of dollars set aside in the border bill as a down payment on AMLO’s demands. At best, it’s a quid pro quo for cooperation on the border. At worst, it’s a ransom payment to a hostile neighbor with ill intent.

Now, one might argue that Schumer and McConnell and the Biden administration are just doing the practical thing here and securing Mexico’s cooperation. But such a view belies a misunderstanding of the relevant history and Mexico’s malign role in the border crisis.

For many decades now, the default assumption in Washington was that Mexico is our partner, that we can’t solve illegal immigration without Mexico’s help. But that’s only half true. The reality is that Mexico is not a partner, not a friendly neighbor with whom we can cooperate to solve this problem, but an antagonist. Over the last 15 or so years, the merging of Mexico’s most powerful cartels with certain elements of the Mexican state means that much of the border crisis is being directed and facilitated by the cartels in collaboration with Mexico’s National Guard and the National Institute of Migration, the federal agency in charge of migration in Mexico.

On top of that, it’s now a well-established fact that AMLO himself is cooperating with the Sinaloa cartel, the country’s most powerful, and has been for many years. A long and detailed report published by ProPublica last week chronicled Sinaloa’s bankrolling of AMLO’s 2006 presidential campaign, which appears to have been the beginning of a long partnership that has now borne fruit — for both parties. Sinaloa has helped consolidate electoral victories for AMLO’s left-wing Morena party in the last two election cycles, while AMLO has pursued a policy of placating the cartels and disavowing the drug war — “hugs, not bullets,” as he put it on the campaign trail in 2018.

That AMLO’s administration has been compromised by its association with the cartels, or that the cartels have figured out how to monetize illegal immigration, isn’t some conspiracy theory but well-established fact. Given that reality, it stands to reason that if AMLO is going to cooperate with the Biden administration to reduce the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. at the expense of the cartel networks with which he is politically allied, he’s going to want compensation. After all, the illegal immigrant black market was worth an estimated $13 billion a year as of July 2022, and is likely much more than that now, not counting the $56 billion in remittances to Mexico from the U.S. every year.

Put bluntly, that’s what the $415 million slush fund is really for, to make up for lost revenue that would otherwise go to the cartels, smuggling networks, and corrupt elements of Mexican officialdom. And it’s likely just a first installment.

Given all this, what other ways could we secure Mexico’s cooperation on the border crisis? Recent history suggests that sticks work better than carrots. In 2019, amid a much smaller border crisis, President Trump famously threatened to slap a tariff on all Mexican goods coming over the border unless the Mexican government did more to crack down on the caravans wending their way north through the country. If Trump had followed through, it would have collapsed the Mexican economy in short order, and everyone knew it.

Sure enough, the newly elected AMLO got the message. Arrests at the border soon began to plummet. The caravans were dispersed, and most never made it to the border. By the time Trump left office, illegal border-crossings were at historic lows.

That changed the month after Biden took office, and we have more or less been in crisis since then. Under Biden, almost nothing has been asked of Mexico, even as illegal immigration reached historic levels. Yet Biden hasn’t threatened AMLO’s government with a thing, and of course, the lack of consequences has incentivized more bad behavior from a corrupt Mexican state and the cartels that profit off the crisis.

If Senate Republicans were serious about convincing Mexico to accept expelled or deported illegal immigrants under a new U.S. border policy, they would treat our southern neighbor as the antagonist it actually is and threaten massive tariffs or some other economic penalties. As for the cartels, Republicans need to start making a more forceful case for going to war with them. Otherwise, there’s no way to get either the fentanyl or border crises under control.

The last thing you would do with such a neighbor, under these circumstances, is offer a bribe, validating the corruption right at the heart of the border crisis. Yet that’s exactly what the Senate bill does.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

We Need an Immediate Ceasefire in Ukraine, Not Israel


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | DECEMBER 12, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/12/we-need-an-immediate-ceasefire-in-ukraine-not-israel/

helicopter in front of explosion

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington this week, once again pressuring U.S. lawmakers to dole out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars for his war effort. At issue is a $110 billion national security supplemental the Biden administration has requested that includes about $61 billion for Ukraine, as well as more funding for Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and money to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.

Senate Republicans last week sensibly blocked a vote to advance the bill because it doesn’t include changes to border policy, which is the only thing that would actually secure the border. But the border isn’t the only good reason to block the funding package. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the war in Ukraine is an unwinnable quagmire, and that for all the calls we hear for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, what’s really needed is a ceasefire in Ukraine, where the solution today is more or less what it was before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022: a negotiated settlement.

Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio hinted at this in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper over the weekend, saying there’s no reason to think $61 billion will accomplish what $100 billion hasn’t. “The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous. Nobody actually believed it. So, what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is.”

So far, neither the Biden White House nor any neocon Ukraine hawk in Washington has been able to articulate what the endgame strategy in Ukraine should be. Instead, we get platitudes about the need to shovel more money into a bloody war of attrition from the likes of Mike Pompeo, who of course doesn’t bother to elaborate on what he means by “end the war.”

At this point, nearly two years into the war, no one really believes what Pompeo and Biden administration officials have been peddling since the conflict began, that somehow Western aid to Ukraine would enable a Russian “defeat” that would send Putin running back to Moscow, where perhaps he would even be deposed. That was always a neocon fantasy.

What was obvious from the beginning, as Mario Loyola pointed out in these pages just three weeks before the Russian invasion, is that Ukraine could have territorial integrity or political independence, but not both. Because of the unique historical circumstances of Ukraine’s borders, together with what Moscow has long viewed as its core strategic interests, Ukraine should have been prepared to trade land for independence. Indeed, U.S. leaders should have insisted on it.

Instead, President Biden embarked on a desultory policy of half-measures, giving Ukraine just enough aid to keep Russia from overrunning the country but not enough to expel Russian forces and risk a potentially catastrophic escalation with a nuclear power. Biden did this, moreover, without ever even attempting to explain to the American people why funding a proxy war against Russia constituted a core national interest. Then and now, anyone who questioned our involvement was labeled a Putin apologist. Insults were traded for arguments, and this is more or less where we are today.

That’s too bad because what the goal should be now is fairly obvious: an immediate ceasefire in which Ukraine de facto accepts Russian control over some of its territory without formally ceding it to Moscow. In exchange for this, Ukraine could fairly ask for and receive the kind of formal Western support that would ensure the territory it does have, which is most of the country, would be secure.

The lazy counterargument that such an arrangement would invite Putin to invade all of Eastern Europe is, as Vance argued, preposterous. Moscow is weaker than anyone thought, and if its military could not overrun Kiev, there’s no reason to think it could so much as set a track on any NATO member territory. Any suggestion to the contrary is fearmongering designed to shut down legitimate debate about what U.S. policy should be in this conflict.

Contrast all this with the war in Israel, which vast swaths of the American left seem to think needs to end immediately even as they support endless support for the Ukraine conflict. It’s a perfect illustration of how Americans tend to view foreign policy as a proxy for domestic politics. For the left, supporting Israel is to side with the oppressor. Never mind that Israel was viciously attacked by Hamas terrorists who control the territory from which they launched the Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli civilians. Hamas has vowed it will launch more such attacks as soon as it can. Under these circumstances, a ceasefire makes zero sense.

But for Ukraine, a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement is probably as good as it was ever going to get. The Minsk ceasefire agreements of 2014 and 2015, laid out in U.N. Security Council Res. 2202, provided that the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk would be allowed to conduct local elections with guarantees of local autonomy and a general amnesty. In exchange, the separatists would disband their “people’s republics,” disarm, and the Ukrainian military would reassert control of all Ukrainian territory to the Russian border.

That agreement was designed to avoid war, but it was never implemented. At this point, Ukraine will almost certainly never officially cede territory to Russia, but something like the Minsk agreement could work to bring an end to the fighting. The United States isn’t going to risk World War III to guarantee Ukraine’s 1991 borders, and the sooner Senate Republicans and the Biden administration make that clear to Zelensky, the sooner we can start working out what a post-war settlement could look like for Ukraine and Russia.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

In Major Reversal, Biden Admin Now Seeks To Build Trump’s Border Wall


BY: JORDAN BOYD | OCTOBER 05, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/05/in-major-reversal-biden-admin-now-seeks-to-build-trumps-border-wall/

Trump’s border wall

President Joe Biden’s White House repeatedly insists that the invasion at the U.S. Southern border is “not a crisis” but waived 26 federal laws this week so that it can resume construction of former President Donald Trump’s border wall and curb the millions of illegal migrants inundating border officials.

Mere weeks after the Department of Defense was caught “quietly” auctioning off millions of dollars of barrier parts, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced plans to rebuild a portion of the fortification separating the U.S. and Mexico.

The border wall project, assigned to DHS in a 2019 appropriations bill, is expected to cover 17 miles in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas where many illegal border crossings occur.

The Biden administration’s decision to simply waive more than two dozen laws without scrutiny is a slap in the face to Republicans like Trump who had to jump through judiciary hoops every time he tried to secure the Southern border.

It’s also yet another major flip-flop for Biden who, even before he was elected, swore off of physical barriers as an effective illegal immigration deterrent.

“There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration, No. 1,” he told NPR in August 2020.

On day one in the Oval Office, Biden scaled back several Trump-era border protections and halted Southern border wall construction. By April 2021, Biden’s DOD canceled the border wall construction contracts completely and diverted the funds to other Pentagon pet projects.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas previously told the House Homeland Security Committee under oath that he supported Biden’s decision to halt construction of the wall.

Millions of record-breaking illegal border crossings later, Mayorkas has changed his tune.

“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States,” Mayorkas wrote in his announcement waiving federal laws to restart barrier building.

The “acute and immediate need” Mayorkas refers to is the influx of illegal border crossers who have spent the last two years flooding underequipped regions and crowding already overpopulated cities.

Migrants rushed to the U.S.-Mexico border shortly after Biden was elected because he promised to abandon the border wall, ditch Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, and scale back ICE arrests and deportations.

August alone yielded 232,972 illegal border crosser arrests. Another surge in September means 2023 apprehensions are on track to outpace the nearly 2.4 million illegal border crossers arrested in the 2022 fiscal year. Those numbers don’t even include the estimated tens of thousands more “gotaways” who evade arrest every month.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

It’s No Accident the Southern Border Is Collapsing, It’s Intentional


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/21/its-no-accident-the-southern-border-is-collapsing-its-intentional/

Southern Border

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

A clip of comedian Louis C.K. on the Joe Rogan show has been circulating on X (formerly Twitter) this week in which he goes on and on about how opening up the southern border would be a good thing because Americans shouldn’t have such a high standard of living compared to the rest of the world, how poor people in other countries just want what Americans have, and how it’s not fair that we have so much. “It shouldn’t be so great here,” he says. So, open the border and let them pour in.

It’s possible he’s joking, that it’s just a comedy bit he’s practicing. That’s what my friend Inez Stepman thinks. Get liberals to nod along in agreement and then expose the consequences of such an insane idea. You can judge for yourself:

I don’t think it comes off as a joke but as an almost perfect distillation of globalist liberalism. Louis C.K. cannot fathom why Americans should have a say about who comes into their country and who does not. He clearly has no real allegiance to his country or countrymen, and is actually embarrassed by their prosperity — and presumably his own as well.

There is nothing special about America, according to this view, and no reason the rest of the world should not enjoy her ill-gotten riches. Opening the border is the least we could do for the cause of justice.

Whether it’s a joke or not, the substance of what Louis C.K. articulates is the logical endpoint of leftist ideology. It’s what the mainstream left actually believes — and the Biden administration has been actively working to accomplish at the southern border. 

This week, the border began collapsing completely in south Texas. Over five days, about 45,000 people illegally crossed the Rio Grande near the small town of Eagle Pass, Texas, population 28,000. In one especially active 24-hour period, nearly 10,000 people forded the river.

Customs and Border Protection shut down two international bridges to deal with the crisis. The mayor of Eagle Pass, Rolando Salinas, declared an emergency on Wednesday, it seems with good reason. He told The New York Post that the surge of illegal immigrants, most of them single adult men from Venezuela, has swamped the city’s only migrant shelter. Many of them, says Salinas, “don’t want to listen to instructions.” He added, “Not all of them come in peace.” 

Bill Melugin of Fox News has been in Eagle Pass this week posting jaw-dropping videos and images of the influx, which sure enough consists of mostly single adult men. The lines stretch over the river and along both banks as far as the eye can see. Whatever you think of the border and U.S. immigration policy, this is shocking.

All of it recalls the mass encampment of some 15,000 Haitians under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, two years ago. At the time, images of what looked like a refugee camp you might see in a war-torn country dominated several news cycles, goading the Biden administration to disband the encampment and deport a small number of Haitians as a warning to others. Most of them fled back across the Rio Grande rather than face being deported to Haiti, a country they had left years ago for better jobs in South America (which countries they in turn left for better jobs in the United States).

But notice how the illegal immigrants in Melugin’s footage are walking calmly, not running, not trying to evade Border Patrol. They show every indication they believe they will not be detained long.

And of course they’re right. It’s impossible for federal authorities to detain this many people arriving within such a short timeframe. There is simply nowhere to put them.

A soft-sided facility erected by Customs and Border Protection that could house about 2,000 quickly reached capacity early in the week, leaving federal officials little choice but to parole mass numbers of illegal immigrants and release them from custody on their own recognizance. They are now making their way to points all across the United States. The vast majority of them will stay for good.

This is not a mistake or a mishap, the unintended result of an ill-considered policy. This is intentional. Flooding the border with illegal immigrants is the actual policy.

When White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeats the talking point that President Biden has “done more than anyone else” to secure the border and deal with illegal immigration, as she did again last week, what she really means is that under Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, uncontrolled illegal immigration is not something federal officials are trying to stop, it’s something they’re trying to facilitate and manage.

The numbers tell the tale. Nearly six million people have been arrested crossing into the United States illegally since Biden took office. Millions more have gotten in without being caught. About 200,000 are arrested every month. They are coming in such great numbers because they know that if they can get across the river they’ll be allowed to stay. Under Biden, there is almost no chance of being deported. It’s not more complicated than that.

That brings us back to Louis C.K.’s comments and the ideology from which they spring. Deterring illegal immigration is a policy you pursue only if you believe foreign nationals do not automatically have a right to enter the United States simply because they want a better life. Borders are something you enforce only if you believe you have a duty to your fellow citizens and the nation at large to protect the country and safeguard its way of life.

Biden and Mayorkas and the ruling elite in this country do not believe these things. They believe a borderless world is better, that the United States does not belong to the American people, to whom they feel no particular allegiance.

To quote Louis C.K., they believe it shouldn’t be so great here. And they’re determined to make it so.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:


Wealthy Democrats Aided And Abetted The Biden Border Crisis, Now They’re Whining About It

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

SEPTEMBER 01, 2023

7 MIN READ

Border crisis migrants stand in a line

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

Amid the scrum of news this week about Democrat-led schemes to put former President Donald Trump on trial during the GOP primaries and rig the 2024 election in plain sight, you might have missed a cautionary tale out of New York City, where Democrat millionaires are whining about a migrant crisis they helped create.

A group of more than 120 executives, including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Larry Fink of BlackRock, and Jane Fraser of Citigroup, sent a letter to the Biden administration and congressional leaders asking for more federal aid to New York, to help with what they call “the humanitarian crisis that has resulted from the continued flow of asylum-seekers into our country.”

Credit where credit is due: These wealthy New York executives seem to have figured out the connection between huge numbers of illegal immigrants — sorry, “asylum-seekers” — and the humanitarian crisis that always follows.

It’s a connection many of us made years ago, back when massive waves of illegal immigrants were overrunning Texas border towns and gathering in sprawling makeshift encampments along the north banks of the Rio Grande. Unable to house or even properly process these people, federal border officials resorted to dropping them off at bus stations in places like McAllen and Del Rio, Texas — relatively small towns with few resources to cope with the thousands of illegal immigrants released from federal custody, sometimes on a daily basis.

But so long as the chaos and crisis stayed in south Texas, Democrats in deep-blue enclaves like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles were happy to tut-tut anyone who claimed there was a problem at the border or suggested that maybe we should do something to stop the flow of illegal border-crossers. If you complained or proposed solutions, you were a racist — just like those Border Patrol horsemen with their “whips.” How dare they try to stop foreigners from illegally entering the country right in front of them?

But now that hotels and shelters are filled to overflowing in these cities, now that the crisis has come directly to open-border Democrats’ homes and places of work, wealthy urban elites want the government to do something about it. (A New York Times story this week mentioned that new arrivals are being forced to sleep outside over-capacity shelters, including one at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, “just blocks away from JPMorgan’s offices.”)

The New York letter, whose list of signatories includes people like Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf, ends with a plea to Washington “to take immediate action to better control the border and the process of asylum and provide relief to the cities and states that are bearing the burdens posed by the influx of asylum seekers.”

Of course, to hear White House flack Karine Jean-Pierre tell it, President Biden is controlling the influx of migrants at the border and, in fact, has stopped the flow! She actually said that this week, even though as Bill Melugin of Fox News was quick to point out, it’s completely false.

Leaving aside idiotic White House spin, do the wealthy letter-signers of New York realize that one very effective way to “better control the border” is for state and local law enforcement to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ensure illegal immigrants under an order of deportation by an immigration judge are actually deported? Do they know that kind of enforcement is a powerful deterrent to would-be illegal border-crossers abroad, and lack of such enforcement is a powerful pull factor that encourages more illegal immigration?

It would seem they do not. These are the same people, after all, who tacitly supported a 2019 law making it much easier for illegal immigrants to get a driver’s license in New York, thus shielding them from detection, while also prohibiting ICE and CBP from accessing New York DMV records.

Did the current Democratic mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, support this policy when it was introduced four years ago? He was a state senator for years; surely he knew about it. Today, Mayor Adams says that any plan to address the migrant crisis in his city that does not involve stopping the flow of illegal immigration at the border “is a failed plan.”

I hate to be the one to break it to him, but stopping the flow of illegal immigration at the border means taking away the incentives for people to illegally cross the border in the first place. Making it easy for illegal immigrants to get a driver’s license, for example, while helping to shield them from federal immigration authorities, is a recipe for more, not less, illegal immigration.

New York is of course only one state among many that has passed such laws. Indeed, a vast illegal immigrant sanctuary network has sprung up nationwide in recent years among blue cities, states, and counties that have enacted laws, ordinances, regulations, and policies that hinder immigration enforcement and shield criminal aliens from ICE.

Still, even amid the crisis, with migrant families sleeping on the streets of New York and other major cities, blue-state elites don’t quite seem to grasp what’s happening, which is why they aren’t demanding deportation but better processing and expedited work permits for “asylum-seekers” — policies that do nothing but provide more and stronger incentives for migrants to enter the United States illegally.

And make no mistake: Would-be migrants are acutely aware of the incentives and disincentives at work here. As Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies noted in a recent interview, “All U.S.-bound immigrants pay very, very close, almost academic attention, to any and all policy pronouncements uttered or implemented by American leaders about immigration. They also pay close attention to news of all immigration-related court rulings. The reason they are so disciplined is because this or that policy or court ruling either makes illegal entry easier or harder.”

Which means, in turn, that surges in illegal border-crossings of the kind we’ve seen since Biden took office — a record 2.3 million border arrests last year and on track for the same or greater this year — are driven almost entirely by policy decisions coming out of Washington, D.C., and legal rulings from the federal judiciary.

If New York millionaire Democrats paid half as much attention to border policy as illegal immigrants do, maybe they’d grasp what’s going on at the border, and why. Maybe they could then start to make sense of the anger and frustration of working- and middle-class residents of their cities, who increasingly show up at public meetings to express outrage at the migrant crisis. One woman, a Chicago resident speaking at a recent meeting about a migrant shelter in Hyde Park, was blunt about it: “I don’t want them there. Take them someplace else or send them back to Venezuela. I don’t care where they go. This is wrong. You got 73 percent of the people homeless in this city are black people. What have you done for them?”

Maybe, just maybe the wealthy elites who run our blue cities are beginning to wake up and realize that soon that woman’s question will be on the lips of every resident of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and every other place where Democrats have helped create the conditions for this crisis.

Here’s hoping they can connect the dots. If they can’t, they can always go down to the local migrant shelter and have an asylum-seeker explain it to them.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

More Suspected Terrorists Found Illegally Crossing Southern Border in April Than in Four Trump Years Combined


BY: JORDAN BOYD | JUNE 02, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/02/more-suspected-terrorists-found-illegally-crossing-southern-border-in-april-than-in-four-trump-years-combined/

handcuffed at the border

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

Border Patrol agents caught 16 people on the FBI’s terror watch list trying to illegally cross the U.S. southwest land border between entry ports in April, bringing this fiscal year’s suspected terrorist arrest total up to nearly 100.

Not only is 16 higher than the recorded combined arrest totals from fiscal years 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 but it’s the same as the total number of suspected terrorists apprehended at the southern border in FY 2021. Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection also suggests that the number of suspected terrorists arrested in April alone was five times the three watch list apprehensions listed for all of FY 2019 and FY 2020.

There are still five months left in the 2023 fiscal year, which means that 2022’s arrest total of 98 people on the watch list, an all-time record for the U.S., will be easily surpassed in the coming months. Already, CBP data says 98 noncitizen watch list members were arrested at American borders in 2023, all but two of whom were caught at the southern border. Reports of more potentially dangerous foreign nationals trying to infiltrate the U.S. in May have also surfaced.

Ever since Biden took office in January 2021, border arrests have skyrocketed. The number of suspected terrorists captured by border agents may be small compared to the 1,734,686 and 2,378,944 illegal border crossers apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in FY 2021 and FY 2022, respectively, but it is important.

Despite the Biden administration and corporate media’s attempts to downplay the ongoing border crisis, internal alarm over the escalating number of terror watch list members caught entering the U.S. prompted CBP in April of 2022 to create an “Enforcement Statistics” page detailing all of its agents’ “Terrorist Screening Data Set Encounters.” At that time, roughly 42 people listed on the terror watchlist had been arrested attempting to enter the U.S. since Biden became president.

As the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center webpage notes, everyone listed on the watchlist is “reasonably suspected to be involved in terrorism (or related activities)” and most “are not Americans.” Because these people “have no known connection to the U.S.,” their increased presence at the southwest and northern borders of the nation, where overwhelmed border agents struggle to keep up with the years-long influx of migrants, is suspect.

Just as millions of arrests and hundreds of thousands of gotaways continue to increase, so does the number of national security threats seeping into the country. As Todd Bensman, the Center for Immigration Studies’ Texas-based senior national security fellow, writes, “remember that not all terrorism-linked ‘special interest aliens’ coming from nations of national security concern get as far as nomination and approval for the FBI terrorism watch list, which involves a lengthy, multi-tiered process.”

“Some 3,000 to 4,000 special interest aliens are caught between ports of entry every year from the same countries as those who do make the FBI terrorism watch list. Terror links may not come out until much later, after the individual is in the country,” he warned.

Republicans on the House Committee on Homeland Security sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray in late May demanding information about suspected terrorists, specifically an Afghan national and a Pakistani national, who were caught trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in May.

“These reported arrests raise serious questions about the security of our Southwest border and the potential for terrorists to take advantage of the glaring vulnerabilities due to the Biden-Harris administration’s open-border policies,” the Republicans wrote.

That demand was preceded by a letter from Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, and Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green pressuring Mayorkas to explain how DHS “is handling the elevated national security risk presented by an increasing number of aliens with terrorist ties illegally crossing the southwest border into the United States.”

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

House Democrats Snub Chance at Bipartisan Border Oversight, Blame GOP For Crisis Biden Created


BY: JORDAN BOYD | FEBRUARY 07, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/07/house-democrats-snub-chance-at-bipartisan-border-oversight-blame-gop-for-crisis-biden-created/

CBP Chief Patrol Agent of the Tucson sector John Modlin testifies to House Oversight Committee
‘We went from … unprecedented to a point where I don’t have the correct adjective to describe what’s going on,’ one border chief said.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

MORE ARTICLES

Republicans convened the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday to evaluate the “front lines of the border crisis” but Democrats were less than cooperative in the GOP’s efforts to hear from two chief patrol agents.

“President Biden and his administration have created the worst border crisis in American history,” committee chairman Republican Rep. James Comer said in his opening remarks.

Comer and several other GOP members on the committee pointed to President Joe Biden as the reason millions of migrants, including suspected terrorists, illegally cross the border. Witnesses — CBP Chief Patrol Agent of the Tucson sector John Modlin and Chief Patrol Agent of the Rio Grande Valley sector Gloria Chavez — confirmed this in their testimonies.

“In the Tucson sector, interviewing people post-arrest, what became the most common response [from migrants] was that they believed that when the administration changed that the law changed and policy changed and that there was an open border,” Modlin said.

The chiefs agreed that border security measures like the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (often referred to as the “Remain in Mexico” policy), which Biden eliminated with the stroke of a pen at the beginning of his term, were “effective” at combatting the staggering number of illegal migrants flooding the border.

And staggering those numbers are.

“We went from what I would describe as unprecedented to a point where I don’t have the correct adjective to describe what’s going on,” Modlin said.

Democrats Opt for Smears over Accountability

House Democrats, who had two years to give Biden’s disastrous border the oversight it required but failed to do so, were less interested in asking the CBP officials questions and far more interested in criticizing Republicans for suggesting that Democrats’ lax border policies are responsible for the worst migrant influx in U.S. history.

Before the hearing, the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security tried to obstruct oversight by Republicans by keeping CBP officials from testifying. Democrats joined in their attempts to taint the GOP’s investigation into the border crisis with smears that Republicans wanted “to amplify white nationalist conspiracy theories instead of a comprehensive solution to protect our borders and strengthen our immigration system.”

The “QAnon caucus” and “anti-immigrant” name-calling continued in the hearing after ranking Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin launched another round of politically motivated attacks in his opening remarks.

The same Democrats who bought into and promoted the border patrol whipping lie claimed that Republicans “demonize migrants” and refuse to fund the border through Democrats’ omnibus wish list. Washington D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton even went so far as to blame the GOP for the El Paso Walmart shooting.

Despite Democrats’ attempts to turn the hearing into a political circus painting the border crisis as a funding problem, instead of a policy problem, the witnesses confirmed that the U.S. southern border is comprised in a way it’s never been in the past.

Cartels ‘Leveraging Chaos’

A large part of the Republicans’ border inquiry centered on the Biden administration’s failure to secure the border against cartels, which Chavez said have become “more active” in trafficking humans and drugs into the U.S. in “recent years.”

“Cartels are leveraging chaos at the border. They are using their human smuggling operations to overwhelm U.S. Border Patrol agents with large migrant groups, often placing migrants in peril,” Comer said. “They create these diversions at the expense of human life to traffic dangerous narcotics like fentanyl, across our southern border. These deadly drugs then make their way into communities across the United States and poison our neighbors and our children.”

“No one crosses the border in Tucson sector without going through the cartels,” Modlin confirmed in his testimony. Chavez testified the same about her district.

“[Migrants are] pretty much confined to whatever those cartels require to be able to see their family member again,” she said.

Democrats tried to claim that the problems at the border are a “humanitarian crisis, not a criminal one.” Yet, none of them mentioned the connection between cartels’ illegal activities and migrants, including the criminals’ lack of care for the men, women, and children who have to bribe them for passage to the U.S.

“What my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are failing to recognize is in order to get here, [migrants] have to deal with a group of people that is not interested in human rights. They place no value on humanity. If they can make money on it, they will exploit it,” Republican Rep. Kelly Armstrong said. “I think one of the mistakes we make quite often is we talk about [cartels] like they’re drug cartels. They’re in the business of making money and whatever the path of least resistance is, is how they make money.”

Cartels’ billion-dollar migrant smuggling business, Modlin and Chavez said, deliberately puts illegal border crossers in danger so Border Patrol agents will leave their posts to conduct rescue missions.

“There are a lot of migrants out there that are out there requiring rescue. So, a lot of times, our agents are out there rescuing people, being task-saturated in rescues, abetting frontline operations, so therefore cartels take advantage of that,” Chavez said.

Rescue operations like those are dangerous and have, in recent years, proved fatal for American agents and migrants alike.

A Fentanyl Pipeline

Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the proliferation of fentanyl in the U.S. is a serious issue that needs addressing. What the representatives did not agree on is that it’s Biden’s policies that embolden the cartels to manufacture and smuggle fentanyl into the states.

Multiple Democrat representatives tried to blame the proliferation of fentanyl on U.S. citizens who are often selected to bring the drugs to the United States. Rep. Katie Porter even had the audacity to argue that because CBP is seizing more fentanyl now than it was before 2020, border security under Biden is a “success.”

“Regardless of who’s bringing it across the border, U.S. citizens, ports of entry, between ports of entry, not ports of entry, the drugs that are killing people in my communities are being made by the cartels,” Armstrong pointed out.

Modlin and Chavez both said their agents are overworked and overwhelmed by the crisis. Unless there’s a national policy shift on the border, the historic crisis is only going to get worse.

“What happens on the border affects the entirety of the country,” Modlin said.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

The End of Title 42 Caps the Worst Year for Illegal Immigration in U.S. History


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | DECEMBER 14, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/14/the-end-of-title-42-caps-the-worst-year-for-illegal-immigration-in-u-s-history/

El Paso
The Biden administration has no plan for what to do beginning next week when it loses the ability to quickly expel illegal immigrants.

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

As the year winds down, the border is about to break wide open. In less than a week, the Biden administration’s last remaining tool to control illegal immigration, left over from the Trump administration, will be taken away.

Title 42, the public-health order invoked by President Trump during the pandemic that allowed immigration officials to quickly expel most migrants caught crossing the border illegally, will end on Dec. 21 by order of a federal judge. Once Title 42 is gone, federal agencies at the border will have no choice but to process and release nearly every illegal border-crosser. It will represent a full return to the Obama-era “catch-and-release” policy. Border Patrol estimates they could see as many as 14,000 arrests per day in the coming weeks, which would totally overwhelm the border.

For migrants, there is now every incentive to do just that. Word of Title 42’s demise has almost certainly reached migrants in Mexico already, who now know that if they cross the Rio Grande, they will be allowed to remain in the United States, with work authorization, for years while they await the outcome of an asylum hearing.

Biden, who repealed or severely curtailed nearly every one of Trump’s border policies upon taking office in January 2021, has no plan for what to do now. Axios reported this week on a vague plan circulating among Biden officials for a temporary (five-month) moratorium on asylum, but the plan hasn’t been approved. It’s unclear how it would even be implemented with less than a week to go before Title 42 ends.

But even if the feds do impose a temporary halt to asylum, it’s too late. Thousands of migrants are crossing into the El Paso sector every day now, many of them having been bussed into Ciudad Juárez by the Mexican government. They are coming from large caravans that, having heard of the impending end of Title 42, formed for precisely this purpose.

Many of them are from Nicaragua, which means they can’t be deported to Nicaragua (the U.S. has no deportation agreement with the authoritarian dictatorship of Nicaragua’s president-for-life Daniel Ortega), and they can’t be expelled to Mexico, which refuses to take back Nicaraguans. So, the U.S. is just letting them in, giving them a court date for an asylum hearing years from now, and releasing them. Never mind that many of these migrants, by their own admission to reporters, are economic migrants who have no valid asylum claims.

Back in August, my colleague Emily Jashinsky and I reported on the migrant encampments and shelters in the Mexican border towns of Matamoros and Reynosa across the Rio Grande from Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, respectively. Most of those migrants were Haitian, although they had been living in various South American countries for years, with legal status. They came to the border for a chance to get into the U.S. and pursue what one of them told us was “the American dream, a dream for all Haitian people.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=N4hUfRufhdU%3Ffeature%3Doembed%26enablejsapi%3D1

The reason so many had been waiting in Mexican shelters was that they feared being deported back to Haiti, where they hadn’t lived in many years, or because they had already tried to cross and been expelled back to Mexico under Title 42. They could not afford to pay the cartels for multiple river crossings, and so they were waiting, they told us, for U.S. policy to change.

Their wait is almost over. Once the threat of expulsion under Title 42 is gone, there will be little to hold them back. The border will become a chaotic, ungovernable disaster. We will likely see the appearance of tent-like refugee camps on the U.S. side of the border, as we saw in Del Rio, Texas, in the fall of 2021. To put the figure of 14,000 arrests per day into context, three years ago, during the 2019 border surge, President Obama’s DHS Secretary, Jeh Johnson, said that 1,000 apprehensions a day “overwhelms” the system and that he “cannot imagine” what 4,000 arrests per day would look like.

2022 was the worst year for illegal immigration in U.S. history. 2023 will be worse yet. As long as the Biden administration maintains its open-border policies, illegal immigration will increase, the cartels that profit from migrant smuggling will get rich, and the border will descend into chaos.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:


Sorry, There’s No ‘Smoking Gun’ In Martha’s Vineyard, Just A Lot Of Left-Wing Condescension

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

6 MIN READ

Martha's Vineyard

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

One of the most condescending and insulting responses on the left to the Martha’s Vineyard migrant imbroglio last week was the repeated insistence, by blue-check media figures and Democrat politicians alike, that the 50 migrants who voluntarily boarded a plane to Massachusetts were somehow misled or tricked into it. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in this fevered telling, took advantage of these poor people for a political stunt, proving himself to be a cruel and heartless man, willing to exploit the misfortune of desperate migrants — weaponize them! —  just to own the libs. 

It’s hard to think of a more patronizing attitude toward men and women who successfully navigated a harrowing exodus from Venezuela and Columbia, trekked through Central America and Mexico, dealt with smugglers and cartels and corrupt police the entire way, and finally set foot in the United States.

Contrary to insulting left-wing stereotypes about ignorant and confused migrants, the people who show up at our southern border tend to be tough, determined, and keenly aware of what’s in their own best interest. (I know that firsthand, having interviewed hundreds of migrants over the years, most recently in Reynosa and Matamoros, Mexico. I always come away impressed by their grit and resolve and resourcefulness, which is more than I can say for Twitter blue-checks who are happy to opine about what we should do about “helpless migrants” but can’t be bothered to take a trip to the border to interview them in person.)

Now comes Judd Legum with an unintentionally hilarious story for Popular Information purporting to be a “smoking gun” proving that the Martha’s Vineyard migrants were lied to — and maybe even kidnapped! It’s probably the purest possible distillation of the condescending left-wing notion of confused and helpless migrants being led around by the nose by cynical and evil Republicans. 

Legum opens his breathless reportage with this bombshell: “Popular Information has obtained documentary evidence that migrants from Venezuela were provided with false information to convince them to board flights chartered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R). The documents suggest that the flights were not just a callous political stunt but potentially a crime.”

And what is this documentary evidence? A brochure outlining refugee and immigrant benefits and assistance available in Massachusetts, which is a sanctuary state with multiple state programs designed to assist refugees and migrants. Legum says he got the brochure from Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR), a Boston-based legal organization that’s supposedly representing 30 of the migrants, who presumably got it from Florida officials before they boarded the flight to Martha’s Vineyard.

According to Legum, though, the benefits described in the brochure are only available to refugees who have been referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and authorized to live in the U.S. They’re not for illegal immigrants who have claimed asylum, like the Martha’s Vineyard migrants. Therefore, he says, they were misled. Lawyers for LCR are now asking the Massachusetts attorney general to open an investigation. “The allegation that the migrants were misled is legally significant,” writes Legum. “It would mean that the flights were not just heartless, but potentially criminal.”

But no matter how much activist reporters like Legum might wish that DeSantis had somehow committed a crime by offering illegal immigrants a voluntary free flight to Massachusetts, it just isn’t so. The 50 or so migrants who landed in Martha’s Vineyard last week were never promised employment or anything else, they were simply told that sanctuary states like Massachusetts, unlike Florida and Texas, have programs and assistance available to refugees and migrants, which is true.

The brochure in question, for example, contains a list of community services and churches that have migrant assistance programs. The first one listed is a link for the immigration page of a website called First Stop Martha’s Vineyard, which is an online reference guide to the island’s social services and programs. It includes information about the Massachusetts Office for Refugee and Immigrants, among other programs.

The flights themselves were organized and funded as part of Florida’s relocation program to transport Florida-bound illegal immigrants to sanctuary states like Massachusetts, California, and New York. The Florida legislature last year set aside $12 million for the program, which also targets human smugglers and traffickers through a law enforcement strike force. Texas has a similar program under the aegis of Gov. Greg Abbott’s $4 billion ongoing border security initiative, Operation Lone Star. 

According to Florida officials, the Martha’s Vineyard migrants were identified in Texas as Florida-bound, but with no resources to travel. Some of them were sleeping in the streets, others in shelters. They were put up in hotels for a night or two and offered voluntary transport to Martha’s Vineyard. Some, after a night in a hotel, changed their minds and opted not to go. One migrant, a man named Eduardo Linares, told the Texas Tribune he declined the offer but that he’s since heard from people who went to Martha’s Vineyard, and now he’s wondering whether he made the right decision. Legum quotes Linares alleging that a mysterious blonde-haired woman named “Perla” promised him and others a job and rent assistance in Martha’s Vineyard, but left out the part about Linares second-guessing his decision to stay behind. Why? Because including that detail would disrupt the preposterous narrative that these migrants are confused and helpless, unable to make their own decisions, and totally at the mercy of duplicitous, scheming politicians like DeSantis and Abbott.

The reality of the situation is more complicated. Often, illegal immigrants who cross the southern border into the U.S. already have a job lined up and a place to stay, usually with family members. They’re bound for points all across the country, from California to Massachusetts. Some might even make their way to Martha’s Vineyard, especially if they’re offered a free ride.

That is to say, most of them have a plan. But you would never know it from the coverage of the Martha’s Vineyard saga, which didn’t just demonstrate the hypocrisy of leftists who welcome illegal immigrants so long as they don’t show up in places like Martha’s Vineyard. It also demonstrated the appalling condescension many in the corporate press have toward the very migrants they pretend to champion. 

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

    Category:

    Political

    Tagged with:

    Texas Counties Say the Border Crisis Is An ‘Invasion.’ They’re Not Wrong


    REPORTED BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JULY 06, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/06/texas-counties-say-the-border-crisis-is-an-invasion-theyre-not-wrong/

    Border wall

    The move was meant to pressure Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to take direct action to secure the border. The question is, will he?

    Author John Daniel Davidson profile

    JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

    VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

    MORE ARTICLES

    Ahandful of Texas counties on Tuesday declared the ongoing border crisis an “invasion” and called on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to do the same, citing constitutional authority for states to act in self-defense in the face of federal inaction.

    Speaking in rural Kinney County, which includes a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, officials from Kinney, Uvalde, and Goliad counties said the Biden administration has refused to secure the border and enforce the law, and that although Abbott has done much to support local communities in south Texas most affected by the crisis, he needs to do more. Namely, he needs to follow their lead and declare an invasion.

    County officials of course can’t do anything about illegal immigration on their own, but their argument is that Abbott, as governor of Texas, can. They cite Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which says that states can’t do things like conduct foreign policy or engage in war, “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit delay.”

    Those three words, “unless actually invaded,” are the crux of the argument. The idea that states have the constitutional power to act on their own to enforce immigration law and police the border has been gaining ground for some time now. Former Trump administration officials such as Russ Vought and Ken Cuccinelli, both now at the Center for Renewing America, have made a case for unilateral state action on the border. 

    Cuccinelli, former acting deputy Homeland Security secretary under Trump, was at the press conference on Tuesday in Texas. “This is the first time in American history that a legal authority has found, as a matter of law, that the United States is being invaded,” he said, later adding, “What we’re talking about is an operation that looks a lot like Title 42.”

    That is, declaring an “invasion” means that state law enforcement, at the direction of the Texas governor, would directly arrest and expel to Mexico illegal immigrants in much the same manner as Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection does now under Title 42, the pandemic health order that allows federal authorities to expel illegal immigrants with minimal processing.

    So far, Abbott has been reluctant to take this route, instead attempting lesser measures such as arresting and prosecuting illegal border-crossers for criminal trespass or ordering onerous state inspections at ports of entry as a way to pressure his Mexican counterparts into stopping migrants in Mexico before they cross the border.

    These lesser measures, however, haven’t done anything to stem the flow of illegal immigration, which continues, month over month, to set new records. Perhaps it’s time for Abbott to listen to these local officials, and also to people like Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who was also at the press conference Tuesday and said, “We should declare an invasion and, as Texas, turn people away.”

    Arguably, Abbott already bought into this more expansive constitutional interpretation of state authority when he struck security agreements with the governors of the four Mexican states bordering Texas back in April. (Never mind that the agreements were mostly for show, given the corruption of Mexican officialdom in these states.) After all, Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution says that states are not allowed to “enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded.”

    By entering into security agreements with “another State, or a foreign Power,” it would seem Abbott has tacitly acknowledged not only that his state has been “actually invaded,” but that he has the constitutional authority to act in its defense. If that’s the case, why not take the next step and avail himself of the considerable law enforcement (and military) resources at his disposal to secure the border and expel illegal immigrants?

    Maybe Abbott, secure in the state capital of Austin, is just taking longer to reach this conclusion than the people of south Texas, who are bearing the brunt of the border crisis. Indeed, among the hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border illegally every month now are a not insignificant number of people who do not want to be arrested, and whose presence on U.S. territory could reasonably be considered hostile. Unlike the migrant families who turn themselves in to the first Border Patrol agent they see, these people often attempt to evade the authorities, which gives rise to things like high-speed chases through small towns and over private lands. Across Texas border communities, this has become a serious and worsening problem since President Biden took office.

    Some of those chases end in damaged property; some end in fatal car crashes. Sometimes the attempt to evade detection ends not with a chase but a horrifying tragedy like the one in San Antonio last month, where 53 migrants were found dead in a tractor-trailer.  

    Corporate media outlets, to the extent they cover the border crisis at all, will likely only mention efforts to declare the crisis an invasion in order to mock it or smear the people arguing for it as racists and bigots. But it is not some crackpot idea. In February, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued a legal opinion affirming that the border crisis constitutes an invasion and that the governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, has the authority under the Constitution to secure its border with Mexico.  

    In his legal opinion, Brnovich argued that the meaning of the word “invade,” as used in Article I of the Constitution, “covers the activities of the transnational cartels and gangs at the border—they enter Arizona ‘in [a] hostile manner’; they ‘enter as an enemy, with a view to … plunder’; they ‘attack,’ ‘assail,’ and ‘assault’; and they ‘infringe,’ ‘encroach on,’ and ‘violate’ Arizona.”

    Ducey, like Abbott, has thus far balked at the idea of using state law enforcement to police the border directly. But as the crisis drags on, each month breaking the previous month’s record for arrests, border-state governors might be forced to test the limits of their authority. The incentives to do so are only going to mount as the crisis worsens.

    And anyway, if there’s a constitutional question to be settled here, why not step forward now, set down a marker, enforce the law, and see how it plays out? If states really have no power to repel an invasion, no ability to defend their people and police their borders in the face of federal inaction, then we might as well admit now that we no longer live in a constitutional republic, and that states, whatever they once were, have been reduced to nothing more than administrative units of a centralized regime in Washington. There’s a word for such a political arrangement: empire.

    John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

    Category:

    Political

    Tagged with:

    If Anyone Believes In ‘Replacement Theory,’ It’s Democrats Who Think Voters Are Stupid


    REPORTED BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | MAY 18, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/18/if-anyone-believes-in-replacement-theory-its-democrats-who-think-voters-are-stupid/

    Biden's Buffalo speech

    Democrats have been bragging that ‘demographics is destiny’ for years. But a more diverse electorate isn’t voting the way they’d hoped.

    Author John Daniel Davidson profile

    JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

    VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

    MORE ARTICLES

    In the immediate aftermath of the massacre in Buffalo, New York, where a deranged white supremacist killed 10 people, elite opinion quickly settled on the real culprit: Republicans. The New York Times spelled it out explicitly in an editorial this week, claiming Republican politicians and conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, “openly espouse versions of a white supremacist conspiracy theory holding that an orchestrated effort is underway to displace white Americans.”

    The Times is of course referring to so-called “replacement theory,” the idea that global elites are trying to “replace” white Americans with immigrants and foreigners, which the Times thinks is a common belief among Republicans. Not to be outdone by the Times, the Washington Post’s editors on Monday declared, “what was once on the fringes has now been given currency, thanks to the Republican Party’s tolerance of white nationalists who count themselves as part of its base.”

    The notion that “replacement theory” is mainstream on the right, much less in the GOP, is of course abject nonsense. But the accusation serves a purpose. By conflating the conspiracy theories of maniacs like the Buffalo shooter with legitimate calls for, say, border security and controls on illegal immigration, the left can smear all Republicans as white supremacists. Doing so serves a useful purpose for Democrats. If Republicans are the party of people who believe global elites are trying to “replace” white Americans with immigrants and foreigners, then any calls to fix our immigration system or solve the ongoing crisis at the border must be in bad faith, nothing more than rank racism thinly disguised as a respectable-sounding immigration agenda.

    It also serves Democrats in another way: it helps mask an electoral agenda they once openly espoused. It’s no secret that Democrats think mass illegal immigration will accrue to their electoral advantage over the long term. For years, they have felt comfortable saying so routinely on national television. Indeed, the notion that “demographics is destiny” has been a long-running belief among Democrats, famously spelled out in John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s widely acclaimed 2004 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” Part of their argument rests on the assumption that immigration, legal and illegal, will swell the ranks of Democrat voters and hasten the inevitable emergence of a permanent Democratic majority. That theory, whatever its merits in 2004, is looking weaker by the year. Under President Trump, the Republican Party made huge inroads among black and Hispanic voters, especially in areas like south Texas and Florida, where Democrats’ theory of demographics would have suggested such GOP gains would be impossible.

    It’s not just Republican voters who are getting more diverse, but also Republican officeholders. As Henry Olsen noted after the 2020 election, which saw a record number of Republican women and minorities elected to the House, “every seat Republicans have flipped from blue to red has been captured by a woman or a minority.”

    The Virginia statewide elections last year continued this trend, with a black woman, Winsome Sears, elected lieutenant governor, and an Hispanic man, Jason Miyares, elected attorney general. So much for the emerging Democratic majority.

    But here’s the thing: Republicans didn’t come up with the “demographics is destiny” idea. Democrats did. For years, they bragged that rising levels of immigration and massive demographic change would usher in profound changes in U.S. politics. The Buffalo shooter went on and on about this in his idiotic manifesto, echoing similar diatribes from other racist mass shooters in recent years. Wonder where they got the idea? 

    It’s true that the country is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, it’s simply a fact. The problem for Democrats is that this more diverse electorate isn’t voting the way they hoped it would. In part, that’s because Republicans are waking up to the fact that immigration and border security, together with other commonsense policies like not letting rioters burn down neighborhoods and not shutting down the economy because of Covid, are issues that can broaden their base and bring in a more diverse array of voters.

    All of which is to say, asinine white supremacist notions about how all the races should live separately have absolutely nothing to do with efforts to control illegal immigration, and most people know it. When Democrats try to smear Republicans as white supremacists for wanting a secure border, understand that they’re not just trying to demonize the right, they’re trying to change the subject. Illegal immigration is just about the last thing any Democrat wants voters thinking about heading into the midterms. Why? Because the border is a complete disaster. According to the latest data, federal authorities arrested more than 234,000 illegal immigrants in April, yet another record-breaking monthly total. So far, this fiscal year, nearly 1.3 million illegal border-crossers have been arrested along the southwest border, also a record.

    Ordinary, non-white supremacist Americans of all races and walks of life look at this and think something must be very wrong at the border. They see news stories like the one this week about an industrial-scale drug-smuggling tunnel that federal authorities discovered on the California-Mexico border — six stories deep and the length of six football fields, with reinforced walls, electricity, ventilation and a rail system — and they wonder what’s going on in Mexico. They are smart enough to know that drugs like fentanyl, which is ravaging American communities, come primarily from labs in northern Mexico that are controlled by powerful cartels. They also know that these cartels are in the business of drug and human trafficking, and that they profit off mass illegal immigration. 

    Voters are not stupid, certainly not stupid enough to believe that the GOP and Tucker Carlson are fomenting white supremacist conspiracy theories. But the editors at The New York Times and the Washington Post, along with every leading Democrat including the president, think they are. At this point, they’re counting on it. 

    John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

    Category:

    Political

    Tagged with:

    U.S. Special Forces Veterans Rescue Afghan Family Biden Abandoned, Reunite Them with American Father


    REPORTED BY: JORDAN BOYD | APRIL 29, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/29/u-s-special-forces-veterans-rescue-afghan-family-biden-abandoned-reunite-them-with-american-father/

    family silhouette

    It had been more than a year since Hashmatullah Niazy, a U.S. citizen, last saw his wife, Freshta, and four young children when they finally reunited in Austin, Texas this month.

    Author Jordan Boyd profile

    JORDAN BOYD

    VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

    MORE ARTICLES

    While thousands of illegal immigrants pour across the southwest U.S. border daily, Afghan refugees abandoned by the Biden administration during the Afghanistan withdrawal are still struggling to gain legal entry to the United States.

    It had been more than a year since Hashmatullah Niazy, a U.S. citizen who emigrated from Afghanistan, last saw his wife, Freshta, and four young children when they finally reunited in Austin, Texas this month. Niazy became a U.S. citizen in 2020 through the Special Immigrant Visa program after working as a translator for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. He began translating and training recruits at the Kabul Military Training Center in 2007 after his older brother died in combat while working with special forces. When Niazy obtained his U.S. visa in 2014, he resigned from his job and flew to the states. 

    Niazy told me he wanted to bring his family over with him, but every time he tried to initiate the immigration process, his wife was pregnant and wanted to avoid strenuous travel. Freshta and the children eventually joined the backlogged SIV immigration process before the Taliban took over the country, but their quest for permanent U.S. residency was derailed when President Joe Biden initiated the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan last fall.

    I first reported on Niazy’s family situation in September 2021 when his brother, wife, and kids were all stranded in a Taliban-infested Kabul. At the time, Niazy was already in the United States, working nights and eagerly building a life for his family in Texas. But his excitement for his family’s new life in America was blunted when he realized they might not make it past the crowds at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul to get on an evacuation flight out of Afghanistan.

    “Suddenly the Taliban took over the country and now we were like lost,” Niazy told me.

    That’s when “angels from the sky” came in.

    The Escape

    After weeks of chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where some translators and their families were among the more than 200 people killed by a suicide bomber on August 26, Freshta and the kids, ranging in age from 3 to 12 years old, finally escaped Kabul at the end of September with the help of a large group of former U.S. soldiers, some trained in special operations.

    Jim Young, Dan Fickel, Keye Perry, Joe Penkala, and another man named “Tom,” who is still in active government service and declined to give his last name, all graduated from West Point in 1994. When they saw the crisis in Afghanistan, they banded together to do everything they could to rescue Americans and Afghan allies the Biden administration had left behind. They enlisted the aid of several other former service members including Ryan Timoney, West Point class of 1993 graduate Dave Abrahams, retired Special Forces officer Matt Coburn, former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, and Helen Jbeily of California Republican Rep. David Valadao’s office to actively shepherd Freshta, her brother-in-law, and her kids to the overcrowded, dangerous airport for evacuation while avoiding the Taliban as much as possible.

    I talked to Penkala, a retired U.S. Army officer, about the rescue efforts after the Niazy family’s first attempt to seek evacuation at the airport.

    “We had sort of an up and down type of situation, even after we had taken over his case, and had managed to get the family back to [the airport]. And it was through no small effort on the part of some folks from the Special Operations community, one individual in particular who was retired,” Penkala told me over the phone. “We actually got them to the North Gate [of the airport] so this is the second time they had made it to the airport. And even though there was an obvious way to bring them in, frankly, they were still left stranded. Nobody would open the gate for them even though at one point we only had about 25 people in front of the North Gate.”

    At one point, Penkala told me that, “the Taliban began beating some of the local Afghans,” forcing the on-the-ground rescuers to adapt as the Niazy clan retreated to their apartment.

    During that time, Niazy said his wife “never lost her courage.”

    “There was the time that I lost my hope. That was the time when my wife said ‘It’s okay. Whatever it takes me to get my kids to their dad, I will do that,’” Niazy said. “So that was a time when she gave me the courage, she gave me the hope and I needed it.”

    Efforts to orchestrate the evacuation of the Niazys and hundreds of others from the clutches of the Taliban were largely funded by one of Young’s business partners, Zekelman Industries out of Texas, which donated $1 million out of the $1.1 million required to reunite the Niazy family and other refugees after another sponsor backed out.

    After days of chaos, the Niazy family and 528 other American citizens, legal permanent residents, their spouses, and their children were finally able to flee Afghanistan unharmed.

    “We’re so thankful for all these great humans. From God first and then from all these humans that helped me and came into my life, me and my wife,” Niazy said.

    Evacuation Was Only The Beginning

    Even though the Niazy family applied to permanently rejoin the head of their household in the United States, it was a long and difficult process between September of last year and early April this year, when they were finally permitted to set foot on American soil.

    “This was a family who was already in the process and had paperwork prepared. And, frankly, the wife was married to a U.S. citizen. This is the immediate family of a United States citizen and it took private efforts,” Penkala said. “And once we got them out of harm’s way, it took an additional five months to come into the country.”

    During that time, Freshta and her children were at a refugee camp in the United Arab Emirates. While the family was safe from the dangers the Taliban posed to them, they were stuck in limbo and at the mercy of the American bureaucracy.

    Penkala said “there were some folks who were kind enough to work through their connections to get them some additional food and supplies and that type of thing” but that didn’t help reunite the family.

    Niazy admitted that the experience induced many “sleepless nights” for him as he anxiously waited for the green light. In total, it took more than five months for Niazy, an American citizen who served with U.S. forces in combat, to legally relocate his wife and kids to Texas.

    The American Dream

    The Niazy family may have had to jump through multiple hoops that illegal immigrants at the Southern border don’t, but a lack of help from the U.S. government hasn’t hampered their enthusiasm for the American Dream.

    While Niazy works as an engineering technician, Freshta and the children are acclimating to their new lives along with Niazy’s parents, who also emigrated to the United States. Once the family moves to a new apartment, three of the four children will start attending school. 

    In just a couple of weeks, Freshta and the Niazy children are expected to receive their Social Security numbers. But for now he is thankful that his immediate family made it to a free country where his daughters can attend school.

    “It’s the teaching of our parents that wherever you live, treat it as your home, keep it clean, and keep the environment clean and also treat your neighbors good,” Niazy said. “With this [Taliban] regime, no one is happy and everybody lost the hope that [Afghanistan] will ever be a free country.”

    When I video chatted with the family last week, Niazy had just woken up after working a night shift at his engineering job and Freshta was preparing food in the family’s apartment kitchen. The children were happily chattering with each other as they played with toys. The youngest one gave me a shy wave.

    “This is a beautiful life,” Niazy said as he bounced his daughter on his lap. “I’m very excited and very happy. And I am praying for those who helped me, these beautiful humans in my life.”

    Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

    Category:

    Foreign Policy

    Tagged with:

    Tag Cloud