A three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government has the authority to deport illegal immigrants even if local leaders try to impede the process. The case arose after King County Executive Dow Constantine issued an executive order in 2019 that instructed county officials to prohibit “fixed base operators” (FBO) on a county airfield from servicing flights chartered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport illegal immigrants who are lawfully removable. FBO’s “lease space from the airport and provide flights with essential services, such as fueling and landing stairs,” according to the ruling.
The Trump administration sued because the order impeded ICE from enforcing the law and removing illegal immigrants. The administration argued that the order violated the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and a World War II-era agreement that gave the federal government permission to use the King County airport.
The three-judge panel affirmed both contentions. The panel ruled that the executive order was a violation of the Supremacy Clause’s intergovernmental immunity doctrine because it “improperly regulates the way in which the federal government transports noncitizen detainees by preventing ICE from using private FBO contractors at Boeing Field.” The court also held that the executive order discriminated against the federal government by “regulat[ing] them unfavorably on some basis related to their governmental ‘status.’”
King County said it would not appeal the ruling, according to The Seattle Times.
The incoming Trump administration has vowed to solve the border crisis and deport illegal immigrants who are draining taxpayer resources, while hordes of so-called “sanctuary cities” nationwide oppose enforcement of federal immigration law and go so far as to refuse to comply with ICE authorities.
Tom Homan, dubbed the incoming “border czar,” has already warned sanctuary city officials not to resist or impede the federal government’s deportation activities.
“It is a felony to knowingly harbor or conceal an illegal immigrant from immigration authorities. Don’t test us,” Homan said.
One Democrat, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, has already vowed to mobilize police and residents “stationed at the county line” to “keep” federal immigration authorities “out” of the city. Johnston likened the hypothetical to Tiananmen Square but later tried to walk back the comparison.
Homan responded to Johnston’s open defiance, saying he is “willing to put [Johnston] in jail.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is pleading with lawmakers to send the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) more money after the disaster relief agency emptied the coffers to provide services for illegal immigrants.
“FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season,” Mayorkas told reporters on Air Force One Wednesday, with hurricane season running from June 1 through Nov. 30.
“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” he said, after Hurricane Helene brought devastation to the southeastern United States.
The storm crashed into Florida as a Category 4 hurricane last week and poured a record-breaking 40 trillion gallons of water across the South, washing away entire Appalachian towns. Ryan Cole, the assistant director for emergency services in Buncombe County where Asheville became isolated due to broken roads and no power or cell service, characterized the aftermath as “Biblical.”
“You’ve heard us say, ‘catastrophic devastation within our county.’ I would go a little bit further and say we have Biblical devastation through the county,” Cole said Sunday. “We’ve had Biblical flooding here, and it has been extremely significant.”
But while communities across southern Appalachia scramble to rebuild following the torrential downpour that killed roughly 200 people, federal relief efforts have come up short. One woman named Alyse Adams, who spoke to NBC News about her family stuck in the North Carolina mountains, said she’s been stunned by the slow response from the Biden-Harris administration.
“I don’t know how you did not have a formal press conference or something from either President Biden or Kamala Harris,” Adams said. “FEMA is not on the ground there at all. They are not in these cities, not in these towns, and not in these villages.”
This woman has family trapped in Spruce Pine, North Carolina for 4 days… She just called out Biden and Harris live on NBC: pic.twitter.com/FFT11nuOPM
While the emergency response agency is typically proactive, with pre-staged supplies ready for immediate rescue operations, that same support was clearly not available to the Appalachian towns where Hurricane Helene wrought havoc. Instead, the Biden-Harris administration restructured FEMA to provide services for illegal migrants with a new bureaucratic mandate to instill “equity as a foundation of emergency management.” Storm preparedness ranks as a third priority for the disaster relief task force under “lead[ing] whole of community in climate resilience.”
According to the government’s website, FEMA has spent more than $1 billion “to provide humanitarian services to noncitizen migrants following their release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” under the “Shelter and Services Program” just within the last two years. The agency allocated nearly $364 million to the program in the fiscal year 2023 and $650 million for 2024.
“Over the last 4 years the Biden-Harris admin has steadily transformed FEMA — the agency responsible for responding to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene — into an illegal alien resettlement agency that emphasizes DEI over public safety,”reported America First Legal, a conservative non-profit. AFL published a series on online posts outlining where FEMA spent tax dollars meant to assist Americans in the aftermath of major storms and hurricanes.
“The Shelter and Services Program is designed to exclusively provide shelter and services to illegal aliens,” AFL reported, with millions in grants spent to groups primarily across the Southwest. AFL also highlighted the “Emergency Food and Shelter Program” as a “separate program” that has given $685 million “to fund illegal aliens.”
/4 Moreover, the Emergency Food and Shelter Program has been reshaped to provide funding to “families and individuals encountered by the Department of Homeland Security” – aka illegal aliens.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, FEMA gets most of its funding from supplemental appropriations bills passed by lawmakers following natural disasters. This hurricane season, however, has only brought two major storms to the U.S. that caused widespread devastation: Helene and Beryl, which hit Texas in June. Yet Mayorkas is now demanding more funding for FEMA after the administration diverted the agency’s resources for the continued migrant crisis under President Biden’s “border czar,” Kamala Harris.
“We have, of course, made a significant request of Congress with respect to stable funding for the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which should not be a political issue,” Mayorkas said Wednesday. “This is something that Americans need desperately.”
Americans in the washed-out towns of southern Appalachia also need the support of their federal government more than the illegal border crossers in California and Texas, desperately.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
A.F. Branco Cartoon—VP Candidate Tim Walz has been to China over 30 times, lived there, and where he spent his Honeymoon. He has been pushing to send more jobs there from America while excusing their genocide policies, ignoring the fact that they have killed over 200,000 Americans with their Fentanyl coming across the border. For Walz, it’s not America first; It’s China first.
Kamala Harris Chooses VP with Deep Ties to Communist China: Tim Walz Visited China Over 30 Times, Had a Special Work Visa, Set Up a Student Program to Travel in China, and even Honeymooned There
By Jim Hoft – August 7, 2024
Kamala Harris has selected Tim Walz as her running mate for the upcoming election. This decision raises serious concerns about national security and the integrity of American values, given Walz’s radical policies and extensive ties to Communist China. Senior reporter Paul Sperry from RealClear Investigations recently uncovered a disturbing pattern in Walz’s relationship with China. According to investigative journalist Paul Sperry on X, Walz traveled to China annually from 1996 until at least 2003. His travels were not merely for tourism; he was granted a special work visa by the Chinese government, which raises questions about his loyalties and motivations. During his time in China, he reportedly expressed a deep admiration for the country. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Kamala says that illegal immigrants entering our southern border are way down, but she fails to mention they are flying 1000s into our country from around the world.
Joe Biden Admits to Secretly Flying 320,000 Illegals into the United States
By Jordan Conradson – March 7, 2024
Trump ICE Director Tom Homan will testify in a House Judiciary Committee hearing alongside Center for Immigration Studies’s Art Arthur and America First Legal Executive Director Gene Hamilton to examine Joe Biden’s handling of the illegal immigration crisis. The hearing “will examine how the Biden Administration has systematically dismantled effective border security measures and has stymied aggressive enforcement of the immigration laws in the interior of the United States” and “how President Biden can mitigate the border crisis by using mechanisms that currently exist within immigration law,” according to the Judiciary Committee’s webpage. This hearing comes after the horrific murder of Georgia college student Laken Riley by an illegal alien suspect named Jose Ibarra. Countless Americans have been raped and murdered by the illegals that Biden rolled out the red carpet for. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco Cartoon — in her desperate attempt to get elected, Kamala is flip-flopping on her long-held core values, like no fracking, border policies, defunding police, Medicare for all, and taxing worker tips. Given her far-left values, we all know she’ll flip back flip back if she’s elected.
Dem California Senator on Kamala’s Constant Flip-Flops: ‘She’s a Human Being Who Learns New Things’ (VIDEO)
Mike LaChance – August 5, 2024
Laphonza Butler, the junior U.S. senator of California, appeared on CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ this weekend and was asked by host Dana Bash about Kamala Harris changing her views on a laundry list of major issues. Butler tried to spin this by suggesting that Harris is changing her opinions because she is learning new things. This answer was beyond generous. Harris is not changing her mind about minor issues because she is reading books and speaking to experts. She is doing a total 180 degree turn on major issues because she thinks they could sink her campaign. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Trump had illegal immigration down to a trickle compared to Biden blowing up the dam and allowing over 10 million Illegals along with unknown gotta-aways and terrorists.
Biden’s Broken Border Allowed 400 Illegals Tied to ISIS-Affiliated Human Smuggling Network into US, The Whereabouts of Over 50 Remain Unknown
By Margaret Flavin – June 26, 2024
Two Venezuelan illegal immigrants were arrested for 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray’s murder in Houston, Texas, after reportedly abducting her, strangling her, and dumping her body in a bayou.
An illegal from Ecuador wielding a “machete-style” knife kidnapped two school children from a New York park in broad daylight, tied them up, and then sexually assaulted the young girl.
The Gateway Pundit also reported that an illegal alien from El Salvador was charged with brutally raping and murdering Rachel Morin, a mother-of-five, on a Maryland hiking trail last year.
Now, disturbing news from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reveals that they have identified over 400 illegals who have entered the U.S. from Central Asia and elsewhere by an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network and are considered “subjects of concern.” READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
President Joe Biden announced an executive order (EO) Tuesday that awards amnesty to illegal immigrants married to U.S. citizens. And while he dubbed his overreach as keeping “families together,” it is nothing more than another step in Democrats’ plan to expand their future electorate.
The EO makes it easier for illegal immigrants who married U.S. citizens — and their children — to apply for lawful permanent residence status without leaving the country, and after that, U.S. citizenship. An approximate 500,000 illegal immigrants who married a U.S. citizen will benefit from this order along with 50,000 children, according to the White House.
Without providing any explanation as to how, Biden claims this will “strengthen” the U.S. economy. Notably, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows foreign-born workers gained 637,000 jobs year-over-year while native-born workers lost roughly 299,000. The BLS acknowledges foreign-born workers likely include illegal immigrants. As economist E.J. Antoni recently explained to The Federalist, the drain illegal migrants place on the economy offsets their production value.
By federal law, “non-citizens, including permanent legal residents,” are not allowed to “vote in federal, state, and most local elections,” according to USA.gov. But lawful permanent residents are “eligible to become a U.S. citizen after five years of becoming a lawful permanent resident, or three years if you are married to a U.S. citizen,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Unless there are specific carveouts in Biden’s executive order prohibiting individuals who came into this country illegally before receiving amnesty from registering to vote, then Biden just gifted Democrats with hundreds of thousands of potential future voters.
Former President Donald Trump warned that under Biden’s election-year order, “a deluge of illegals will be given immediate green cards and put on the fast track to rapid citizenship so they can vote.”
“Couple this with [Biden’s] previous voter registration EO and it is clear that Biden is attempting to win the upcoming election, not by winning over legitimate American voters, but by attempting to legitimize illegal immigrants,” said Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen. “He won’t stop with this EO. He will keep attempting to dilute the power of the vote of legal Americans.”
Of course, Biden and Democrats, as my colleague Shawn Fleetwood explained, “want Americans to believe they aren’t interested in handing out U.S. citizenship and voting rights to foreign nationals like it’s candy on Halloween.” Yet their actions, including this EO, suggest otherwise.
In fact, Biden’s EO sends the same message that a trio of Democratic witnesses sent during a Senate Judiciary Hearing in March. Not a single Democrat witness could resolutely say they believe only citizens should be able to vote in a federal election. And it’s the same message being sent by Democrats nationwide who oppose legislation to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections. As of right now, anyone registering to vote in federal elections must simply check a box affirming he is a U.S. citizen. Individuals — legal or not — can simply lie on their registration forms. In other words, our elections hinge on the honor system. It’s a loophole Republicans are working to close via the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would amend current law to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Democrats have insisted the SAVE Act is unreasonable and unnecessary since, according to federal law, it’s illegal to vote in an election if you’re not a U.S. citizen. It’s also illegal to bum-rush border agents and break into the country.
Only one state, Arizona, requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in state elections. As a result of the federal government’s attempt to weaken Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship law, individuals who cannot prove their citizenship can register as federal-only voters.
During the 2020 election in Arizona, 11,600 voters voted using a federal-only ballot, according to AZ Free News. Biden won that state by 10,457 votes.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
The ongoing border invasion is perhaps the largest source of human trafficking inside the United States. Yet the woman President Joe Biden tasked with monitoring and combating this problem has largely neglected that nexus in her reports, speeches, and other work since assuming her role in January 2023.
On paper, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Cindy Dyer appears qualified to lead that State Department office. Her official bio boasts “three decades of experience working at the local, national, and international levels to prevent and respond to human trafficking, sexual assault, and domestic violence” as well as her lengthy track record as former vice president for human rights at a nongovernmental organization.
It’s safe to say Dyer is no stranger to the conditions that breed exploitation at home and abroad. That might be why the Senate unanimously confirmed her as human trafficking czar in 2022. Notably missing from her work at the TIP office, however, is a focus on what has quickly become the nation’s biggest hub for human trafficking: the southern border.
The Elephant in the Room
Human trafficking was a huge, bipartisan issue until a few years ago when corporate media started associating it with the “far-right.” That narrative shift directly coincided with Democrats’ zeal for unfettered illegal immigration. That means it’s like pulling teeth to get anyone in the regime (including the nation’s lead woman on the job) to talk about the mass human trafficking at our compromised southern border.
Still, it’s happening and, with the help of a vast nongovernmental organization system, is funded with American tax dollars and enabled by American policies.
In 2007, the majority of trafficking victims in the States were clocked as female border crossers. Even our federal government admits on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website that “border smuggling frequently involves human trafficking.” Since that report was released in 2007, the number of men, women, and unaccompanied minors indebting themselves to smugglers so they can illegally enter the United States has skyrocketed.
At least 10 million illegal border crossers have entered the United States since President Joe Biden’s presidency began. Since illegal immigrants rarely get across the U.S.-Mexico border without paying a price to cartels, those millions likely shelled out thousands of dollars to ensure their illegal passage from Mexico into California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
The people demanding these payments are “coyotes,” the billion-dollar human smuggling arm of criminal organizations that control the Northern Mexico territory. The profitability and frequency of these cartels’ kidnapping and ransom schemes have increased since Biden effectively legalized illegal border crossings after taking office in 2021.
Tara Lee Rodas, who worked with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement to place unaccompanied migrant children with sponsors, told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement in April 2023 that children “are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with being recruited in home country, smuggled to the US border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to . . . Sponsors” who may be “criminals and traffickers and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations.”
“Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the US Government has become the middleman in a large scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children,” Rodas said.
See Something, Say Nothing
The 2023 Trafficking in Persons Report, released by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Dyer last June, acknowledges that human trafficking “often occurs transnationally” but stops short of acknowledging that the influx of illegal border crossers welcomed under President Joe Biden contributes to the nation’s modern slavery problems. Instead of addressing the root cause of U.S. trafficking problems — unfettered and incentivized access to the United States via a compromised border — Dyer said the State Department is focused on promoting “equity” that prioritizes “diverse groups and marginalized communities” in foreign countries.
“Promoting equity with respect to race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and for marginalized communities is not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do. When we partner to support vulnerable migrants, advocate for women’s rights, or enact legislation to protect LGBTQI+ individuals, we are creating a more just and equitable world that is also more impervious to human traffickers,” Dyer wrote in the report’s introduction.
Later in the 116-page document, Dyer also demanded foreign governments “re-double their efforts to proactively identify all victims, protect them, support survivors, prevent trafficking even in the face of new and complex challenges, and ensure that law enforcement holds traffickers accountable.” The report confirmed this by calling for U.S. security and government “assistance” for other countries deemed in need of trafficking prevention resources.
Yet Dyer failed in the report to specifically address securing the U.S. border or cracking down on the criminal trafficking that stems from it.
The United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking Annual Report 2023, released under the Dyer office’s supervision, does touch on the relationship between the border invasion and trafficking but fails to link it to the Biden administration’s open border polices or recommend any serious policies aimed at combating the problem. Instead, the report merely suggests the Department of Homeland Security increase its “oversight,” “support,” and “awareness” of the issue.
Why hasn’t Dyer directed her or her subordinates’ attention to the ongoing border chaos despite its clear connection to human trafficking?
She admitted the quiet part out loud during May 2023 testimony to the House Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations when she told Chairman Chris Smith, R-N.J., that her office supports the Biden administration’s goals to facilitate amnesty for illegal border crossers instead of deportation.
“Addressing the challenges of irregular migration, specifically providing protection to refugees and asylum seekers and offering lawful migration pathways are key priorities for the administration,” Dyer said.
The Federalist asked Dyer if she believes cracking down on illegal immigration and securing the border would reduce the risk of human trafficking, but she did not respond.
Emboldening crime organizations with promises of citizenship for all doesn’t simply put illegal border crossers at risk of exploitation and harm, it endangers Americans too. Simply put, failure to curb the border crisis is a direct failure to cut down on human trafficking and American suffering in 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.
After he died last month in federal custody, Democrats are rallying around the death of an illegal alien who was convicted of murder more than two decades ago. Charles Leo Daniel, a Trinidad and Tobago citizen who illegally overstayed his U.S. visa, died due to unknown circumstances on March 7 in the Northwest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington.
Daniel was first jailed after he was convicted in 2003 of the brutal murder of his landlord roommate with a “bloody butcher knife.” Court documents say police arrived on the scene to find Daniel “covered in blood.”
Daniel claimed self-defense but the court determined that “testimony to be lacking in credibility” and “found the forensic evidence inconsistent with Daniel’s account of how he had stabbed” the victim, Raymond Lindsay. The court initially sentenced Daniel to “220 months prison and 24 to 48 months of community custody.” A per curiam decision issued in 2007 affirmed that sentence after concluding that “the court did not misapply the law of self-defense.”
After an immigration judge ruled in favor of expelling Daniel from the country in 2020, Daniel was transferred into the custody of the Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations, where he died.
Shortly after his death, researchers at the University of Washington quickly alleged that the circumstances of Daniel’s detention, which included “the second-longest stretch in solitary confinement of any person in ICE custody since 2018,” caused him suffering and may have played a role in his death. The UW activists demand that Congress send “written information requests of the agency’s Congressional liaison.”
“If members of Washington’s Congressional delegation have chosen not to make use of this tool to date, now is the time to start, in the interests of transparency, accountability, and supporting the leadership of Washington communities who are using every tool at our disposal in our effort to stop the abuse of our neighbors,” the “research update” concludes.
A few weeks later, a dozen Democrat Senators sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Patrick J. Lechleitner, the ICE official performing the duties of the director, on March 29 demanding an end to the “misuse of solitary confinement in immigration detention.”
Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin, two of the signees, also spoke out against solitary confinement for those convicted of crimes connected to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. They did not, however, ever send a formal letter demanding better treatment for detained Americans than for illegal border crossers.
Democrats’ letter to ICE does not mention Daniel’s name. It does, however, use the same language as UW to pressure ICE into reducing punishments for foreigners who break U.S. law and murder Americans.
On March 21, Rep. Pramila Jayapal also released a statement scolding ICE for “overreliance on detention” and even suggested that “nearly 67 percent of people detained in ICE custody have no criminal record and many more only have minor offenses such as traffic violations.” While mentioning Daniel by name, she did not mention Daniel’s criminal record atop his violation of U.S. immigration law. Instead, she offered sympathy to his family for the “unacceptable tragedy.”
“First and foremost, my heart goes out to Mr. Daniel’s family and loved ones. His death is an unacceptable tragedy and there must be accountability and a full investigation to understand exactly what happened at the Northwest Detention Center,” she said.
Democrats’ attention to Daniel’s death received amplification from The News Tribune. The pro-illegal migration group La Resistencia also saw their fact-free claims of “harassment” and “intimidation” amid protests outside of the Tacoma detention facility published in a positive light.
Neither article mentioned Daniel’s criminal history.
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.
MIDLAND, Texas —Alex Wise Jr. would have turned 11 years old in May, but he won’t be at his birthday party this year. Instead of celebrating another trip around the sun for Wise, his extended family will gather without him to honor his 10 short years on Earth.
“I wish he was here. I really do wish I had him here. But unfortunately, his life was taken way too early by someone who wasn’t even supposed to be in the country,” Sykia Benson, Wise’s mom, told The Federalist.
Wise became one of the many victims of the ongoing border invasion in February, shortly after he was struck and killed by an illegal border crosser as he headed home from school. The elementary school student used to ride the bus, but after his family moved apartments, he was asked to walk.
Thursday, February 8 was Wise’s first and last day to walk his new after-school route. Before the 10-year-old could even make it to the stop sign where someone was waiting to meet him, Wise was hit by a truck driven by an illegal border crosser.
“Everybody else let [Wise] cross the street but this car was so impatient that it went around. And he was almost on the grass, like a step away from being on the grass when he got hit,” Benson said.
Rogelio Ortiz Olivas, a 50-year-old Mexico native who re-crossed President Joe Biden’s open border after facing deportation at least five times previously, was registered as intoxicated at the time of the crash. He fled the scene but was later arrested after an officer at a traffic stop noticed his damaged truck hood bearing an “impression of a skull.”
Ortiz Olivas faces a third-degree felony of “hit and run, accident causing death” charge for “driver negligence” and failing to stop and render aid. Local arrest records confirm that, to this day, the Midland County Sheriff’s Office is holding Ortiz for “collision involving serious bodily injury,” “driving while intoxicated,” and an immigration detainer.
Benson says police told her Ortiz Olivas had a New Mexico driver’s license and the vehicle he drove was in his name.
“Somebody helped him get identification,” Benson said. “Somebody helped him in New Mexico get an ID.”
The Midland Police Department did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s questions about this alleged driver’s license and whether it was still valid at the time of the incident. It wouldn’t be impossible, however, for an illegal border crosser like Ortiz Olivas to have obtained a standard license at some point under New Mexico’s lax ID laws.
‘The Sweetest Kid’
Benson received the devastating call that her son was injured and would be life-flighted to the nearby city of Lubbock for medical care as she was picking up her father from the local airport. By the next day, Benson’s “sweet,” “helpful,” and “friendly” boy was gone.
“He was a kid. He got into things,” Benson recalled. “But he was still just a sweet, sweet person.”
Wise wasn’t just sweet, he was also smart, making mostly A’s and B’s in school. When he wasn’t learning math, his favorite subject, Wise was playing sports with friends
“He loved football, basketball, soccer. He loved it all. He was about to start playing football. He already played basketball and soccer,” Benson said.
Wise also loved playing with his one-year-old sister. Benson said her daughter doesn’t quite understand Wise’s absence but she recognizes it.
“I don’t think she knows too much now but you can definitely see a void where she’s used to running to him, running in his room,” Benson said.
As for Benson, she’s taking things “day by day.”
“I feel like I’m at a standstill because it’s surreal that he’s gone,” Benson said through tears.
A Preventable Death
Since Wise’s passing, Benson and her family have received an outpouring of support from their church, friends, and Wise’s school, which promised to erect a park bench in her son’s name. But not even the most heartfelt gestures can take away the pain she feels when she wakes up early to take her son to school only to remember he’s not there.
“It’s been hard. Trying to get used to him not being here, it’s been really, really difficult,” Benson said.
One of the most unexpected parts of her grieving process, Benson said, is her concern that a tragedy like the one her son endured could happen again. She said her son’s death could have been prevented if the United States had better deportation enforcement and border security.
“There should be laws put in place where if you’re deported one time and you get caught a second time, it should be mandatory automatic jail time. So you keep sending them back and they keep coming over and they’re getting over some kind of way. It’s no control over the border,” Benson said.
Currently, Benson does not know when legal justice against her son’s alleged killer will be served.
“I actually haven’t heard anything from anyone,” Benson. “Nobody’s been informing me about anything. I’ve been going to them, and they still don’t know too much.”
The Midland County District Attorney’s Office confirmed to The Federalist on Wednesday that there are no scheduled court dates for Ortiz Olivas.
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.
The real National threat to America? Joe Biden, Obama, and the Democrats. Their open-border policies have endangered American citizens more so than at any time in recent history. Rape, Murder, Fentanyl deaths, disease, Terrorists, MS-13 gangs, Human Trafficking, and assorted high rise in crime. Trump fixed this problem through executive orders that Biden ended when he came into office. This is not a Congress problem; this is a Biden problem, and he and the Democrats have blood all over their hands.
Joe Biden Is America’s Biggest National Security Threat
By New American Prophet
At the end of President Donald Trump’s administration, there was peace abroad and prosperity at home. After three years of President Joe Biden, Americans no longer enjoy economic prosperity, but face inflation and high interest rates. Also, there are major wars raging in Ukraine and in Gaza, while additional wars may be started by the brutal dictators in China and Venezuela. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Earlier this month the Senate rejected a “compromise” on the border and sent a bill to the House that funds Israel’s many needs following the 10/7 massacre, Taiwan’s defenses, weapons for Ukraine and a significant spend on America’s defense industrial base. Now Speaker Mike Johnson has to decide what to do with it because he needs more support from his Caucus than the bill as currently written garners from the House GOP caucus. The best strategy for the Speaker? Make everyone an offer they can’t refuse: Build the wall.
The key to getting the Supplemental passed lies in a Washington Post article from February 27, the headline of which tells the story: “The Border Wall Has Never Been More Popular.”
The critical two paragraphs:
“Multiple recent polls have shown support for building a wall along the southern border creating a majority.
“Late last year, it was Quinnipiac University and Fox News polling that showed between 52 and 57 percent supported its construction. On Monday it was a Monmouth University poll that pegged support at 53 percent.”
Those are eye-popping numbers because the wall is former President Trump’s signature issue, but the collapse of security at the border and President Biden’s shrugging of shoulders at the flood of migrants who have crossed the border since he became president has changed public opinion dramatically in Trump’s and the wall’s favor.
Trump had the border under control by the end of his first term and has promised to do so again in a second term.
Biden, in the sharpest contrast of the campaign ahead, abandoned the policies that led to control of the border and eight million people entered the country without permission in Biden’s first three years. That number has likely now passed 9 million total “encounters” at the border —and that number does not include “got-aways”: The illegal immigrants who do not enter through a port of entry and are never “encountered” by law enforcement anywhere. The “get-aways” include the cartels’ worst customers carrying the most fentanyl and the Chinese nationals who don’t want to be fingerprinted and then released.
It’s a mess. It’s a huge burden on all the states and cities flooded with migrants. It’s a threat to every kid who tries one pill because they think they have bought a Xanax online but it’s a knock-off laced with enough fentanyl to kill. And it’s a national security nightmare.
Only 450 Chinese nationals were “encountered” at the border in Fiscal Year 2021. In FY 2022 “encounters” with Chinese nationals soared to 2,176. “In 2023, it ballooned to 24,314,” according to NBC News and in the first quarter of FY 2024, estimates are that another 19,000 have already entered and the surge in this demographic is increasing. That’s a national security issue of the first order. When the Soviet Union existed, do you think Ronald Reagan would have allowed 40,000 Soviets to enter the country and vanish into its interior? Of course not, but Joe Biden has done the equivalent of that by doing nothing.
Migrants are encountered by Border Patrol in the San Diego sector on Feb. 17. (Fox News)
When discussing this Chinese subset of the migrant flood with three former national security officials from the Trump era this past weekend, they guaranteed me that tens of thousands of Chinese nationals don’t slip easily out of the Chinese Communist Party’s control. They are very alarmed that the vast majority of these migrants are military-aged men.
Whatever one thinks about sanctuary cities, or California extending Medicaid to illegal immigrants (at a cost of more than $2 billion annually to a state with a $68 billion dollar deficit) the reality is that Americans of all political perspectives save the hard Left have awakened to the fact that this can’t go on.
The border with Mexico is 1,954 miles long. 900 miles are considered “passable.” When he left office, Trump was adding miles of Wall daily to try and get as much of the 900 miles of Wall needed built. But as soon as Biden was sworn in, construction stopped, and the film of migrants walking around the unfinished Wall or through openings created by the coyotes began playing. Americans noticed. They want The Wall and they want it now.
With funding for most of the Supplemental already enjoying majority support in the House, how to pass the necessary bill? Tack on funding for the wall as well as language that makes it clear that construction is to restart and conclude in a matter of months. That will also require language in the new law that approves that construction “notwithstanding any other law or treaty with any nation or sovereign Tribe.” That language blows past the obstacles to the Wall’s construction posed by the federal Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and National Environmental Policy Act while also mandating construction on tribal lands. This is America. We built the Interstate Highway system. We can build the Wall in a matter of months if the will, the money and the clear direction exist in the Congress.
Want the Supplemental? Build the Wall. It is that simple.
Hugh Hewitt is one of the country’s leading journalists of the center-right. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990, and it is today syndicated to hundreds of stations and outlets across the country every Monday through Friday morning. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and this column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his forty years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio show today.
MSNBC host Joy Reid— seen here in a May 19, 2021, screenshot speaking to a virtual version of the 33rd “Gloria Awards: A Salute to Women of Vision” in New York City—is what she accuses others of being; namely, a spreader of wild conspiracy theories. (Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images)
In case you just can’t get enough of Joy Reid with an hour each weeknight on MSNBC, you can catch her sharing her wild and loose opinions on TikTok. Recently, she pounced on remarks by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., supporting the Alabama court decision that frozen embryos are children, because “we need more kids.”
Our fertility rate in America is now at a record low, but Reid just wants to use Alabama’s football coach-turned-senator as a punching bag. “Why does the state of Alabama need more kids? More kids for what?”
Reid wants to make this about immigration. “Your party, Sen. Tuberville, is the one screaming that 10 million immigrants … have streamed into the country since Joe Biden has been president. And you’re claiming that’s too many people.”
Most critics of the border crisis aren’t arguing that America is overpopulated. They’re arguing the massive influx of humanity is too much for our government systems to handle, which is the same critique emanating from Democratic big city mayors, who have been swamped with migrants who expect free food, housing and maybe a monthly gift card.
But Reid was primed to uncork a racial conspiracy theory, which MSNBC always encourages against Republicans. Antebellum references seem mandatory.
“There was a time when the state of Alabama absolutely needed more kids, because Alabama was a slave state,” Reid proclaimed, “and the mandate of the planter class in Alabama was for black women to produce more kids because those kids were property, and they could work more kids and make more money on their plantation.”
But what does 1854 have to do with 2024? Reid suggested there was a master plan: “Are you saying the state of Alabama needs more kids because you think that those populations will include people who may be destitute and desperate enough that when you kick out the immigrants … you can make them do the work that the migrants are doing now? ‘Cause that kind of sounds slavery-ish.”
Wait. If the immigrants flooding into America are doing “slavery-ish” work, shouldn’t Reid oppose more immigration? Reid needs to imply the immigrants pouring in are “people of color,” even if that’s not true. For the Left, appeals to limit illegal immigration must always be painted as motivated by racism.
To its credit, The New York Times has published a series of investigative reports on migrant child labor in America. One was headlined “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.”
No one imagines that led to a scathing TikTok tirade by Reid. She closed out by asking Tuberville in absentia if, since he’s a “white guy,” he’s suggesting “we need more kids” means “whites need more kids,” a “Great Replacement thing,” because if he thinks white women need to make more babies, “that’s a little creepy. A little ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ don’t you think?”
Back in 2021, Reid took to TikTok to mock Kyle Rittenhouse for tearing up when he testified about shooting rioters dead in self-defense. Reid compared him to Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings, mocking their “male white tears,” and proclaiming these guys “Karen-out, and as soon as they get caught, they bring waterworks.”
Reid wouldn’t use this white-Karens-waterworks mockery for Hillary Clinton’s public tears when she ran for president. These videos aren’t for everyone. They’re for the hard-core MSNBC watchers who want to “own the cons,” but especially those stale, pale males. Conservatives just want to check what chemicals she might have put in her vape pen to explain that overactive imagination.
Laken Riley is another of many victims Biden’s and the Democrats’ open border policies have claimed. Over 100,000 Fentanyl deaths, human trafficking, and crime have saturated Biden and the Democrats’ hands with the blood of these victims, all the while blaming Congress when Biden ended all the Trump border executive orders that were effective against drastically curbing the invasion at the border.
Biden Cracks a Joke About His Age After Refusing to Mention Georgia College Student Killed By One of His Illegal Aliens (VIDEO)
By Cristina Laila – Feb 28, 2024
Joe Biden on Wednesday delivered remarks on his so-called ‘actions to fight crime and make communities safer.’ This is while he’s allowing millions of military-age males from some of the most dangerous parts of the world to invade the US. Venezuela emptied its prisons and some of its most dangerous gang members and murderers have illegally crossed into the US on Joe Biden’s open border invitation.
Biden’s open borders policies are getting Americans killed.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Why did President Joe Biden reverse former President Donald Trump’s order excluding noncitizens from being counted in the census, while simultaneously issuing a slew of executive orders decimating the integrity of our southern border? While illegal immigrants cannot vote in elections (despite Democrats’ best efforts), the left is using their illegal presence to rig elections by shifting the political landscape through apportionment.
Both congressional and electoral college apportionment is derived from the number of residents in a particular area. Trump signed a memo in July of 2020 that barred illegal immigrants from being counted in the census, which is used to apportion representation in Washington. Biden, however, reversed the policy and ordered the census to include illegal immigrants and other noncitizens.
This means that American citizens aren’t receiving balanced representation in their government.
States can pick up — or lose — a congressional seat depending on the size of their population, despite the fact that some of that population may not even be allowed to vote. Millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom are in large, left-leaning cities, dilute the voting power of American citizens who may live in a mildly populated area composed of legal residents.
Democrat New York Rep. Yvette Clark said during a 2021 hearing that her district “can absorb a significant number of these migrants” because “I need more people in my district, just for redistricting purposes.”
NY Congresswoman Clarke (D) saying the quiet part out loud about the border:
Clark’s resurfaced clip prompted Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and others to introduce the “Equal Representation Act” which would mandate only legal citizens are counted for congressional districts and the Electoral College map.
Sanctuary Cities
So-called “sanctuary cities,” which promise not to enforce immigration laws and often guarantee lodging to illegal residents, have long blurred the lines of law, bucking federal immigration policy and then begging taxpayers to foot the bill. But despite the drain on government resources — and sometimes violence — these policies invite, these cities and left-leaning states have reason to incentivize illegal immigrants because it helps them adjust for apportionment.
As residents flee blue states like California and New York for more family-friendly and taxpayer-friendly states like Florida and Texas, Democrats need to recoup their population losses. Illegal immigrants inflate the census data, which in turn could help Democrats retain their power.
Constitutionally Suspect
The framers likely would not support Biden’s position that illegal immigrants deserve to be counted in apportionment to determine representation.
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment stipulated that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.”
But “whole number of persons” was likely not intended to encompass those illegally residing in the states.
Prior to the ratification of the Constitution, most northern states advocated for no slaves to be counted in the apportionment proceedings so that slaveholding states, some of which had slave populations as high as 43 percent of their total residents, would not have an unfair amount of representation compared to their actual voting weight.
The three-fifths compromise also lessened the incentive for slaveholding states to import more slaves in order to expand their population and increase their representation.
No ‘Colorable Constitutional Claim’
Lower courts had blocked Trump’s memorandum from taking effect after 23 states challenged the memo, saying it violated the Constitution and federal census statutes. The Supreme Court has never weighed in on the question nor answered whether the word “persons” encompasses illegal immigrants for the purpose of apportionment. But the high court has previously ruled in Mathews v. Diaz, a case regarding the Social Security Act, that while illegal immigrants are entitled to due process protections under the Fifth and 14th Amendments, they are not entitled to the benefits of citizenship. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the unanimous court:
Neither the overnight visitor, the unfriendly agent of a hostile foreign power, the resident diplomat, nor the illegal entrant, can advance even a colorable constitutional claim to a share in the bounty that a conscientious sovereign makes available to its own citizens and some of its guests.
If voting, which is a benefit exclusively for citizens, is off-limits to illegal immigrants, it would be hard to imagine that illegal immigrants should be empowered to dilute the weight of a vote by artificially expanding the population and increasing the representational advantage of one area while taking it away from another area that is populated by legal residents. And yet, thanks to Democrats, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Biden is losing more of the Black Vote every day to Trump along with other minorities according to recent polls. Mainly because of his disastrous economy and open-border policies.
Black Voters in South Carolina Turn on Joe Biden Ahead of Democrat Primary (VIDEO)
Black voters in South Carolina are turning on Joe Biden ahead of the Democrat primaries set for February 3. “Biden just wants to cause more bills for everybody, and he’s got a lot of homeless people out here,” one black South Carolina voter told the media of Joe Biden losing support among blacks. “It ain’t the Black community — it’s everybody’s community,” he said.
As TGP’s Kristinn Taylor reported, a poll released last month by Morning Consult shows Joe Biden losing support among black voters while President Trump is gaining support. Over the past year, Biden is down nine points, from 70 to 61 percent while Trump is up seven points, 15 to 22 percent. READ MORE…
The border crisis is 100% caused by Biden. He ended Trump’s policies that kept the border secure, and for 3 years continued to allow millions of illegal immigrants into the U.S.. Biden’s refusal to close the border with existing tools at his disposal is allowing rising crime, human trafficking, and Fentanyl into our country, killing and destroying the lives of millions of Americans.
BIDEN BORDER CRISIS: A Record 302,034 Illegal Aliens Encountered at Southern Border in December
A record 302,034 illegal aliens were encountered at the US-Mexico border in December. It has been estimated that more than 11 million illegal aliens – mainly military-age males – have crossed over the border since Joe Biden was installed in January 2021. The Biden Regime waited more than 3 weeks to release the numbers and then decided on a Friday news dump. READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
After the much-anticipated “bipartisan” Ukraine and border bill finally dropped on Sunday, it took little time to confirm that all 370 pages are worse than intelligent observers predicted. The $118 billion boondoggle is dead on arrival in the House. For Democrats and their accomplice media, however, the legislation and House Republicans’ response to it are going exactly as planned.
Not only did national disgrace Sen. Mitch McConnell (feat. useful idiot James Lankford) work tirelessly with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on this bill to keep America’s borders open, give out amnesty Oprah-style, and write more blank checks to Ukraine and Hamas sympathizers in the Middle East, they also helped the corrupt corporate media run a propaganda operation against House Republicans and the rest of the GOP. Worse, they’re deliberately running it during an election year to boost Joe Biden on the border issue — which the near-dead incumbent has aided and abetted, and voters say is top of mind next to Bidenomics.
The Republican-majority House predictably isn’t going for the bill. Why would they? It would allow nearly 2 million illegal aliens into the country in one year — as long as the numbers stay below 5,000 entries per day for seven consecutive days, or below 8,500 border encounters in a single day — before triggering “emergency authority” for the Department of Homeland Security and closing the border. Even then there are exceptions.
Worse, if Biden decides it’s in the “national interest” to beckon some more Democrat representation padding and likely future voters across the Rio Grande, he can unilaterally suspend the border closure for 45 days per year. There’s more where that came from.
If GOP members of Congress had taken the bait, Democrats would have come out on top, having
convinced their political foes not only to continue funding a no-win forever war in Eastern Europe but also to keep letting illegal aliens into the country virtually unrestricted. Bonus: A codified open border could hamstring “the fixer” Donald Trump if he wins the general election later this year, zapping his political power to rehabilitate U.S. security and sovereignty.
Yet even without the House conceding to the bill, Democrats win anyway. Now Biden and his accomplice media can simply blame Republicans for not solving the crisis this administration caused. That’s exactly what’s happening, starting with Biden pointing fingers at Republicans:
Working with my administration, the United States Senate has done the hard work it takes to reach a bipartisan agreement. Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border?
Biden’s media lapdogs dutifully advanced the narrative, which they’d already been spinning before the text of the bill was even released.
“GOP Blames Biden for Border Crisis That GOP Refuses to Solve,” blared one Daily Beast headline. “Republicans are yelling about a crisis at the border. But they’re also unwilling to do anything to address it for fear that it’d give Joe Biden a political win,” the subheading continued, taking its talking points straight from the president and Senate Democrats like Chris Murphy.
“Why Republicans Don’t Want To Solve the Border Problem — But do want to make deals to cut taxes,” read another headline in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer by Jonathan Chait.
“Republicans Who Screamed About A Crisis On The Border Now Oppose A Plan To Fix It,” said HuffPost, claiming Republicans oppose the border bill not because it’s nightmarish but because they want to hurt Biden. “Border Patrol Supports ‘Strong’ Immigration Deal. Republicans Don’t Care,” wrote Rolling Stone.
Vanity Fair claimed, “Republicans Don’t Want to Lose Their Favorite 2024 Talking Point,” with Bloomberg opting for a simple, “House Republicans Don’t Want to Fix the Border.”
Cable television has been as bad. A host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” said the “bipartisan border deal is doomed to fail … because Republicans have turned on it.” The “Today” show framed the gridlock as Republicans “threaten[ing] to block the border bill they negotiated,” as if McConnell and his sidekick colluding with Democrats behind closed doors amounts to a good-faith bipartisan negotiation.
This run-of-the-mill propaganda is to be expected from the corporate media, but it’s just so brazen considering Republicans’ efforts to secure the border earlier in Biden’s term and Democrats’ subsequent refusal to cooperate.
We’re all old enough to remember less than a year ago when the House passed a stronger border bill that would have restarted Trump-era border wall construction, required aliens to remain in Mexico while waiting out their usually fraudulent asylum claims, restricted asylum eligibility to legal ports of entry, enacted harsher punishments for overstaying expired visas, kept Title 42-esque “expulsion authority” in place, and supplied border authorities with additional grant funding. Senate Democrats wouldn’t lift a finger.
But sure. It’s Republicans “playing politics.”
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
When the Rev. Al Sharpton used the word “invasion” to describe the onslaught of migrants at the southern U.S. border on Monday, his MSNBC guest suddenly stopped nodding along. And then the fast blinking began — he was triggered. Because to the American left, the word “invasion” is off-limits and even “violence-inciting.”
But the word — and the concept — are at the heart of what’s happening in Texas, as Gov. Greg Abbott stands up to the Biden administration and its open border policies. He rightly contends that according to the U.S. Constitution, Texas does not merely have the Constitutional power to defend itself — it has a constitutional and moral responsibility to do so.
To qualify as an invader in the constitutional framework requires two qualities: entry into a sovereign territory, and enmity toward the sovereign. An immigrant without enmity is not an invader, nor is an enemy that stays outside our borders.
Consider some examples of what the Founders did consider invaders: foreign powers, pirates, and hostile tribes. In today’s context, a vast multinational criminal cartel whose activities and personnel enter America, harm Americans, destroy or commandeer property, defend routes on private and public lands, coerce American officials through extortion or bribery, and do so with the collaboration and collusion of a foreign state power is absolutely an invader, and would have been immediately recognized as such by the American Founders.
Sharpton wasn’t siding with Abbott, however; he was pushing the new Senate border bill.
But that bill misses the mark almost entirely on all these points. With its stupefying allowance of several million illegal entries per year, its comically constricted “border emergency” framework, its loosening of the asylum process, its billions in funding for the human-trafficking complex, and its wildly permissive structure for allowing the executive branch to override even its own minor strictures, the bill is right now Exhibit A in the contention that the border crisis is a choice made by Washington, D.C.
The border-security crisis is also a choice by Mexico’s own powerholders, stemming from two major motivations. The first motivation is simple: money. We must understand this very clearly: The Mexican state and the Mexican cartels are the same — including the president of Mexico himself.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has repeatedly sided with the criminal cartels, particularly the Sinaloa cartel. This includes his rhetorical generosity toward it, his public visits to honor the aged mother of the jailed drug lord El Chapo, and his political party’s use of its sicario enforcers to kill opposition candidates and rig elections.
AMLO’s policy of “abrazos no balazos” (hugs, not bullets), effectively prevents the use of force against cartel violence; he has handed over civil powers to his own army apparatus, which itself is a major trafficking organization and uses violence against Mexican civilians who defend themselves against cartels; and he has vowed to use the Mexican armed forces to defend Mexican cartels against the Americans.
The second motivation for Mexico City is leverage: leverage versus the United States, which is the only power capable of arresting and disincentivizing Mexico’s slide into narco-state status.
Mexico City understands two things very well: It makes billions off the border-security crisis, especially in human trafficking, and the crisis gives it leverage over U.S. officeholders, especially as the latter come under pressure from the American people to secure the border and defend our communities.
Texas has undertaken a variety of efforts in defense of itself and its citizenry that the federal government has refused to do:
Texas has illuminated the national scope of the border crisis, and invoked the principle of equity within it, by its transportation of migrants to leftist-run localities across the country.
Texas has used its military forces for their proper and primary purpose, in the defense of its own territory and citizenry, with the use of the Texas Military Department, including the personnel of the Texas Army National Guard, in Operation Lone Star.
Texas has built effective border-barrier infrastructure not once, but twice — with its innovative buoy barriers in the Rio Grande, and its barriers on the river’s north bank.
Texas has a new law that allows Texas law enforcement to intercept and de facto deport illegal entrants into Texas.
The federal government ought to be doing all these things — but it is not, and therefore Texas must see to its own self-defense. As Abbott has noted, in failing to do so, the federal government has abdicated its own Constitutional responsibility to the states.
Make no mistake, Texas is faithfully executing the law — both its own, and the Constitution’s, which provides in Article I, Section 10, for a state to defend itself against invasion.
Biden is too busy to visit East Palestine Ohio, shut down the border, or give press conferences, but has plenty of time to hang out at the beach. It’s reported that Biden has declined an interview before the Super Bowl for the second year in a row. Is he not up for the task?
Biden Skips Super Bowl Interview for Second Year in a Row
For the second year in a row, Joe Biden declined to be interviewed before the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is scheduled for Sunday, February 11th, and will air on CBS. The matchup will be the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. After CBS recently discussed it with the White House, Biden decided against the interview. This would have given him a very large viewing audience, considering it is the biggest TV event of the year.
There has been a long-time tradition of the President being interviewed by the station airing the big game going back to 2009 with Barack Obama. READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
The Senate’s emergency appropriations bill released on Sunday won’t address the border crisis, and contrary to the accomplice media’s spin, the spending bill won’t “severely curtail asylum at the US southern border.”
The bill could have had the Senate reclaim the reins of lawmaking from the executive and judicial branches and clarify that widespread criminality in another country is not a basis for asylum in America. Instead, the 370-page bill, the “Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024,” includes funding for both Israel and Ukraine, plus decidedly insufficient provisions for addressing aliens and immigration.
The backers of the Senate bill seek to portray its provisions as, in the words of Joe Biden, the “toughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades.” There is little that is “tough” in the bill, however, and what is can easily be sidestepped — either by the Biden administration or the throngs of illegal aliens invading from the south.
Consider, for instance, the “emergency authority” the bill would grant to the secretary of homeland security to “summarily remove” aliens. But that authority only arises if the number of encounters with aliens at the border averages 4,000 for seven consecutive days or more than 8,500 in any one day.
Beyond the flood of aliens allowed to enter the United States without triggering the emergency authority, the statutory exemptions gut the secretary’s authority. Specifically, the bill provides that the border emergency authority cannot be used against “an unaccompanied alien child,” so every illegal alien who is under 18 — or can pass as someone who is under 18 — will be allowed in.
Likewise, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can exempt aliens from the “border emergency authority” based on supposed “operational considerations.” An immigration officer can exempt other aliens for public health, humanitarian, and a smattering of other reasons. The president also has the power under the Senate bill to unilaterally suspend the secretary’s border emergency authority, meaning Biden can stop summary removals at will — at least temporarily.
The country has seen these types of exceptions swallow the rule since the Biden administration supplanted President Trump’s border policies, and there is no reason to believe things will be any different after nearly four years of an open border.
Empty Asylum Reform
The Senate bill’s claimed toughening of asylum procedures is similarly impotent. Most glaring is its provision stating that individuals seeking asylum will be “released from physical custody.” The sections and subsections that follow then detail the process for handling asylum claims.
The supposed improvement here is that asylum decisions are to be completed expeditiously, within 90 days. But the Senate includes the squishy “to the maximum extent practicable” to that 90-day timetable. That’s assuming the alien, who recall is “noncustodial,” does not abscond. The bill also allows for aliens to seek review of negative decisions, meaning they’ll have a second opportunity to flee even if they appear for the first hearing.
That the Senate bill provides for the release of aliens pending a hearing renders any other tightening of the asylum process meaningless. What would have sent a message, however, would have been for the Senate to clarify that facing general violence, including gang violence, in a country of origin, is not a basis for asylum.
Congress previously defined the grounds for asylum as limited to those who are unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion…” The statutory “membership in a particular social group” language has led to claims for asylum premised on spousal abuse, threats by gang members, and individuals targeted because of their occupation.
Attempts at Reform
Under the Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sought to “return some semblance of meaning to the ‘membership in a particular social group’ category by holding that an applicant ‘must demonstrate: (1) membership in a group, which is composed of members who share a common immutable characteristic, is defined with particularity, and is socially distinct within the society in question; and (2) that membership in the group is a central reason for her persecution.’”
As Sessions explained in his decision interpreting the statutory language, “nothing in the text of the [Immigration and Nationality Act] supports the suggestion that Congress intended ‘membership in a particular social group’ to be ‘some omnibus catch-all’ for solving every ‘heart-rending situation.’” The former AG’s opinion further indicated that “victims of private criminal activity” will generally not qualify for asylum, absent “exceptional circumstances.”
Following Joe Biden’s election, his DOJ issued an opinion vacating Sessions’ opinion, suggesting asylum was more readily available for victims of private criminal activity. But rather than explain, Merrick Garland noted he would leave the question to rule-making. Such a fundamental question should not be left to unelected bureaucrats, however, especially given the unsustainable levels of asylum applications seen in the last few years.
Asylum for All
Maybe Congress wants to open America to every citizen of the world who heralds from a country where the government cannot control crime — which is the conclusion that follows from the Biden administration’s all-inclusive reading of the statutory “membership in a particular social group” language. If so, Congress should say so. But if not, Congress should make clear that asylum provides a safe haven for those persecuted by their government because of their race, religion, sex, political views, or whatever other specific classifications our elected officials believe appropriate.
The irony here is that the Biden administration’s reversal of the Trump policies has fortified the funding of cartels, gangs, and traffickers — so much so that those flooding our shores will now be able to honestly say their government cannot protect them. And if “non-gang members” qualifies as a “social group,” it will be asylum for all.
Is that what Congress believes is appropriate? We don’t know because the cowards prefer to leave it to the administrative state. The Senate bill proves that.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court, a white Minnesota farmer is suing Gov. Tim Walz and the commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) for racial discrimination.
On July 20, 2023, Lance Nistler applied for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s “Down Payment Assistance Grant” program. This program awards qualified farmers with up to $15,000 in grant funding to help them purchase their first farm. Among the requirements, applicants must be Minnesota residents who intend to farm the land they purchase for a minimum of five years and who have never owned a farm before. However, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and Democratic majorities in the Minnesota Legislature authorized a new preference system last year which changes how grant funding is awarded under the program. READ MORE
Biden created the border crisis by inviting the world to illegally enter the U.S. while at the same time removing the tools Trump put in place through executive orders.
BIDEN BORDER CRISIS: A Record 302,034 Illegal Aliens Encountered at Southern Border in December
A record 302,034 illegal aliens were encountered at the US-Mexico border in December. It has been estimated that more than 11 million illegal aliens – mainly military-age males – have crossed over the border since Joe Biden was installed in January 2021.
The Biden Regime waited more than 3 weeks to release the numbers and then decided on a Friday news dump. “This represents a 460 percent increase from the average December during the Trump administration.” RNC Research said. Last month a mass of thousands of illegal aliens waited to be processed by Border Patrol at the Eagle Pass port of entry were spotted after they invaded Texas. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trum
Yesterday, a reporter standing outside the Senate chamber told me that after four months of secrecy, The Firm™️ plans to release the text of the $106 billion supplemental aid/border-security package — possibly as soon as today. Wasting no time, she then asked, “If you get the bill by tomorrow, will you be ready to vote on it by Tuesday?”
The words “hell no” escaped my mouth before I could stop them. Those are strong words where I come from. (Sorry, Mom.)
The reporter immediately understood that my frustration was not directed at her. Rather, it was directed at the Law Firm of Schumer & McConnell (The Firm™️), which is perpetually trying to normalize a corrupt approach to legislating, in which The Firm™️:
Spends months drafting legislation in complete secrecy
Aggressively markets that legislation based not on its details and practical implications (good and bad), but only on its broadest, least-controversial objectives
Lets members see bill text for the first time only a few days (sometimes a few hours) before an arbitrary deadline imposed by The Firm™️ itself, always with a contrived sense of urgency
Forces a vote on the legislation on or before that deadline, denying senators any real opportunity to read, digest, and debate the measure on its merits, much less introduce, consider, and vote on amendments to fix any perceived problems with the bill or otherwise improve it.
Whenever The Firm™️ engages in this practice, it largely excludes nearly every senator from the constitutionally prescribed process in which all senators are supposed to participate. By so doing, The Firm™️ effectively disenfranchises hundreds of millions of Americans — at least for purposes relevant to the legislation at hand — and that’s tragic. It’s also un-American, uncivil, uncollegial, and really uncool.
So why does The Firm™️ do it?
Every time The Firm™️ utilizes this approach and the bill passes — and it nearly always does — The Firm™️ becomes more powerful.
The high success rate is largely attributable to the fact that The Firm™️ has become very adept at (a) enlisting the help of the (freakishly cooperative) corporate media, (b) exerting peer pressure in a way that makes what you experienced in middle school look mild by comparison, and (c) rewarding those who consistently vote with The Firm™️ with various privileges that The Firm™️ is uniquely capable of offering, such as committee assignments, help with campaign fundraising, and a whole host of other widely coveted things that The Firm™️ is free to distribute in any manner it pleases.
It’s through this process that The Firm™️ passes most major spending legislation. And it’s through this process that The Firm™️ likely intends to pass the still-secret, $106 billion supplemental aid/border-security package, which The Firm™️ has spent four months negotiating with the luxury of obsessing over every sentence, word, period, and comma.
I still don’t know exactly what’s in this bill, although I have serious concerns with it based on the few details The Firm™️ has been willing to share. But under no circumstances should this bill — which would fund military operations in three distant parts of the world and make massive, permanent changes to immigration law — be passed next week.
Nor should it be passed until we have had adequate time to read the bill, discuss it with constituents, debate it, offer amendments, and vote on those amendments.
There’s no universe in which those things will happen by next week.
Depending on how long it is and the complexity of its provisions, the minimum period of time we should devote to this bill after it’s released should be measured in weeks or months, not days or hours.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement on Wednesday asserting that the Lone Star State has a constitutional right to defend its sovereignty in the wake of an invasion facilitated by President Biden’s open border policies.
“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now,” Abbott wrote. “President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them. The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration.”
According to the Washington Examiner, more than 10 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended by U.S. border officials since Biden assumed the presidency in January 2021. Those figures don’t even include the estimated 1.7 million “gotaways” who evaded capture upon illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
In his statement, Abbott slammed Biden for facilitating the ongoing invasion and noted how the president’s “refusal to protect the States” has resulted in “more than 6 million illegal immigrants” traversing Texas’ border alone. That figure is greater than the population of more than 30 states.
The Texas governor further underscored the federal government’s obligation to defend states from invasion and the states’ right to defend their sovereignty from outside forces, citing Article IV, § 4, and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, of the U.S. Constitution. While the former stipulates that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” the latter recognizes “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.”
“James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border,” Abbott wrote. “The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense.”
“For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” he continued. “That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”
Abbott’s remarks appear to come in response to a Monday decision by the U.S. Supreme Court allowing the Biden administration to authorize Customs and Border Protection officials to cut razor wire installed along the border by Texas to stymie illegal immigration. Five of the court’s nine justices sided with the administration, including Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Recent school violence in Minnesota has people asking why. Many folks fail to correlate the total removal of God and Christianity from our government-run early learning institutions to the mayhem happening today.
The people of Texas are sick and tired of the Democrat-run Federal government ignoring the constitution and rule of law to allow an invasion of millions of illegals into the U.S. at the expense of its own citizens and are taking action to stop it.
TEXAS STRIKES BACK: Lone Star State Defies Biden Regime’s Outrageous Lawsuit Threat – Begins Arresting and Charging Illegal Aliens (VIDEO)
The Biden regime has flooded the great state of Texas with illegal aliens for months and threatened legal consequences if they dared to resist. On Wednesday, the Lone Star State took matters issued a bold act of defiance.
The Gateway Pundit previously reported Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill earlier last month known as SB4, which grants state and local law enforcement officials the power to arrest, jail, and prosecute illegal migrants. Moreover, it allows judges to issue de facto deportation orders, thus allowing the state to send back the invaders the Regime has happily allowed in. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
“We need immigrants in this country,” Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler said Thursday during a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement hearing. “Our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants — many illegal immigrants.”
“The fact is, the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level,” he continued. Nadler is adamantly anti-life and given that abortion is responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn American children, it’s unlikely that he’s sincerely concerned about the United States’ replacement rates.
Nadler’s remarks recall the Democratic party’s past reasoning for supporting slavery. Federalist Senior Editor Mark Hemingway pointed out that Democrats in 1823 were backing slavery because if there were no slaves, “Who would pick our cotton?” Today, Democrats are making the argument that low-wage working illegal migrants are necessary to pick “our vegetables.”
Another striking comparison is the Democrats’ past support of slave traders and their current aiding of human trafficking at the southern border. As Federalist CEO Sean Davis explained, “Before the Civil War, Democrats bought their slaves from human traffickers who kidnapped them and then shipped them across the Atlantic. In 2023, they use cartels to smuggle illegal immigrants across a border Democrats refuse to close.”
Indeed, human trafficking at our southern border is now a multi-billion dollar business, and Democrats have no plan to stop the abuse. In December alone, over 300,000 illegal immigrants crossed into the United States.
Now, illegal immigration isn’t just a problem for border states but the entire nation. Massive influxes of aliens are now invading places like New York City and Chicago, putting massive strain on city resources. Meanwhile, the fentanyl crisis created by the open southern border is taking countless American lives in all corners of the country — both urban and rural.
This week, citizens were given some hope after the Texas Military Department took over a 2.5-mile long stretch along the Rio Grande River, supposedly to stop illegal immigration in the high-traffic crossing area and keep out federal border officials who “perpetuate illegal immigrant crossings in the park and greater Eagle Pass area.”
However, as my colleague Jordan Boyd explained, the move appears to be nothing more than political theater. “Yet despite the addition of personnel, barriers, gates, concertina wire, and military Humvees’ to the area,” Boyd wrote, Texas Gov. “Abbott has not authorized the Texas National Guard to detain and deport illegal immigrants, who are still being turned over to Border Patrol for processing and, in most cases, release.”
“So, while the move prompted an outcry from the Biden administration and federal border officials who say the state’s interference prevents them from doing their jobs,” she added, “Abbott’s move won’t fundamentally change the dynamic at the border.”
In other words, the border remains open, and the drug and human trafficking crises caused by it rage on. But, according to Nadler, it’s all worth it because the vegetable industry needs people to pick produce for exploitative slave wages.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
Democrats are promising more money for the border but we all know it’s so they can process more illegals, not to stop the flow, and they want it tied to more Ukraine money.
Republicans in the Senate Suddenly Take Strong Stand on the Border and Illegal Immigration in Exchange for Funding Ukraine
Days after new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) again put the Biden administration and the Senate on notice that he would only consider funding for Ukraine if strict border and immigration reforms in H.R 2 were enacted, Republicans in the Senate have suddenly taken a hardline stand on the border and immigration in negotiations with Democrats on funding for Ukraine to defend itself from the ongoing… READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
More than 300,000 illegal immigrants were encountered by U.S. border officials in December, marking a record for the highest number recorded for a single month.
REPORT: Migrants are camping in people's yards in San Diego, California as the Biden migrant crisis continues to spin out of control.
It didn't have to be this way.
Migrants are now chopping down San Diego residents' trees and using them for firewood. One land owner says the… pic.twitter.com/z9uW5VfOgy
According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources who spoke with Fox News, “more than 302,000 migrants were documented attempting to cross the U.S. southern border” between Dec. 1-31. Totaling more than 785,000 illegal encounters in the first quarter alone, December’s numbers signify the first time CBP has engaged more than 300,000 illegals in a single month.
While the former figure is larger than the population of Seattle, Washington — which, as of July 2022, hosts roughly 749,000 people — the latter is enough to fill America’s largest football stadium “almost three times,” according to The Daily Signal.
In fiscal year 2023, CBP encountered “more than 2.47 million” illegals, marking an increase from the roughly 2.38 million recorded in 2022 and 1.73 million in 2021. An October report published by House Republicans estimates there have been more than 1.7 million “gotaways” since President Biden took office.
Contrary to the White House’s claims, Biden and his administration have done nothing to stymie the ongoing invasion at America’s southern border. In fact, the administration has actively sought to prevent border states such as Texas from enacting measures designed to halt foreign nationals’ infringement upon their sovereignty.
Last year, for example, Biden’s Department of Justice sued Texas for placing barriers in the Rio Grande River to prevent illegals from streaming onto their land. More recently, the DOJ threatened to file a lawsuit against the Lone Star State if it enacts legislation that would authorize state and local law enforcement to “arrest, jail and prosecute [individuals] suspected of entering the U.S. unlawfully.”
I’m so damn sick and tired of seeing these videos with NOTHING being done.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have failed to use their majority to enact significant border policy changes in spending bills or hold Biden and officials such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas accountable for their intentional destruction of America’s southern border. In November, for instance, eight GOP representatives voted with Democrats to block a resolution introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to impeach Mayorkas for his allowance of the disaster to continue unaddressed.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Dershowitz is a Democrat who voted for Obama but says during this segment that his relationship with Obama is over.
He also makes some pointed comments about the college students who are protesting for Hamas. Alan Dershowitz calls out Obama’s ‘deep hatred of Israel’: ‘He should be ashamed’ Expressing outrage over former President Barack Obama’s call for an end to Israeli “occupation,” Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz expanded on why he’s never… READ MORE..
Elk River board censures pro-parent school board members
Two Elk River school board members who were elected on a pro-parent platform say they are being intimidated by their colleagues after the board voted to censure them for misconduct Monday night. A standing-room only crowd listened as school board attorney Michael Waldspurger read the allegations against newly elected board members John Anderson and Mindy Freiberg before presenting a censure resolution, which the board voted on and approved. Anderson and Freiberg were elected to the ISD 728 board in 2022.
“They want us off the board, but they aren’t going to get rid of me that easy,” Freiberg said.
Allegations of misconduct included being late or unprepared for meetings, speaking to legislators or constituents without authority, inquiring about curriculum, and failing to communicate with Superintendent Dan Bittman, the board’s… READ MORE…
The Democrats have been killing off their future voters through nationwide legal abortion, which explains their passion for open borders.
Majority of Americans Greatly Concerned About Border Security According to New Fox News Poll
by David Greyson
Border security is one of the top concerns for the average American. Although most of the media is ignoring the crisis, it is a vital topic heading into the 2024 election. Since August, the importance of border security has jumped eight percentage points in national polls.
A Fox News poll released Sunday shows 8 out of 10 voters see the border as a significant priority with some seeing it as an emergency or major issue. A majority of those polled said increasing the number of Border Patrol agents was the best way to… READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Democrats have one huge, unavoidable problem. And his name is Joe Biden.
According to recent polls, GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump would beat Biden if the 2024 election were held today. A Quinnipiac poll out Wednesday shows Biden with 46 percent and Trump with 48 percent among registered voters, still within the margin of error and too close to call. However, a new Fox News poll, also out Wednesday, shows that in a head-to-head, the former president would prevail with 50 percent to Biden’s 46 — a number Trump has never garnered in a Fox poll going back to October 2015.
Do these numbers and thin margins mean anything? Maybe not. We are still a year from the election. And if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that polls are traditionally garbage and are used far more often as tools to shape public opinion than to reflect it. But there are deeper and far more meaningful insights to mine from the survey, and they don’t spell good things for the Democrat Party.
For instance, it’s worth noting that not only does Biden appear to be losing generally to Trump, but the incumbent is losing his own dependable voters to his rival. Polls show Biden is hemorrhaging black, Hispanic, suburban, and young voters — all demographics that reliably vote Democrat. It could have something to do with how Biden has handled major crises he’s either caused or exacerbated. According to Quinnipiac, voters disapprove of his response to the Hamas attack and subsequent fallout (54 percent disapproval to 37 percent approval), his economy (59 to 37 percent), his foreign policy (61 to 34 percent), his border crisis (65 to 26 percent), and his response to the Russia-Ukraine war (49 to 47 percent).
The implications are simple. Voters are confronting a rare moment in U.S. history in which they can actually compare what it’s like to live under the leadership, or lack thereof, of the two major presidential candidates. Do they want Bidenomics or the affordable grocery and gas prices of the Trump era? Do they want war in the Middle East — or Eastern Europe or the South China Sea — or peace? Do they want an open border or national security? The Trump-Biden decision is an increasingly easy calculation for voters to make.
So, Democrats are stuck. And they did this to themselves, largely by closing off the possibility of a primary and instead committing to dragging Joe’s corpse across the finish line.
And yes, that really is the strategy. It’s not that Biden is a strong candidate by any measure, save for maybe his incumbency, but again, even that’s in doubt after his disastrous first term. He’s a demonstrably weak candidate, especially compared to Trump — another reality easily extrapolated from the polls.
On the Republican side — which, in contrast to Democrats, is still choosing to slog through primary election theatrics — the second-tier candidates are a notable governor and former governor, both beloved by their states and beyond. And Trump is still leading them by some 50 points. He’s got 48 points on Ron DeSantis and 51 on Nikki Haley. If prominent leftist governors such as Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer were to challenge Biden for the Democrat nomination, there’s no way he’d have that kind of lead.
This week there have been murmurs of a potential challenger — just maybe not who you would have expected. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on Capitol Hill hobnobbing with Sen. Chuck Schumer on Wednesday and refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether he’ll run for president. This after he divulged last week that the parties did approach him last year. And you can see the twinkle in Democrats’ eyes at the thought of dumping weak, old Biden for his antithesis. Here’s Schumer flirting with The Rock on X after their meeting, posting cutesy little lyrics from one of the actor’s Disney roles.
But while Democrats might view The Rock as an exit strategy, they still have a monumental problem to overcome: Voters aren’t just fed up with Biden, they’re fed up with Democrat policies both foreign and domestic.
There’s no denying Democrats have become the party of mass illegal immigration. Every town is a border town, and even urbanites are done with the Democrat policies overrunning their cities with aliens who suck resources dry. Speaking of cities, left-wing policies have destroyed them, from Portland and Seattle to Washington, D.C. Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies have caused violence in these places to skyrocket, with carjackings up more than 100 percent since last year and violent crime up 40 percent in our nation’s capitol. In fact, just this week D.C.’s disaster of a mayor declared a state of emergency because youth violent crime has gotten so bad. Meanwhile, Democrats have also become the party of inflation, war, no-limits abortion, transing kids, weaponizing the federal government, terrorist sympathizing, and every other anti-America policy position you can imagine.
That takes a strong leader to overcome. Sure, The Rock does a magnificent job at the role he plays in every movie, but he’s not that leader. And besides, would today’s Democrat Party really vote for a candidate who’s a Joe Rogan bro and friends with Trump supporters?
So, Democrats are left to lie with sleepy Joe in the bed they made for themselves. It’s hard to feel sorry for them.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Biden administration officials including President Joe Biden warned over the weekend that Hamas’ attack on Israel has resulted in an increased threat of terrorism within U.S. borders. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned on Saturday that the “heightened environment” presented by the fighting in Israel and Gaza has caused “an increase in reported threats.”
“We’ve got to be on the lookout, especially for lone actors who may take inspiration from recent events to commit violence of their own,” Wray said during his address at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference. “I’d encourage you to stay vigilant because as the first line of defense protecting our communities, you’re often the first to see the signs that someone may be mobilizing to violence.”
Biden similarly confirmed during a “60 Minutes” sit-down that Americans are at greater risk of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil after the events of the last week and a half.
“Because of what we’re seeing in the Middle East, is the threat of terrorism in the United States increased?” CBS’s Scott Pelley asked.
“Yes,” Biden replied. “I had a meeting this morning with the Homeland Security people, with the FBI, in the Situation Room for the better of part of an hour to discuss how we make sure that we prevent a lone wolf and or any coordinated effort to try to do what was done in synagogues before, do what was done to Jews in the street.”
Biden claimed that his administration is “making a major effort to make sure that doesn’t happen,” yet he has no concrete plans to cut off the biggest potential terrorist pipeline into the United States.
Hama’s “global day of rage” prompted terrorist attacks and anti-Israel demonstrations not just in France, China, Jordan, Iran, and Italy, but also in states like Washington and California. In addition to the Iranian spies who made their way into the Biden administration and the terrorist sleeper cells already embedded in U.S. cities, foreign incendiaries who wish ill on Americans can literally walk right into the U.S. via our compromised Southern border.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection sources confirmed to Fox News on Monday that two of the Iranians caught sneaking across the Southern border in the last month were pinned as “raising red flags that they could pose a significant security threat.” Their information was later located in the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
The capture is not the least bit surprising to border officials who, since October 2022, arrested nearly 160 illegal border crossers whose information was found on the TSDB. The Department of Homeland Security even admitted last week that “[t]errorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States” via its open Southern border.
Yet, Biden has no plans to stymie the border crisis created by his commitment to undo Trump-era security policies. On the contrary, the Democrat has repeatedly reinforced that he does not care to stop the collapse of the Southern border.
When word spread that Biden, in a major reversal, sought to build part of the Trump border wall he had been “quietly”auctioning off, the Democrat regime scrambled to assure Americans that the administration did not care to secure the nation’s borders, especially with physical barriers.
I want to address today’s reporting relating to a border wall and be absolutely clear.
There is no new Administration policy with respect to border walls. My full statement ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/ga1fEMqvN8
— Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (@SecMayorkas) October 5, 2023
Biden is not blind to the fact that nearly 7 million illegal border crossers have marched into the country detected by border officials, though likely not detained for long. Instead of addressing the border crisis that is clearly used as a pathway by potential terrorists to infiltrate the states, however, Biden is planning a trip to Israel to discuss its border issues.
If the Biden administration can waive more than two dozen laws to begrudgingly erect part of the border wall, it could easily reinstate other border security measures that would keep illegal border crossings down and free up Border Patrol to capture the several potential terrorists who inevitably make up part of the 1.5 million gotaways who made it into the U.S. under Biden.
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.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted in a September report that foreign terrorists are exploiting the Biden-manufactured border crisis to illegally enter the United States.
Released last month by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the “Homeland Threat Assessment” for fiscal year 2024 includes an admission by the agency that international terrorists are looking to capitalize on the Biden administration’s open border policies and the resulting influx of illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border to enter the American homeland. Under the section titled, “Border and Immigration Security,” the report specifically noted how “[t]errorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.”
The agency further acknowledged “individuals with potential terrorism connections” are actively attempting to enter the U.S. thanks to the ongoing crisis. Months before the 2023 fiscal year ended, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had already encountered approximately 160 individuals on the Terrorist Screening Data Set (TSDS), or “watchlist” — more than the 100 or so encountered in the entirety of the 2022 fiscal year. According to the report, “Inclusion in the TSDS ranges from known associates of watchlisted individuals, such as family members, to individuals directly engaged in terrorist activity.”
Despite proclaiming support for a “secure” border, President Joe Biden and his administration have routinely dismantled policies that helped stymie the ongoing crisis. In addition to auctioning off border wall construction materials, Biden moved to gut the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy shortly after taking office. That policy required illegal border crossers seeking asylum to stay in the Latin American country until their court hearing.
It’s estimated that nearly 7 million illegal immigrants have been “encountered” at the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office, according to the New York Post. And that doesn’t even include the potentially millions of “gotaways” who evaded capture by CBP agents.
Last month’s DHS assessment was issued weeks before Hamas — an Iranian-backed terrorist organization operating out of Gaza — launched a series of unprovoked and barbaric attacks against Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The attacks have since prompted concerns that foreign-based terrorist organizations could exploit America’s open border to illegally enter the U.S. and launch similar operations.
In response to possible threats, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the state’s public safety division to coordinate with local and federal law enforcement on “heightened public safety measures,” with a particular focus on raising awareness of possible threats against the state’s Jewish community by Iranian-backed terrorist groups.
In its new threat assessment, DHS specifically highlighted Iran — the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism — and its “intent to plot attacks against current and former US government officials.”
“Iran relies on individuals with pre-existing access to the United States for surveillance and lethal plotting—using dual nationals, members of criminal networks, and private investigators,” the report reads, adding that Tehran has even attempted to carry out plots “that do not require international travel for operatives.”
The report also listed Hezbollah — another Iranian-backed terrorist group operating out of Lebanon — as another source of potential foreign terror threats.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
We can no more count on Biden to defend our border than to assist Israel. That means states and local communities must take their fates into their own hands.
“Such is the nature of Evil. Out there in the vast ignorance of the world it festers and spreads. A Shadow that grows in the dark. A sleepless malice as black as the oncoming wall of night. So, it ever was, so it always will be.”
These words from the movie adaptation of The Hobbit were quoted by my colleague Dr. David Wurmser, who is presently in Israel reporting as he can between rocket attacks and shelter-in-place orders.
Only Tolkien’s stories of the changeless sweeping malevolence of evil across the ages seem appropriate to encapsulate the tremendous paradigm shift represented by the horrific massacre perpetrated by Hamas over the weekend. The losses suffered, perhaps as many as 1,000 dead and many thousands more wounded, are of such a horrific scale in light of Israel’s small population that regardless of how the fight proceeds now, Israeli society is likely to be changed forever. The attack, in which as many as 1,000 Hamas jihadists crossed the Gaza border under the cover of a massive rocket barrage and drone attacks, seized control of towns in Southern Israel and went from door to door to rape, torture, and murder every Jew they could find, all on video, instantly evoked horrors known to most of us only from black and white newsreels in previous centuries.
As the perpetrators have openly admitted, the massacre was planned and prepared with the help of Iran, whose other terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, and Houthi terrorists in Yemen, remain at the ready to expand the fight on Tehran’s orders.
A New Age, A Timeless Evil
The likely purpose of the attack from Iran’s perspective was to undermine peace efforts between Israel and Arab states, most especially Saudi Arabia. Not coincidentally, this has also been a major effort of the Biden Administration, which has sought to undermine the historic Abraham Accords achieved under President Trump by injecting the Palestinian issue into the center of the Arab-Israel conflict, even while pretending to seek an agreement.
The Biden Administration has released $6 billion dollars to Iran, currently stored at a bank in Hamas-friendly Qatar. It has provided funds to Gaza which they admitted would result in arming Hamas, and pillaged stockpiles of U.S. arms stored in Israel as part of a long-standing agreement, and sent them to Ukraine.
Like the conniving Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings, the Biden administration, as the Obama administration before it, has at every turn counseled Israel to maximize restraint and complacency in the face of a growing peril, all while professing friendship.
Here at home, the Democratic Socialists of America, a group that consists of numerous Democrat politicians at the local, state, and federal level, hosted the largest Pro-Hamas rally thus far, in New York City replete with open calls in support of terrorist violence. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group with close ties to Hamas, has called for a National Day of Resistance and a “Unity Intifada” in solidarity with the Hamas attack for Thursday, Oct. 12.
In the face of this reality, GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley saying the attack represents “an attack on America,” or Qatar-friendly Sen. Lindsay Graham issuing threats against Iran is mere fecklessness and bravado. The truth is that as it is currently constituted, the U.S. government, especially the State Department and intelligence agencies, are unlikely to do anything but deliberately hamper Israel’s attempts to defend itself and seek ways to further bolster Iran and its proxies behind the scenes.
Americans should demand the American government keep out of meddling with Israel’s response and allow it to defend its citizens as it sees fit. Certainly, the U.S. should honor existing agreements and obligations (refilling drained stockpiles for instance) but over-the-top or performative action will likely only amount to interference.
The Invasion on Our Own Border
Meanwhile, we should tend urgently to our own border and security. Israel’s border with Gaza was one of the most heavily surveilled and monitored borders in the world. As events have shown, surveillance is not enough. U.S. border doves for years promised that a border can be protected by a mere “virtual fence” of cameras and sensors. The reality is that only real physical barriers, like walls, watched over by sufficient numbers of properly armed and trained men constitute a secure border. Anything else is theater. On the other side of that border are barbaric criminal cartels and narco-insurgents every bit as murderous as Hamas and Hezbollah. In fact, Hezbollah has extensive ties with various drug cartels, which it has used to try and conduct attacks inside the United States. Hundreds of individuals already named on the terrorist watchlist have crossed into the country.
Israeli awareness of the situation in Gaza now being criticized as insufficient, is undoubtedly far superior to our own understanding of the threats on the other side of our own border.
The Biden administration continues to facilitate an invasion, consisting of as much as an entire infantry division a day, mostly of military aged males across the Southern border. They come from all over the world, including places rife with jihadist terrorists, and increasingly from hostile adversaries like China. Some, likely working with the cartels, cross the border wearing camouflage and carrying firearms.
Iran’s parliament is chanting “Death to Israel! Death to America!
This would not be happening under Trump! Joe Biden just gave them 6 Billion Dollars.
We can no more count on the Biden Administration to defend our border than to assist Israel. That means states and local communities must take their fates into their own hands.
In the wake of the attack from Gaza, Israel immediately loosened its otherwise quite strict gun laws to increase the number of prepared citizens able to defend themselves from terrorists. The reality is that no government force can respond quickly enough against such overwhelming violence to prevent tragedy. Americans should strongly oppose any efforts to restrain our own Second Amendment and take advantage of the ability to possess and train with firearms for their own defense whenever and wherever possible.
Bolster Law Enforcement
Local communities in Israel were quickly overwhelmed by the coordinated terrorist attack, and local police were not equal to the onslaught. It has been reported that over 30 Israeli police were trapped in a police station that came under siege by Hamas gunmen. Many fought bravely and lost their lives.
In America, both urban and rural areas are struggling to recruit, train, and outfit sufficient law enforcement officers following the left’s assault upon policing in 2020. Many local agencies are hundreds of officers below their required needs. Cities continue to attempt to replace armed law enforcement with mere social workers.
Americans everywhere should endeavor to support and bolster the morale of their local law enforcement, most especially their elected Sheriff. Encourage your community to provide the necessary funding to train, recruit, and equip the best possible local law enforcement, without relying upon fickle and restrictive federal grants. Law enforcement leaders should consider ways to augment smaller or struggling police forces with citizen auxiliaries, properly vetted and trained. States should look at ways to bolster their National Guard and State Defense Forces and prepare them for the kinds of violence we know are possible.
Things will get worse before they get better. The attack on Israel is an unmistakable sign that we have entered a dangerous and trying time. The forces of evil fester and spread, not just in the Middle East, but here at home.
First and foremost, we should, as Tolkien wrote, set ourselves to “uprooting evil in the fields that we know” and encourage our friends abroad to do the same.
Kyle Shideler is senior analyst for Homeland Security at the Center for Security Policy.
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.
Interesting news considering Secretary Mayorkas told this Committee under oath that he supported Biden's decision to end border wall construction.🤔 https://t.co/YyCZ15ZRd8pic.twitter.com/WjOdqqypBL
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.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
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.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied the number one tennis player in the world, Novak Djokovic, entry to America and his chance to compete in two renowned tournaments this month because he did not get the Covid-19 jab. Djokovic, who acquired natural immunity, something even the corporate media admits protects against virus severity and death, multiple times since lockdowns began in 2020, applied for a vaccine exemption through DHS with hopes of playing in the Miami Open and Indian Wells Masters in the U.S. this March and April. Even though he has natural immunity and the Biden administration plans to end its “emergency” pandemic requirements like covid shots for air travelers on May 11, the Serbian was barred by the U.S. government from pleading his case for exemption anyway.
THIS IS SOOOOO REDICULOUS. This is more proof of how stupid these Leftist “mental patients” think we are. They quibble over Djokovic, yet care nothing about the hordes coming over our Southern Border, bringing in diseases of how knows what.
This isn’t the first time Djokovic was forced to forfeit his chance to win elite competitions based on his Covid shot status.
Not only could he not participate in the 2022 U.S. Open, but Djokovic was also expelled from the 2022 Australian Open because the pro-jab Australian government canceled his visa and deported him. Djokovic didn’t regain his status as the world’s top tennis player until he was permitted into Australia under the country’s relaxed mandates, where he won the 2023 Australian Open.
Even though it’s abundantly clear that the jab does nothing to stop the spread of the virus, the U.S. is one of the only countries and is the only major Western nation still requiring foreign visitors to get the shot before entering. As Republican Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio noted in a letter calling for the repeal of covid vaccine requirements for travelers, there’s no good reason for these senseless rules to live on.
Especially as other legislators have noted since even President Joe Biden admitted the pandemic is “over.”
The Biden administration tried to force the jab on illegal border crossers at the end of March last year. Of the 476,921 migrants that border agents took into custody in April and May of 2022, only 20,000 were given the shot. That means hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossers who were caught and thousands more “gotaways,” migrants who evaded arrest from overwhelmed patrol units, entered the U.S. without the same stringent requirements DHS enforces for legal travelers.
In contrast, air travelers like Djokovic have to offer verified proof of vaccination upon their arrival to the U.S. or risk getting turned away.
Keeping an unvaxxed professional athlete and star out of the U.S. while border crossers of all kinds pour into the southern U.S. without the same scrutiny proves vaccine mandates were always a political pawn to strong-arm Americans, not a means to control a virus.
From very early on in the pandemic, it was clear that, contrary to leftwing SCOTUS justices and the president’s insistence, the jab doesn’t prevent the spread of the virus. Even if it did, most Americans haven’t cared about the pervasiveness of covid since 2021. Those who do care should understand that natural immunity is a better indicator of protection than shots like the ones DHS currently requires.
Barring legal travelers from entering the U.S. over their covid vaccination status has never been about reducing illness. Neither was forcing nurses, teachers, contractors, children, and many others to follow arbitrary pandemic protocols. Since the beginning of the bureaucracy’s pandemic panic, vaccine mandates have been about forcing conformity on people who felt like they had no other choice but to comply.
For three years now, Djokovic sacrificed his career so he wouldn’t have to bend a knee. Other countries like Australia have recognized their mistake in keeping him away, but the Biden administration, which knowingly lets millions of unvaccinated illegal border crossers into the country each year, wants to teach him a lesson by barring him from the country for just a couple months more. Until Djokovic’s entry is on their terms, when they say being unvaccinated is socially acceptable, the U.S. will sentence him to the sidelines.
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.
Four Americans who went missing in Mexico last week were taken in a possible kidnapping, according to the FBI. The agency is seeking public help in locating the four Americans who disappeared on March 3 after they crossed the border from Brownsville, Texas.
“Four Americans crossed into Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico driving a white minivan with North Carolina license plates,” read a statement from the FBI published by Fox News. “Shortly after crossing into Mexico, unidentified gunmen fired upon the passengers in the vehicle. All four Americans were placed in a vehicle and taken from the scene by armed men.” The FBI did not name the four missing individuals.
The Americans “had traveled to the border city of Matamoros for medical procedures,” a U.S. official “citing receipts found in the vehicle” told CNN. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador “offered a similar explanation.”
“The information we have is that they crossed the border to buy medicines in Mexico, there was a confrontation between groups and they were detained,” Obrador said, according to CNN. “The whole government is working on it.”
The region across the border from Brownsville is predominantly run by the Gulf drug cartel, a criminal syndicate and drug trafficking organization in constant conflict with warring factions.
Ken Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, said Monday American officials are working with Mexican law enforcement to bring the four missing citizens home. The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for the safe return of the missing Americans and the arrest of the captors. Tips can be submitted to https://tips.fbi.gov.
Kidnapping of Americans in Mexico is far from unprecedented. The State Department has warned Americans against trips to the Tamaulipas state since at least Oct. 22 with a level 4 travel advisory “due to crime and kidnapping.”
Last year, an American tourist had his foot hacked by a machete after being kidnapped by his taxi driver. In December 2021, six Mexican nationals from a trafficking group in Tijuana were indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury for kidnapping nine victims and murdering six. Three of those reportedly executed were American citizens. In 2013, an American named Shane Andersen was held for $20,000 ransom in Monterrey, Mexico.
Most kidnappings don’t pick up major press coverage. This week’s hostage situation, however, has already driven headlines across the major networks as the U.S. southern border with Mexico continues to spiral out of control.
CBS aired apparent footage of the kidnapping Monday morning.
Escalating violence across the international boundary has amplified pressure on Washington lawmakers to address the crisis.
In February, newly-elected Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made his first visit to the border as the leading figure in the lower chamber. McCarthy blasted the Biden administration’s lethargic response to the crisis at the border where a lack of law enforcement has opened the door to unchecked migration and a flood of narcotics pouring into American communities.
“We don’t even have operational control of it anymore,” McCarthy said at a section of the border wall in southeast Arizona.
The Republican House speaker threatened to launch an impeachment inquiry into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the agency’s failure to secure the nation’s boundaries.
“You cannot tell us this border’s secure when now there is enough fentanyl in this country to kill every single American more than 20 times over,” McCarthy said.
In January, cartel violence reached the doorstep of McCarthy’s own California House district where six, including a baby, were murdered in a “cartel-style execution.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
YUMA, Ariz. — GOP members on the House Judiciary Committee met with the leadership of the Yuma Regional Medical Center on Thursday to hear how medical services have been impacted over the significant influx of illegal immigrants into the region.
Dr. Robert Trenschel, president and CEO of the medical center, told the delegation that his hospital has around $26 million in unpaid bills for services rendered to illegal immigrants. Trenschel said the priority of who gets seen depends on how severe their illness or injuries are, no matter what their legal status is. This has caused medical services to be prioritized towards the illegal immigrants, as their illnesses and injuries are significant following their journey across the border.
Yuma’s population is just under 100,000, with several nearby towns adding roughly 38,000 people. The medical center was built up to accommodate that population size. Since the surge of illegal immigration that started in their area in December of 2021, over 300,000 people have illegally crossed into the region.
“We have to see them. Any one of those that needs a hospital visit and we’ve done that. We do it with pride…But what we need is a payer source for those individuals because we have nobody to bill. They have no resources and they’ve just continued to come in,” Trenschel explained.
“We’ve had people in our ICUs for over 60 days…They’ve needed dialysis, heart surgery, cardiac catheterization, I mean, they’re sick when they come over. Not all of them but many and some come in with minor bumps and bruises, things like that…and we have no payer source for that care and that’s our biggest issue. For a hospital like us, it prevents us from doing other things we normally do for our community,” he continued.
Though it is not on the brink of collapse, Trenschel said the hospital system losing out on $26 million in a such a short amount of time has made a severe impact on its operations.
“Really, the community is the one that suffers,” he added.
One of the biggest examples of their services being strained is the hospital’s maternity ward having to care for the mothers and newborn babies for much longer than U.S. citizens because the staff has to ensure they are healthy enough to be discharged since most of the time it was unknown when the next time they would see a doctor.
Trenschel said the hospital has had to postpone planned inductions for mothers who were U.S. citizens “and we had to say, ‘Sorry, we’re just full in our maternity unit.'”
Dorie Rush, the director of women and children services, told GOP lawmakers that the hospital staff has plenty of Spanish speakers. But, many of the illegal immigrants coming in for treatment do not speak Spanish, as they came from other countries, like Haiti. Due to this, the hospital system has purchased multiple translation tablets in order to communicate with the patients.
“We had our walls lined with Border Patrol and Customs agents because when they first were bringing the patients in, they would stay with the patients…There was one day when we had five agents from five different locations bring five different patients at the same time into our triage area, and it’s only seven beds,” Rush recalled.
“So as you can imagine, our general population of patients that were here sitting in the waiting room, lined up, backed up, not being able to get everybody, obviously at the same time, caused a lot of
frustration with our communities,” she added.
Rush said even after people were technically discharged, they still had to keep them there because the hospital is required to ensure they have access to follow up care, which many of the patients had no such guarantee, and to ensure they are able to get to their next location.
“We became a hotel. We did. Up on our pediatric unit, we have a set amount of rooms that we set aside for these patients when they are discharged so that we could keep them here until they could get to the appropriate location,” she said, noting staff still had to check up on the patients in the “hotel” since they were still in the hospital’s care. Rush also had to go out into town to buy every single carseat for babies in order to give to the migrant mothers once they were discharged since they are required by law to not allow babies to leave their care unless there is a carseat.
“Weird question, did they seem grateful? Did they seem overwhelmed from where the world they came from?” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) asked.
“I would say a lot of them were grateful. Some of them expected us, I had one tell me, ‘You will help me get to Florida. You will pay for this.’ I explained nicely that we will work with your family, but that will come from your family, not from us,” a hospital staff answered.
Rush revealed actual hotels in the area stopped accepting the illegal immigrants because of “issues” pertaining to their behavior while staying at their locations.
Google reviews left on Yuma Regional Medical Center’s page within the past few months frequently say the long wait times are a major factor for giving the low ratings.
None of the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee were in Yuma to take part of the tours or the hearing that later took place at city hall. Border Patrol agents in the Yuma Sector voiced their displeasure to Townhall over Democrats not bothering to show up to an official hearing.
TUCSON, Ariz. — Kevin McCarthy began to build the case for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment this week with the California lawmaker’s first trip to the border as House speaker. Talking to reporters, with the southeast Arizona border wall serving as his backdrop, McCarthy outlined the myriad crises plaguing the nation due to unchecked migration and charged the DHS secretary with lying to the public.
“Our border, we don’t even have operational control of it anymore,” McCarthy said. “This is why I will continue to investigate what has gone wrong here and we will hold people accountable. And that includes Secretary Mayorkas.”
In an exclusive interview with The Federalist after the press conference, McCarthy offered no timeline for a potential impeachment inquiry and maintained that the process depends on what lawmakers find over the coming weeks.
“You never do impeachment for political purposes,” McCarthy said. “If something rises to that level,” he explained, “we will follow it wherever it goes.”
McCarthy led the congressional delegation with four GOP freshman, kicking off what will be a top priority for the new Republican majority under the second half of President Joe Biden’s term. Every House committee is expected to visit the southwest border in the ensuing months. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., already introduced an article of impeachment against the DHS chief on Feb. 1.
In November, McCarthy demanded that Mayorkas resign over the border crisis or face impeachment in the lower chamber once Republicans took over. Mayorkas has remained defiant while the cartels run rampant. A coalition of 21 attorneys general sent a letter to the Biden administration last week demanding that Mexican drug cartels be designated as terrorist organizations.
Days before the speaker’s border trip this week, DHS staffed up to face House impeachment proceedings, entering a multimillion-dollar contract with a liberal law firm that has a history of left-wing donations.
“You cannot tell us this is secure when more than 42 percent of gottaways come through here,” McCarthy said on Thursday. “You cannot tell us this border’s secure when now there is enough fentanyl in this country to kill every single American more than 20 times over.”
“This has got to stop,” the speaker added. “And it starts with the secretary of Homeland. Stop lying to the American public. Tell them the truth [about] what’s happening and change back the regulation that we had before so our border can be secure.”
The White House hit McCarthy’s border trip as a partisan publicity stunt with a Wednesday statement. “Solutions are what President Biden is focused on, and his is plan working,”said Ian Sams, a White House spokesman. “House Republicans would be wise to join him to work together to strengthen our immigration system and fund border security.”
Biden’s first border visit was a sanitized tour in January, with officials clearing the camps in El Paso before the president’s arrival. Biden proceeded to call on Congress to pass immigration reform at his annual State of the Union last week and claimed his border measures were working.
“We’ve launched a new border plan last month. Unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97 percent as a consequence of that,” Biden said. “But American border problems won’t be fixed until Congress acts.”
ACTS ON WHAT????????? Fund what???????? The Wall has been funded since Clinton. Finish the Wall. We’ve got the materials. Put it up.
Contrary to his claims the border is secure, data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shows otherwise.
Law enforcement reported more than 156,000 migrant encounters in January. While lower than the record of nearly 252,000 encounters in December, 156,000 is still higher than the almost 155,000 in January last year and the 78,000 the same month in 2021 — and way higher than the less than 37,000 in FY 2020. In fact, it’s an all-time high for the coldest month of the year. Even bundled-up reporters shivered under cloudless skies in the high desert winds when lawmakers ran late on Thursday.
A Deadly Crisis
While the Biden administration tries to argue there’s nothing to see on the southern border, Alex Espinosa, the director of a funeral home 15 miles east of McCarthy’s press conference, says otherwise.
“During Trump’s administration, I picked up four border crossers,” Espinosa told The Federalist in his conference room overlooking the border wall. “Right now, I can’t even tell you how many. There’s more deaths. Way more deaths.”
Most, Espinosa said, die from exposure to the elements or fentanyl. He explained the numbers picked up “right after Biden won.”
“Never, never, never, ever have I seen it this bad,” Espinosa told The Federalist. “I’ve probably buried 40 kids.”
A reformed ex-convict himself, Espinosa, 61, served time behind bars for drug smuggling 30 years ago. He now hands out free Narcan, a medication known to save lives in the case of opioid overdose, at services, saying it has become a hot commodity. The local health department replenished his stockpile after it ran out during a single funeral for a recent 23-year-old who overdosed. His own son has also struggled with opioid addiction.
In Naco, a town on the border five miles south of Espinosa’s funeral home, locals were shy about the crisis. A ranch hand working in a field with a pair of day laborers from across the border offered only his first name, Greg, and said he often sees helicopter activity but described the overall area as tame. Another pair of women operating a local nonprofit in the community denied the area even faced issues.
Espinosa, however, who conducts the funerals for the border crisis victims, said locals often feel too intimidated to speak openly about the dangers their neighborhoods face. Despite his Mexican heritage, Espinosa has been tarred as a racist, and his truck was burned after he challenged the mayor of Douglas over the leader’s plans to declare the border town a sanctuary city.
“They need to finish the wall,” Espinosa said frankly, warning that until then, the area would not be safe to walk around at night.
McCarthy told The Federalist on Thursday at the conclusion of his congressional tour that DHS needs to complete the wall with modern technology as originally planned.
“You gotta finish this,” McCarthy said, pointing at the wall. “Finish the technology you haven’t hooked up — the lights, the sensors. There’s places in the wall that’s not done yet.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Instead of transforming the life of Jesus to fit our culture, let’s tell the full story of Jesus — offensive and glorious as it is — to the watching world and see how it transforms them.
“He Gets Us” is spending upwards of a billion dollars on an advertising campaign to expose millions of people, including those who tuned in to the 2023 Super Bowl, to Jesus. But its attempt to win over the world with a modernized version of Christ failed to endear some of those it sought to engage. The first commercial flipped through a series of black-and-white photos of children helping others in need. The 30-second clip ended with the tagline “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults,” a reference to Christ’s teaching about childlike faith in Matthew 18.
“If I could see the world through the eyes of a child, what a wonderful world this would be,” the song narrated.
These commercials offer the vaguest and most inoffensive and uncontroversial picture of Jesus possible, even to people who already have a distaste for Christianity. In fact, they are part of a larger campaign known for making radical comparisons between Jesus and the U.S. border crisis, which is harnessed by corrupt cartels for profit, and bold conflations of Jesus and his disciples with groups who roam the streets today, “challeng[ing] authority” and “ma[king] a lot of people uneasy,” in an attempt to appeal to current culture.
“We look at the biography of Jesus through a modern lens to find new relevance in often overlooked moments and themes from his life,” the campaign’s website states.
The hope in running these eyebrow-raising ads, campaign representatives disclosed, is to use an updated portrayal of Christ to sympathize with the plights of people who “are spiritually open, but skeptical” of organized religion.
In other words, the ads were deliberately designed to look, walk, and talk like the social justice agenda that has found its way into every American institution in the last decade in a last-ditch effort to appeal to a worldly culture.
Yet the universal messages communicated by these videos were still broadly rejected and smeared.
“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” progressive darling and Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quipped on Twitter shortly after the second “He Gets Us” ad aired, with her tweet garnering nearly 200,000 likes and more than 20,000 retweets as of this writing.
No matter how hard Christian campaigns — especially evangelical ones — like He Gets Us try to win over the world by twisting the Gospel to fit our culture’s standards, they will fail.
Jesus said, 19 “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” John 3:19-21 (NIV)
Do Not Conform to This World
It should come as no surprise that even the tamest of ads that barely mentions Jesus was doomed from the start. Christian campaigns like He Gets Us operate under the premise that repackaging the Gospel to make our society think Christians and Jesus are cool entices people to consider following Jesus. Oftentimes, they go to great lengths to trash their own — faithful Christians — to be viewed and accepted by the same world that despises Christ-followers who hold Biblical views about marriage, sex, family, and life.
He Gets Us was born out of the idea that the Christians of today are not good enough at marketing Jesus. After all, an alarming number of Americans are abandoning church.
“How did the story of a man who taught and practiced unconditional love become associated with hatred and oppression for so many people?” organizers ask on the campaign’s website. As a result, they claim “many of us simply cannot reconcile the idea of that person with the way our culture experiences religion today.” They say:
Whether it’s hypocrisy and discrimination in the church, or scandals both real and perceived among religious leaders, or the polarization of our politics, many have relegated Jesus from the world’s greatest love story to just another tactic used to intensify our deep cultural divisions.
Anyone who reads his Bible, however, knows our society will never welcome the Good News with open arms. That’s because the Gospel, in its truest form, is offensive to the world. It announces unequivocally that every person is a vile sinner who deserves death and that even the so-called good works we do are tainted by self-interest and are filthy in the eyes of a holy God. It tells of a loving Father who gave up his only Son Jesus to live a perfect life and die the most brutal death imaginable as a sacrifice for the same sort of people who murdered Him. It proclaims that this Jesus miraculously rose from the grave, and it demands that anyone who follows Him must lay down his own comfort and desires and even his very life every single day.
Nothing about this offensive message conforms to our culture. In fact, the written Word of God demands that we “do not conform to the pattern of this world.”
Dressing up the Word of God to appeal to the masses is the exact opposite of what Jesus and the apostles did and what Christians are commanded to do. We are told to sow the seed of the Gospel everywhere and to everyone, to preach Christ crucified — not water down the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of the incarnate God, who detests sin, into someone who perfectly embodies the modern culture.
Jesus Doesn’t Need Rebranding
There is nothing wrong with bringing Jesus to the masses — it’s what we’re commanded to do — but we have to do it well.
Jesus’ mission from God to die for the sins of the world cannot be reduced to a few choice words he said. We care about what Jesus said, but we can’t separate that from what He did. Jesus didn’t just preach love your neighbor or love your enemies or have childlike faith. He rebuked sin, cast out demons, and promised eternal life for those who repent.
That alone is great news that doesn’t need editorializing or tweaking or watering down. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”
He Gets Us sends a different message: that maybe the pure Gospel is something to be ashamed of because maybe the power of God, absent fresh aesthetics and modern social justice narratives, isn’t enough to save.
That doesn’t mean we stop sharing the Good News on whatever platforms we can. There’s certainly a space for Christians to share the love of God — and the gift of new life by grace through faith in Jesus Christ — to the millions watching the biggest sporting event of the year and everyone else. But let’s not squander that opportunity by peddling convenient narratives.
Instead of transforming the life of Jesus to fit our culture, let’s tell the full story of Jesus — offensive and glorious as it is — to the watching world and see how it transforms them.
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.
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.
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.
Long before classified and potentially compromising documents were discovered in President Joe Biden’s “think tank” office and Wilmington home and garage, the Democrat’s actions posed a threat to U.S. national security. The discovery of even more top secret documents dating back to Biden’s time as vice president and senator sparked widespread concerns that the current president hid material that put U.S. national security at risk, potentially for decades.
Republicans worried — and even partisan hacks such as Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff conceded — that Biden’s harboring of classified documents in high-traffic, unsecured areas could have put Americans or the U.S. government at risk.
“Is it possible that national security was jeopardized here as many, including you, raised that possibility with the Mar-a-Lago documents?” ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl asked.
“I don’t think we can exclude the possibility without knowing more of the facts,” the disgraced former chair of the House Intelligence Committee replied.
It seems logical to investigate Biden’s recent scandal to ensure he didn’t compromise any sensitive material. But the truth is, he opened up the U.S. to a myriad of national security crises, abuses, and disasters long before news broke of his document scandal. Since taking office, Biden, who is charged with ensuring the national security of the U.S., has put Americans and their security at risk countless times.
By openly pursuing a policy of escalation in the U.S.-funded proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Biden and his administration have significantly increased the threat of nuclear war. A conflict that only ends on Ukraine’s terms and might result in a radioactive third world war compromises Americans’ safety and tax dollars.
It also leaves countries like Taiwan vulnerable to communist China’s hegemonic operations. While China stockpiled hundreds of nuclear warheads and prepared to expand its influence, Biden was further emboldening his country’s No. 1 foreign threat. First, he did business with the Chinese gas giant with ties to his son. Then Biden pushed the Saudis into an amicable relationship with the Eastern communist government.
Speaking of the Middle East, it was Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal that sent tens of thousands of Afghan refugees into U.S. cities without proper screening, vetting, and inspection. This lapse in security resulted in two known security risks and dozens more evacuees tainted by “derogatory information” entering the country unmonitored. Domestically, Biden and the same agency that failed to vet Afghan refugees jeopardized U.S. national security by escorting in the worst illegal immigration influx in recorded U.S. history and then doing nothing to fix it. Under Biden’s watch, more than 100 potential terrorists and hundreds more criminals crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.
Even dating back to his time as vice president, Biden sacrificed national security for profit by keeping his son Hunter Biden close. Hunter didn’t just exchange access to his father for cash to fund the family’s lavish lifestyle, he was paid by oligarchs and businessmen in countries that have a vested interest in meddling with U.S. affairs. That’s likely why the inexperienced Hunter was handed a lucrative position at a prominent Ukrainian energy company at the same time his father took the lead on Ukraine policy for the Obama administration.
At one point, Biden used a non-government email to share official White House business with Hunter, a civilian who shouldn’t have had access to sensitive material. Republican senators’ attempts to investigate the emails and the role they may have played in enriching the Biden family business were ignored.
Biden’s willingness to share delicate information with his son, whose own documents stored on an abandoned laptop likely pose a serious threat to the national security of the United States, is more than problematic. Combine that with Biden’s knowledge of and involvement in Hunter’s business with foreign oligarchs, and you have a long list of foreign entanglements and finances that could severely hamper the elder Biden’s ability to put American interests first.
If early reports are correct in noting that some of the recovered Biden documents included “US intelligence memos and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom,” Biden’s information cache does warrant investigation and transparency. But don’t be fooled into thinking this is the first time Biden has sacrificed U.S. national security to protect his personal interests, preserve the Biden family business, and advance his radical agenda.
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.
President Biden has finally found a solution to address the surge in illegal crossings at the southern border: tell the tens of thousands of aliens unlawfully entering the United States from Mexico that they can come to America “legally” if they instead fly to a port-of-entry in the interior of the country.
Seriously, for all the Biden administration’s spin, that’s his plan — and it is illegal.
Of course, when Biden announced his administration’s newest policy on Thursday in advance of his midterm inaugural trip to the southern border on Sunday, the press release heralded the plan as a “new border enforcement action.” But as National Review’s Andrew McCarthy exposed in his weekend column, it’s a scam.
The scam, though, is layers thick, both legally and politically. And to reach the core truth — that Biden refuses to faithfully execute his duties as the president of the United States by defending our sovereign border — one must first unpeel the specifics of the newest plan buried in the Department of Homeland Security’s official notice of the changes, while also analyzing the relevant immigration law.
The Plan
Today’s edition of the Federal Register, which serves as “the Daily Journal of the United States Government,” contains the details of DHS’s supposed “new border enforcement action,” in four separate “notices,” titled respectively: “Implementation of a Parole Process for Cubans,” “Implementation of a Parole Process for Haitians,” “Implementation of a Parole Process for Nicaraguans,” and “Implementation of Changes to the Parole Process for Venezuelans.”
Each notice summarizes the Biden administration’s supposed “solution” to the flooding of the southern border, which in short consists of allowing, on a monthly basis, a total of 30,000 aliens to enter the United States “legally” if they are Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, or Venezuelan nationals. To qualify, aliens must have a “U.S.-based supporter,” which could be “non-governmental entities or community-based organizations,” and must “provide for their own commercial travel to an air [port-of-entry] and final U.S. destination.” National security and public safety vetting are also required, as well as any additional public health requirements, such as vaccinations.
But how is it that illegal-alien border crossers can become lawful noncitizens by just jumping through a few hoops and flying to the interior of the country, rather than sneaking over the southern border? They can’t. And in crafting its latest immigration plan, the Biden administration is again acting lawlessly.
Biden’s Lawlessness
The Biden administration maintains it has the authority to allow aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States legally under section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, or INA. That section provides the secretary of homeland security the authority to “parole” noncitizens “into the United States temporarily under such reasonable conditions as [the secretary] may prescribe only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
“parole” for purposes of the INA is a “legal fiction” in which “a paroled alien is physically allowed to enter the country,” but the alien maintains the same legal status as if he or she were held at the border waiting for an application for admission to be granted or denied. But besides obtaining the legal right to be present in the United States, an alien paroled into the United States may obtain employment authorization to work here lawfully.
As the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently explained, “Parole began as an administrative invention that allowed aliens in certain circumstances to remain on U.S. soil without formal admission, with Congress codifying the practice when it initially enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act (the ‘INA’) in 1952.” At that time, Congress gave the attorney general “discretion to parole into the United States temporarily under such conditions as he may prescribe … any alien applying for admission to the United States.”
However, “throughout the mid-twentieth century, the executive branch on multiple occasions purported to use the parole power to bring in large groups of immigrants,” prompting Congress twice to amend the INA “to limit the scope of the parole power and prevent the executive branch from using it as a programmatic policy tool.” First, as the Fifth Circuit explained, in 1980, Congress added a requirement that the executive branch only parole refugees where “compelling reasons in the public interest with respect to that particular alien,” exist. Then, in 1996, Congress amended the INA to provide “parole may be granted ‘only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.’”
While the DHS’s just-announced parole plans claim the department is making parole decisions on a case-by-case basis, the qualifications set forth by the DHS establish that the Biden administration is illegally using parole power “as a programmatic policy tool,” rather than as designed by Congress, for example, by “paroling aliens who do not qualify for an admission category but have an urgent need for medical care in the United States and paroling aliens who qualify for a visa but are waiting for it to become available.”
The Biden administration’s lawless use of its parole power should come as no surprise, though, as since November of 2021, the president’s team has relied on Section 212(d)(5)(A) to release “family units” at the border to supposedly deal with “capacity constraints.” Florida has challenged the Biden administration’s granting of such carte blanche parole, as well as the president’s failure to detain illegal aliens as mandated under the INA, and trial is set to begin on both those claims later today in a federal court in Florida.
The ‘Standing’ Problem
A similar legal challenge to the Biden administration’s recent parole plan seems likely, although by requiring applicants to secure a vetted “supporter” who will commit to providing for the parolees’ financial needs while they are present in the United States, it will be challenging for anyone to show “standing” to challenge DHS’s plan.
For instance, in the Florida case, while the Biden administration argued the state lacked “standing,” or the right to sue, the court rejected that argument, reasoning Florida “plausibly alleged that the challenged policies already have and will continue to cost it millions of dollars, including the cost of incarcerating criminal aliens and the cost of providing a variety of public benefits, including unemployment benefits, free public education, and emergency services to aliens who settle in Florida after being ‘paroled’ into the country.”
But other than providing “free public education,” the same types of monetary harms are lacking in the case of the Biden administration’s latest parole proposal. And it is questionable whether a court will find that providing free public education to children paroled under DHS’s plans will be enough to establish standing.
Absent a plaintiff with standing to challenge DHS’s plan to parole some 30,000 aliens into the United States every month, the only way to fight the Biden administration’s latest lawless move will be politically. Here, those seeking to secure the southern border have ample ammunition, including highlighting the fact that the Biden administration’s plan does nothing to address that portion of the 200,000-some individuals crossing the southern border every month that herald from countries other than Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Further, while converting 30,000 illegal border crossers into parolees at ports of entry in the interior of the country may provide a reduction to the problem on paper, it does not secure the border nor promise any reduction in the number of individuals attempting to enter via Mexico.
The parole plan presumes, though, that there will be an even greater reduction in illegal border crossings than the 30,000 who enter as part of the parole process. The parole plan, according to the Biden administration, creates a disincentive for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter illegally at the southern border because the DHS’s new policy also provides that aliens who bypass the parole process and enter the United States without authorization will be subject to an expedited removal to Mexico or their country of origin.
If so, then why not just institute a policy of expediting the removal of individuals who enter illegally at the southern border?
Biden’s Border Disaster
According to the figures included in last week’s DHS notices, prior to the surge at the southern border that followed the Biden administration’s change in enforcement policies, there weren’t even 30,000 aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela crossing the border illegally on an annual basis.
For instance, the notice reported that for fiscal years 2019 and 2020 respectively, DHS encountered only 3,039 and 4,431 Haitian nationals at the southwest border, but by 2021 the number exploded to 43,484.
From 2014 to 2019, DHS encountered 589 Cubans on average every month, but by 2022, the average monthly encounter at the land border totaled 17,809, and in October and November of 2022, some 62,000-plus Cuban nationals attempted to cross the border.
From fiscal 2014 through 2019, border agents encountered a monthly average of 127 Venezuelan nationals, but by fiscal year 2022, the average number of Venezuelans crossing the border illegally on a monthly basis totaled 15,494 and rose to more than 33,000 in September of that year.
For Nicaraguan nationals, in 2022, DHS encountered an estimated 157,400 aliens, or an average of 13,113 per month, compared to an average of 316 per month from fiscal years 2014-2019.
These figures show the Biden administration does not need a parole policy: It needs an enforcement policy.
No End in Sight
There is a telling admission hidden in the DHS notice from last week that announced changes to the parole plan established for Venezuela in October of 2022. As originally established, the Venezuela plan capped the number of “parolees” at a total of 24,000 beneficiaries. But, as the DHS acknowledged in its notice modifying that plan, just two months in, “demand for the Venezuela process has far exceeded the 24,000 limit.”
“Absent immediate action,” the DHS notice explained, “there is a risk that DHS meets the 24,000 cap, which would in turn cause the [government of Mexico] to no longer accept the return of Venezuelan nationals and end the success of the parole process to date at reducing the number of Venezuelan nationals encountered at the border.” Further, should it reach the 24,000 limit, thereby making prospective migrants no longer eligible for parole, the “DHS anticipates that we would then see increased irregular migration of Venezuelans.”
In other words, the Biden administration is allowing aliens to come to America “legally” because if it doesn’t, foreign nationals will just start crossing the border illegally again.
Further, while the Biden administration’s current plan caps the number of parolees at 30,000 per month, the DHS notices indicate it may revisit that figure if necessary. What then, is there to stop the Biden administration from increasing the 30,000 cap two-fold or ten-fold? Or what is there to prevent the administration from expanding parole to aliens from countries beyond the four — maybe 14, or even 40?
While the intricacies of immigration law are detailed and often convoluted, the bottom line of the Biden administration’s parole plan should be clear to all Americans: Joe Biden has no intention of securing our border or faithfully executing his duties as the president of the United States.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally sleep on a sidewalk near a migrant shelter on January 06, 2023, in El Paso, Texas. President Joe Biden visited El Paso on Sunday for his first-ever visit to the border in his decades-long career in politcs. U.S. Border authorities took into custody some 2.5 million illegal migrants in 2022, the highest number on record. | John Moore/Getty Images
Critics of the Biden administration’s handling of the immigration crisis at the U.S. southern border say President Joe Biden’s trip to Texas and Mexico amounted to a “photo-op” and expressed concern that the administration’s policies will only exacerbate the humanitarian crisis.
President Joe Biden visited the southwest border for the first time Sunday, as concerns grow about the high volume of illegal immigration negatively affecting U.S. citizens and border communities. Statistics compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol show there were 465,034 encounters between migrants and law enforcement officials at the southwest border in the first two months of fiscal year 2023, which began in October. By comparison, just 339,682 encounters occurred during the same period in fiscal year 2022.
Biden’s border visit occurred against the backdrop of his administration’s efforts to abolish Title 42, which enables border officials to quickly turn away migrants seeking entry into the U.S. due to public health concerns posed by the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered Title 42 to remain in place as the justices are slated to hear a case involving the matter later this year. The abandonment of Title 42 is expected to cause the number of illegal border crossings to increase to an even higher figure.
The president announced his intention to visit the border city of El Paso, Texas, in a press conference last week. During the address, Biden laid out actions his administration was taking to address the surge at the U.S.-Mexico border, including the expansion of a parole program allowing Venezuelan migrants with sponsors in the U.S. to come to the country for two years and receive work permits as long as they pass a background check to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
The president predicted that expanding the parole program to three additional countries will “substantially reduce the number of people attempting to cross the southwest border without going through the legal process.” He contended that since the establishment of the existing parole program, “the number of Venezuelans trying to enter America without going through a legal process has dropped dramatically from about 1,100 per day to less than 250 per day on average.”
When Biden arrived in El Paso, Gov. Greg Abbott gave him a letter declaring that “your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too little and two years too late.”
Abbott added, “Your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies.”
Hand-delivered a letter to President Biden today during his first visit to the border.
His trip is billion too little & 2 years too late.
“Even the city you visit has been sanitized of the migrant camps which had overrun downtown El Paso because your Administration wants to shield you from the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis,” he wrote. “This chaos is a direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted.”
Abbott elaborated on the consequences of mass illegal immigration at the southwest border, including the emboldening of the drug cartels engaged in “trafficking deadly fentanyl and even human beings.” He told the president “when you finish the photo-ops in a carefully stage-managed version of El Paso, you have a job to do.”
The Texas governor urged Biden to “comply with the many statutes mandating that various categories of aliens ‘shall’ be detained, and end the practice of unlawfully paroling aliens en masse,” stop “sandbagging” Title 42, “aggressively prosecute illegal entry between ports of entry, and allow ICE to remove illegal immigrants in accordance with existing federal laws,” immediately resume the construction of the border wall separating the U.S. from Mexico and “designate the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.”
Newly elected Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., issued a statement of his own, characterizing Biden’s visit to the border as a “photo-op,” suggesting that any calls for border security from the administration ring hollow as long as the president continues “pushing for amnesty for millions of immigrants who have crossed into the U.S. illegally.” McCarthy vowed that “House Republicans will hold him and [Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro] Mayorkas accountable for creating the most dangerous border crisis in American history.”
Biden is making his first border visit of his life—a photo op—while pushing for amnesty for millions of immigrants who have crossed into the US illegally.
House Republicans will hold him and Mayorkas accountable for creating the most dangerous border crisis in American history.
Ahead of Biden’s visit to the border, the Democratic mayor of El Paso declared a state of emergency, citing the impacts of the migrant surge on his city. Critics of the Biden administration previously attributed the rise in illegal border crossings, which began at the beginning of his presidency in 2021, to the abandonment of the Migrant Protection Protocols that required those seeking asylum in the U.S. to remain in Mexico while their asylum claims were adjudicated.
During his speech last week, Biden touted the CBP ONE app, which enables migrants “to schedule an appointment at a port of entry and make their asylum claim there without crossing the border unlawfully.” Additionally, the White House released a fact sheet last week outlining additional actions the administration was taking to reduce illegal immigration at the southwest border.
Specifically, the fact sheet proclaimed that “… individuals who attempt to enter the United States without permission, do not have a legal basis to remain, and cannot be expelled pursuant to Title 42 will be increasingly subject to expedited removal from their country of origin and subject to a five-year ban on reentry.”
“DHS and DOJ are surging asylum officers and immigration judges to review asylum cases at the border more quickly — with the aim of reducing initial processing times from months to days,” the document added. The administration also intends to mobilize “faith-based and nonprofit organizations supporting migrants, including those providing temporary shelter, food, and humanitarian assistance.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Democrats and RINO Republicans are pushing a $1.7 Trillion Omnibus bill that spends $47 Billion for Ukraine and $410 Million for Border security in the Middle East but nothing for our southern border.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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