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.
The second ad featured a slideshow of black-and-white photos depicting heated arguments — most of them political in nature.
“Jesus loved the people we hate,” the video concluded before plugging the He Gets Us campaign website.
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.
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.
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.
Despite a general lack of concern among Democrats and corporate media, the U.S.-Mexico border continues to spiral out of control, setting new records for illegal border crossings nearly every month now. In October, more than 230,000 illegal immigrants were arrested along the southwest border, the third-highest monthly total in U.S. history, according to new data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Only May and April of this year have been worse than October, with 235,785 and 241,136 arrests, respectively.
Prior to the Biden administration, monthly arrests at the border rarely exceeded 100,000. In October 2020, for example, roughly 45,000 illegal border-crossers were arrested by CBP. But now it has become commonplace. Every month since March, arrests have surpassed 200,000.
For some historical perspective on the October 2022 numbers, consider that in all of 2017 there were only about 303,000 border arrests, total. And just 46,000 in October of that year.
Since President Joe Biden has taken office, more than 5 million illegal immigrants, including so-called “gotaways” whom Border Patrol wasn’t able to arrest, have crossed the southern border. And unlike previous years, there is no sign of a seasonal ebb and flow at the border. At a time of year when crossings are typically slow, we are now seeing a massive surge.
Apologists for President Biden’s border crisis in the corporate press tend to dismiss these shocking figures and attempt to explain them away by claiming the high monthly totals represent the same people crossing illegally, being expelled under Title 42, and attempting to cross again.
What they don’t mention is that border data has always reflected this phenomenon. Of the 230,000 arrests last month, about 19 percent “had at least one prior encounter in the previous 12 months,” according to CBP. This is only a 5 percent rise compared to the average 14 percent reencounter rate from 2014 to 2019.
Despite these outrageous statistics, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has doubled down on his claim that the border is “secure.”
Asked recently whether he “continue[s] to maintain that the border is secure” by Rep. Dan Bishop, R- North Carolina, Mayorkas responded, “Yes, and we are working day in and day out to enhance its security.”
Sophia is an intern at The Federalist and a student at Le Moyne College. She majors in English and intends to pursue a career in journalism.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Fox News reporter Bill Melugin directly confronted Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other Democrats recently about the border crisis. But none of them were interested in providing substantive answers for a crisis that rages on unaddressed.
First, Melugin questioned Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) whether she has “an issue” with a record number of unaccompanied migrants coming to the U.S., some of them dying. He also asked whether she agrees with the Biden administration that the border is “secure.” Pressley refused to answer either question and instead walked away from him.
Second, Melugin confronted Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), asking him whether the border is secure. Thompson refused to answer the question and immediately walked away after telling Melugin, “I have to go give a speech.”
When Melugin approached Mayorkas, the secretary also refused to answer questions. Mayorkas, however, was more polite than Pressley or Thompson.
“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Mayorkas said when Melugin asked if he had a brief moment to discuss the border crisis.
Fox News confronts Democrats on border crisis www.youtube.com
Interestingly, the Democrats who answered Melugin’s questions — Reps. Veronica Escobar, Colin Allred, and Henry Cuellar — represent districts in Texas, including those on the front lines of the border crisis.
“This is unsustainable. It has been unsustainable for years,” Escobar told Melugin.
“This is our administration. I’m a Democrat. And you know, they need to understand they own it now,” Cuellar said. “They own it now. And they have to take the steps to correct this, otherwise, you know, when are we going to see an end to this?”
Speaking to party leadership, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer blamed Republicans for zero progress on immigration legislation. On the other hand, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Melugin that moderate Democrats support securing the border but will not publicly advocate that support as long as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains in power.
Melugin’s dogged reporting of the crisis, which often goes viral on social media, has angered the White House. Melugin, however, is clearly not backing down.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has flagged thousands of Mexican passports with Middle Eastern names as part of a fraud investigation, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Free Beacon.
Since Jan. 1, DHS’ National Targeting Center has identified 28,500 individuals for “further evaluation,” according to an excerpt of the memo. (RELATED: Human Trafficker Says Cartels Harvest Children’s Organs And Stuff Drugs In Their Corpses: REPORT) The investigation will seek to determine whether the passport holders entered the U.S., according to a senior DHS official, who spoke with the Beacon. Federal officials have raised concerns about the potential risks of the vulnerabilities in border security amid the influx of illegal migration, according to the Beacon. Since October, CBP has encountered 343 people whose names appeared on a national terror watchlist,according to agency data.
“This investigation highlights that criminals often use legal travel to facilitate criminal activity. The nexus to Mexico should cause the public and lawmakers to reflect on how a porous border can be even more dangerous,” the anonymous DHS official told the Beacon.
FBI Director Christopher Wray recently said that the border posed a “significant security issue” and “represents a wide array of criminal threats that flow out of it,” including potential terrorists.
REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
CBP officials apprehended two men from Yemen whose names appeared on the FBI terrorism watchlist after they illegally crossed the southern border into California during two separate occasions in January and March, 2021.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues to encounter record numbers of migrants under the Biden administration and is on pace to surpass 2,000,000 migrant encounters for fiscal year 2022,according to agency statistics.
DHS didn’t respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald 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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
It’s no exaggeration: Joe Biden is bringing the country down in a tailspin. From historic failures internationally to crises at home and dropping approval ratings, Biden’s administration makes every single thing it touches worse.
Taken alone, each of these failures is pretty damning, but as a whole — or at least even just this small sampling — they reveal the degree to which our 46th president is a danger to America’s well-being.
1. Facilitating a Deadly Border
On June 20, an abandoned semi-truck was found to contain more than 40 dead migrants, with the death toll later rising to 51. The deceased have been confirmed to be Mexican, Guatemalan, and Honduran citizens entering the United States illegally, although 20 others’ national origins remain undetermined.
On a recent trip to Mexico, Federalist staff saw firsthand the devastating effects of Biden’s refusal to enforce U.S. border and immigration laws. As a result, our southern border is controlled by cartels, which smuggle and exploit men, women, and children — a process that can be deadly.
2. Shipping Illegals to a Community Near You
In addition to ignoring the border crisis, the president is secretly shipping illegal migrants across state borders and into suburban cities and family neighborhoods. In February, he planned to dump 1,000 Afghan refugees right next to Loudoun High School without contacting local law enforcement about the plan.
According to The Daily Wire, the Department of Homeland Security said the Federal Protection Service would provide security for students located next to unvetted foreign citizens, but since FPS has no jurisdiction in Loudoun County, this pledge was meaningless.
3. Holding Kids Hostage to Trans Radicalism
In May, the Biden administration attempted to strongarm public schools into letting males who identify as transgender use girls’ bathrooms by threatening to pull federal funding for school lunches if they didn’t. That’s 30 million lunch-program students Biden took hostage to push his party’s trans radicalism.
4. Tapping into Emergency Petroleum Reserves
Laying all blame on Putin for gas prices that are double what they were before Biden took office, Biden has commissioned the selling of 1 million barrels of oil per day for six months from our national emergency reserve. Instead of saving our stockpile for an emergency and resurrecting the Keystone pipeline and other major American energy projects Biden killed, the administration is using up the largest release from the stockpile in our history — and suggesting you buy an electric car.
5. Botching the Afghanistan Withdrawal
Pulling out of Afghanistan was always the plan — but not the disastrous way Biden did it. By leaving before Afghan forces were prepared, abandoning the Bagram Air Base before evacuating American citizens and Afghan allies, and leaving American citizens, weapons, and equipment for the Taliban to commandeer, Biden committed a tremendous strategic and humanitarian error.
6. Supporting Child Castration and Sterilization
The White House is openly championing “gender-affirming” surgeries and brainwashing attempts targeted at young children, and Biden is not simply a moderate bystander. He has threatened “immediate action” against state governors and attorneys general who decry castration of a kid as child abuse.
7. Driving up Inflation
As Americans are reminded every time they buy groceries or fill their gas tanks, Biden’s policies have caused, or at least exacerbated, record inflation and unsustainably high consumer prices. By throwing money at problems the government largely created through the so-called American Rescue Plan, relinquishing U.S. energy independence, and printing more money, among other fiscally irresponsible policies, the president has helped make just about everything Americans need more expensive.
8. Letting Babies Go Hungry
Due to government-mandated shutdowns that slowed deliveries, burdensome regulations, and then Biden’s Food and Drug Administration’s shutdown of the largest baby formula-making plants in the country, Americans found themselves unable to find needed formula, leaving infants in hospitals and families desperate. Their desperation turned to frustration with the Biden administration when they realized the president was using their tax dollars to buy and ship formula to illegal immigrants at the border.
9. Forcing the Covid Jab
Despite his so-called “pro-choice” posture, Biden sought to force Americans to put vaccines into their bodies by issuing a rule that all workers in any business of more than 100 employees must get vaccinated or else be constantly tested. His vaccine-or-test mandate for workers was overruled by the Supreme Court and later withdrawn by his administration.
10. Scheming to Enact Abortion Radicalism
Biden has expressed support for an abortion-specific carveout for the filibuster, advocating for an exemption strictly to empower Congress to codify Roe v. Wade without having enough votes. This radicalism is despite his previous passion for the filibuster and Democrats’ constant use of it during President Donald Trump’s tenure.
11. Tanking His Own Approval
Biden has utterly failed to keep the country’s approval, with his ratings down to record lows. The latest CNBC poll out this week shows Biden’s approval rating at an abysmal 36 percent. That’s even worse than Trump’s lowest ratings ever, despite the former president weathering instability over Covid-19 and cultural upheaval after the death of George Floyd.
Beth Whitehead is an intern at The Federalist and a journalism major at Patrick Henry College where she fondly excuses the excess amount of coffee she drinks as an occupational hazard.
Ahandful of Texas counties on Tuesday declared the ongoing border crisis an “invasion” and called on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to do the same, citing constitutional authority for states to act in self-defense in the face of federal inaction.
Speaking in rural Kinney County, which includes a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, officials from Kinney, Uvalde, and Goliad counties said the Biden administration has refused to secure the border and enforce the law, and that although Abbott has done much to support local communities in south Texas most affected by the crisis, he needs to do more. Namely, he needs to follow their lead and declare an invasion.
County officials of course can’t do anything about illegal immigration on their own, but their argument is that Abbott, as governor of Texas, can. They cite Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which says that states can’t do things like conduct foreign policy or engage in war, “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit delay.”
Those three words, “unless actually invaded,” are the crux of the argument. The idea that states have the constitutional power to act on their own to enforce immigration law and police the border has been gaining ground for some time now. Former Trump administration officials such as Russ Vought and Ken Cuccinelli, both now at the Center for Renewing America, have made a case for unilateral state action on the border.
HUGE.
Our constitutional solution to the border crisis is live!
For the first time in U.S. history an INVASION has been declared (outside of Congress) by several counties in Texas.
— Center for Renewing America (@amrenewctr) July 5, 2022
Cuccinelli, former acting deputy Homeland Security secretary under Trump, was at the press conference on Tuesday in Texas. “This is the first time in American history that a legal authority has found, as a matter of law, that the United States is being invaded,” he said, later adding, “What we’re talking about is an operation that looks a lot like Title 42.”
That is, declaring an “invasion” means that state law enforcement, at the direction of the Texas governor, would directly arrest and expel to Mexico illegal immigrants in much the same manner as Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection does now under Title 42, the pandemic health order that allows federal authorities to expel illegal immigrants with minimal processing.
So far, Abbott has been reluctant to take this route, instead attempting lesser measures such as arresting and prosecuting illegal border-crossers for criminal trespass or ordering onerous state inspections at ports of entry as a way to pressure his Mexican counterparts into stopping migrants in Mexico before they cross the border.
These lesser measures, however, haven’t done anything to stem the flow of illegal immigration, which continues, month over month, to set new records. Perhaps it’s time for Abbott to listen to these local officials, and also to people like Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who was also at the press conference Tuesday and said, “We should declare an invasion and, as Texas, turn people away.”
Arguably, Abbott already bought into this more expansive constitutional interpretation of state authority when he struck security agreements with the governors of the four Mexican states bordering Texas back in April. (Never mind that the agreements were mostly for show, given the corruption of Mexican officialdom in these states.) After all, Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution says that states are not allowed to “enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded.”
By entering into security agreements with “another State, or a foreign Power,” it would seem Abbott has tacitly acknowledged not only that his state has been “actually invaded,” but that he has the constitutional authority to act in its defense. If that’s the case, why not take the next step and avail himself of the considerable law enforcement (and military) resources at his disposal to secure the border and expel illegal immigrants?
Maybe Abbott, secure in the state capital of Austin, is just taking longer to reach this conclusion than the people of south Texas, who are bearing the brunt of the border crisis. Indeed, among the hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border illegally every month now are a not insignificant number of people who do not want to be arrested, and whose presence on U.S. territory could reasonably be considered hostile. Unlike the migrant families who turn themselves in to the first Border Patrol agent they see, these people often attempt to evade the authorities, which gives rise to things like high-speed chases through small towns and over private lands. Across Texas border communities, this has become a serious and worsening problem since President Biden took office.
Del Rio, Texas 3 pursuits at the same time 2 on the same road just a few miles apart. Texas DPS arrested both smugglers🇺🇸💪 pic.twitter.com/RJSpP7pKUP
Some of those chases end in damaged property; some end in fatal car crashes. Sometimes the attempt to evade detection ends not with a chase but a horrifying tragedy like the one in San Antonio last month, where 53 migrants were found dead in a tractor-trailer.
Corporate media outlets, to the extent they cover the border crisis at all, will likely only mention efforts to declare the crisis an invasion in order to mock it or smear the people arguing for it as racists and bigots. But it is not some crackpot idea. In February, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued a legal opinion affirming that the border crisis constitutes an invasion and that the governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, has the authority under the Constitution to secure its border with Mexico.
In his legal opinion, Brnovich argued that the meaning of the word “invade,” as used in Article I of the Constitution, “covers the activities of the transnational cartels and gangs at the border—they enter Arizona ‘in [a] hostile manner’; they ‘enter as an enemy, with a view to … plunder’; they ‘attack,’ ‘assail,’ and ‘assault’; and they ‘infringe,’ ‘encroach on,’ and ‘violate’ Arizona.”
Ducey, like Abbott, has thus far balked at the idea of using state law enforcement to police the border directly. But as the crisis drags on, each month breaking the previous month’s record for arrests, border-state governors might be forced to test the limits of their authority. The incentives to do so are only going to mount as the crisis worsens.
And anyway, if there’s a constitutional question to be settled here, why not step forward now, set down a marker, enforce the law, and see how it plays out? If states really have no power to repel an invasion, no ability to defend their people and police their borders in the face of federal inaction, then we might as well admit now that we no longer live in a constitutional republic, and that states, whatever they once were, have been reduced to nothing more than administrative units of a centralized regime in Washington. There’s a word for such a political arrangement: empire.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
County officials in Texas are set to declare an invasion at the southern border Monday afternoon, Kinney County Spokesman Matt Benacci told The Daily Caller News Foundation. The judges, mayors, attorneys and sheriffs in Uvalde, Kinney and Goliad counties are set to urge Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to join them, but the governor is not yet involved in the effort, according to a Texas county spokesman with knowledge of the situation who spoke anonymously with The Daily Caller News Foundation because they weren’t authorized to speak. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Migrants Evading Arrest Cause Ranchers Near The Border To Pay Significant Costs)
Abbott was considering making the declaration, according to an April report from The New York Times. The U.S. Constitution says that states have the right to protect themselves from an invasion.
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence,” Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution states.
In addition to Article IV, Section 4, another clause of the Constitution grants states the ability to declare war against an “invasion.”
The group worked with the Center for Renewing America, a conservative organization led by former Trump administration officials, to make the declaration.
“For the first time in U.S. history, several counties in Texas, outside of Congress, have declared an invasion–a Constitutional solution we have been advocating for over a year,” former Trump administration officials Russ Vought and Ken Cuccinelli, both affiliated with the Center for Renewing America, said in a joint statement Monday.
“While it is unfortunate the Biden Administration has aided and abetted the destruction at the border and put Americans last on the world stage, we’re proud to stand with the history-making county judges, sheriffs and attorneys who didn’t rely on the Federal government, or even the governor to protect their families, ranches, and communities. We ask Governor Abbott to follow the example set by the leaders in Goliad, Kinney, and Uvalde counties and stop with media gimmicks and treat the invasion of American sovereignty as such,” they added.
Cuccinelli and Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy will join the local officials at Monday’s meeting, according to a press release shared with TheDCNF.
“To the ‘it’s not an invasion crowd,’ heavily armed Mexican cartels are pushing human beings & fentanyl for profit into America in violation of our sovereignty while expanding their reach into Texas at the expense, increased danger, & harm to Texans. #EndTheInvasion” Roy wrote on Twitter.
To the “it’s not an invasion crowd,” heavily armed Mexican cartels are pushing human beings & fentanyl for profit into America in violation of our sovereignty while expanding their reach into Texas at the expense, increased danger, & harm to Texans. #EndTheInvasion
The looming announcement comes after 53 migrants died that were being smuggled from the Texas-Mexico border. Authorities discovered an 18-wheeler full of migrants that were suffering from heat-related injuries on June 27, San Antonio fire department chief Charles Hood previously said.
Neither Abbott’s office nor the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responded to TheDCNF’s requests for comment.
The Daily Caller’s Jorge Ventura joined Laura Ingraham to discuss the crisis at the southern border Tuesday night, noting agents are overwhelmed as the situation worsens.
“Here in the Yuma sector we have migrants coming from outside of the northern triangle countries,” Ventura explained. “We’ve met so far migrants from Belarus, Russia, even Afghanistan, India, Peru, Brazil, all coming here. And another kind of issue here as well is the role that the Mexican government plays. You know, most of these migrants, they cross to Guatemala and the first time they reach it Tapachula, Mexico, and they’re in Tapachula. They’re actually technically not legally allowed to travel throughout Mexico.”
Ventura recently reported that Mexican authorities do little to nothing to prevent migrants from attempting to cross the border.
Ventura previously captured exclusive footage for the Daily Caller appearing to show one agent processing dozens of migrants. Ventura told Ingraham one of the biggest hurdles for border patrol agents is that agents lack the manpower to both process migrants and stop the flow of illegal drug trafficking.
“While border patrol agents are busy dealing with family units and unaccompanied minors, we then have the single males running drugs” into the states.
Agents at the southern border encountered a record-breaking number of illegal migrants at the southern border in May, according to CBP. Agents encountered 239, 416 migrants with roughly one quarter of those having been previously encountered. Authorities say 69% of those migrants were adults.
Mexican cartels are luring young gamers with large sums of cash to scout the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Telemundo. There have been at least 30 cases of such recruitment attempts on video games, Telemundo reported, citing the Mexican cyber police. The cartels often message players who are online at times their parents are likely not around to start coaxing them, using terms like ‘n4arc0’, ‘c4rt3l’ or ‘zic4ri0s’ to bypass potential blocks on the games.
“We have identified a situation that is worrying us that girls, boys and adolescents are not denouncing these behaviors that are manifesting for fear of being scolded by their parents, of being exposed within society and being singled out,” Director of the Cyber Police in Oaxaca Mauricio Valdez told Telemundo.
Ernesto, a 13-year-old gamer, was recruited to keep watch of the border, according to Telemundo. He and his friends were recruited by a man who went by the name Moreno, who also played the video game with them and later talked with them on WhatsApp. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: DEA Officials Directed To Stop Saying ‘Mexican Cartel’) They later discovered Moreno was a member of the Northeast cartel, who offered the group of kids between the ages of 11 and 14 $800 a month to move from Oaxaca to Monterrey to work as cartel scouts, according to Telemundo. Their jobs would be to notify the cartel bosses to the presence of law enforcement at the border. If they succeeded in that task, the group could go on to sell drugs, Moreno promised, according to Telemundo.
“He told us that they were going to put us in a tree or a mountain to see how many police or military officers were going there. We were going to count how many went inside. They told me that after I was a scout they would promote me, and, when I was ready, they would teach me how to shoot,” Ernesto said.
After Ernesto disappeared to Monterrey, his mother notified authorities and began searching for him, Telemundo reported. He was later rescued by police, who arrested one woman involved in the operation.
Members of the Navy keep watch at La Mora ranch, in Bavispe, Sonora State, Mexico, as Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador holds a meeting with relatives of the Mormon massacre victims, on January 12, 2020. – The November 4 ambush in which nine US women and children were killed, happened on an isolated dirt road in a region known for turf wars between drug cartels fighting over lucrative trafficking routes to the United States. (Photo by Alfredo ESTRELLA / AFP) (Photo by ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP via Getty Images)
The Northeast cartel, also known as Cartel Del Noreste, was formed from the los Zetas cartel and is known for the trafficking of guns and drugs, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Facebook, the parent company for WhatsApp, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) didn’t respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A dozen former immigration and law enforcement officials, many of whom served in the Trump administration, along with several conservative advocacy groups wrote a letter to Congress Wednesday laying out their game plan to end the border crisis.
The newly-formed coalition, which includes conservative organizations like The Heritage Foundation and groups like the national Border Patrol union, wrote a letter Wednesday addressed to lawmakers urging that no “amnesty of any type” be included in immigration legislation come the next Congress. The plan includes making migrants ineligible for asylum if they’ve already passed through a “safe third country” on their way to the U.S., completing construction of the southern border wall, and giving states the authority to enforce immigration laws, according to the letter. (RELATED: Trump Responds In Just Two Words To Claim He Wanted To Shoot Missiles At Mexican Cartels)
“Congress should be emboldened with the mandate to immediately legislate unflinchingly, ensuring that neither this nor any future administration is again able to weaponize loopholes in the immigration system—and defiantly refuse to follow plain law—to purposefully drive mass illegal immigration to the United States,” the letter stated.
“When the 118th Congress opens with new majorities in both chambers, it will be in large part because Americans have rejected the Biden Administration’s purposeful dismantling of our nation’s borders and our immigration enforcement infrastructure,” the letter stated.
New Border Security Coalition Provides Congress With Roadmap to End Biden Border Crisis, Reduce Illegal Immigration https://t.co/XwGiUGyjWZ
Assuming Republicans take the majority in Congress, the plan would provide a roadmap for their policy agenda, former acting Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner Mark Morgan said in a statement.
“For far too long, Republicans have talked about ‘comprehensive immigration reform,’ which translates to amnesty, or simply advocated throwing more money at the border to solve the latest crisis. Those days are over. Those policy prescriptions are a recipe for failure. If you want to truly secure the border through reducing illegal immigration, implement policies that work. We look forward to working with members to make that happen,” Morgan said.
“The opportunity to legislate has been missed in several previous Congresses but the stakes are too high for it to be missed again,” the letter read.
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 “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Joe Biden has been in the Oval Office (or that weird set in the Eisenhower building’s South Court auditorium with the greenscreen windows) for a year now, and he’s already managed to make his short presidency known for a long line-up of scandals, botches, and slip-ups.
It’s too hard to narrow the list down to one top failure, although his disgracefully handled Afghanistan withdrawal may be the most sobering and inflation may be the one that played the biggest role in Biden’s tanking approval ratings. Even though Biden’s mess-ups tally up to far more than 12, it’s not hard to remember a Biden-enabled disaster for every month of the septuagenarian’s first year at the stern … or in the basement.
January: Biden’s Radical First Week
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed a list of radically left-wing executive orders, including an order requiring that schools must ignore the biological differences between male and female students from the athletic field to the bathroom if they wish to continue receiving federal funding. In Biden’s first week, Press Secretary Jen Psaki also signaled the administration’s plans to reinstate federal funding for abortions around the world with the reversal of the Mexico City policy, and the new president canceled the Keystone XL pipeline.
As Tristan Justice reported at the time, “Biden’s first 48 hours in office have launched the new administration with 17 executive orders, more than were issued in the first month of their presidencies by Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton combined.”
February: Biden’s CDC Worked to Keep Schools Closed
In February, Biden’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced strict reopening guidelines that would keep many schools around the country shut down. “Only K-12 schools in cities and areas with low or moderate virus transmission can fully reopen for in-person learning, as long as physical distancing and mask-wearing is enforced,” Jordan Boyd reported on Feb. 12. “Any transmission rate beyond what is designated as moderate requires hybrid learning or ‘reduced attendance,’ limiting which children are allowed in the classroom at the same time.”
On the same day, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that far-left teachers unions that have worked to keep students out of school buildings over the course of the Covid pandemic had influence when the CDC created its school reopening guidelines.
March: Working With Corporations to Create Vax Passports
As The Washington Post first reported, the Biden White House spent the month of March plotting with corporations to develop a “vaccine passport” system to force Americans to show their Covid papers in order to participate fully in society. “The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass,” the Post noted.
April: Biden Debuts Radical Social Spending Plan
At the end of April, Biden announced his “American Families Plan,” a list of far-left spending priorities, many of which would become hallmarks of his struggling Build Back Bankrupt agenda. The goals of the proposed $1.8 trillion spending spree included extending government schooling fully into preschool and two years of taxpayer-provided community college.
May: More Unsavory Hunter Exploits Emerge
Scandal follows President Biden’s troubled son Hunter around, as the country learned when the New York Post published damning information recovered from a laptop the younger Biden allegedly left at a repair store in late 2020. But further revelations about Hunter’s exploits emerged in May of last year, adding to the pile of unsavory behavior that may implicate the president himself.
New emails from Hunter Biden’s suspected laptop published on May 26 by the Post show that Joe Biden “met with Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani business associates of his son’s at a dinner in Washington, DC, while he was vice president” in April 2015.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together,” wrote executive Vadym Pozharskyi of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where Hunter sat on the board.
Other emails published by The Daily Mail in May revealed that Hunter Biden bragged he “smoked crack with [former D.C. Mayor] Marion Barry” when he was a student at Georgetown University.
June: Record-Setting Crisis at the Southern Border
Biden’s crisis at the Southern border has been setting records all year, but it was in June that apprehensions surged past 1 million for fiscal year 2021 and border crossings were at the highest levels since 2006. In May alone, “170,000 people were captured, marking a 20-year high,” Gabe Kaminsky reported at the time. June also saw the border state of Texas declare an emergency over Biden’s border crisis, which the president helped cause by reversing Trump-era stances like the “Remain in Mexico” policy.
As the crisis raged, Biden’s border czar Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t be bothered to visit the actual U.S.-Mexico line, snapping “I haven’t been to Europe” when reporters pressed her on the topic. She finally caved and scheduled a trip, but only after former President Donald Trump announced his plans to visit.
July: Bragging about Working with Big Tech to Silence Dissent
In July, the Biden administration bragged about colluding with Big Tech to shut down perspectives with which the regime disagreed. In a press briefing on July 15, Psaki touted the administration’s policy of “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” A few days later, Psaki admitted there was nothing “off the table” in the effort to smear dissent as “misinformation” and have it removed from social media.
August: Bungled Afghanistan Withdrawal
August saw the largest-scale disaster on Biden’s watch so far, when the administration’s disorganized withdrawal from Afghanistan left 13 American service members dead and thousands of American citizens and allies stranded under Taliban control.
From the administration’s decision to vacate Bagram Air Base before evacuating Americans from the country, to leaving weapons and equipment to fall into the hands of the Taliban, to Biden taking an out-of-touch, hollow victory lap after the service members’ deaths and while Americans remained stranded, to the administration’s ongoing decision to ignore the allies still behind enemy lines, every action taken by the Biden team was a disaster. In the same month, the administration carried out a drone strike targeted at ISIS operatives that actually killed at least 10 civilians, seven of whom were children.
Americans won’t soon forget the harrowing images of desperate people trampling each other in the chaotic race to the Kabul airport, of people clinging to aircraft landing gear and falling helpless from the sky, or of a lone helicopter leaving the roof of the American embassy. There is blood on Biden’s hands, and our allies won’t soon forget it either.
September: Biden Lies to Undermine His Own Border Patrol Agents
After a photo of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback was misconstrued by Democrats and their media allies to falsely accuse agents of “whipping” criminals, Biden promised to make his own CBP employees “pay” and the White House banned agents in Del Rio, Texas from using horses going forward.
“It was horrible to see. To see people treated like they did. Horses running them over people being strapped. It’s outrageous,” Biden claimed, even though the photographer who took the viral photo insisted he’d “never seen them whip anyone.”
October: Biden’s Ed Secretary, DOJ Collude with NSBA to Smear Parents as Domestic Terrorists
On Sept. 29, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the White House asking Biden to use the FBI and other federal law enforcement to target parents using terrorism laws. A few days later on Oct. 4, in response to the letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and federal attorneys to investigate and address “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
As it turns out, however, Biden’s own Education Secretary Miguel Cardona appears to have secretly requested the letter from NSBA, presumably to use as a pretense for the administration’s push to target parents unhappy with public schools’ closures, mask mandates, and extremist LGBT and critical race theory curricula.
November: That Tyrannical, Unconstitutional OSHA Vax Mandate
After issuing a September press release threatening a vaccine mandate for private businesses with 100 or more employees, Biden’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) released an emergency temporary standard on Nov. 4 that would require businesses to comply by Jan. 4 or incur fines of up to $14,000 per violation.
The Supreme Court struck this down in January, of course, and the Biden administration knew it was flagrantly unconstitutional all along — but exploiting the delays of the judicial system allowed the administration to bully many corporations into compliance anyway. Never mind the fact that the Biden administration had promised during the campaign that it wouldn’t mandate the Covid vaccine.
December: Supply Chain and Inflation Nightmare
December saw the climax (so far) of Biden’s joint inflation and supply chain crisis, dually caused by the administration’s radical spending and Democrats’ Covid lockdowns. As Americans faced shortages and shipping delays during their Christmas shopping, the Department of Labor released its November figures revealing 6.8 percent year-to-year inflation, or “the largest 12-month increase since the period ending June 1982.”
December’s inflation numbers were even higher, clocking in at 7 percent.
Bonus: January 2022: Compared Filibuster Defenders to George Wallace, Jefferson Davis
In a Jan. 11 speech urging the U.S. Senate to ditch filibuster rules in order to pass his radical and unconstitutional federalization of election laws, President Biden compared his agenda’s critics — which include Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Confederate leader Jefferson Davis.
“Do you want to be the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” Biden said. Comparing his critics to notorious segregationists isn’t a good way to start year two of the Biden era.
Who knows what new scandals and embarrassments await the Biden administration in 2022? For the sake of the country, we can hope for fewer than in 2021, but it’s clear the administration has a failed track record only one year in.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
AUSTIN, Texas – During a recent trip to a Reynosa, Mexico migrant camp, I took photos of a United Nations-supported International Organization for Migration (IOM) operation to hand out cash debit cards to intending and repeat border crossers. One of two workers at a plastic folding table inside the Reynosa camp, which was filled to capacity with at least 1,200 mostly U.S.-expelled Central Americans, said they were distributing the cards for IOM to help migrants waiting until they cross the Rio Grande at greater leisure to claim asylum, for which most will be declared ineligible years later. Many parents, for instance, got about $400 every 15 days, I was told, or $800 a month if they were still there to collect it, although the support level varied.
My photos of this posted to Twitter and related dispatch for the Center for Immigration Studies drew outrage among some Republican lawmakers. They saw the images as evidence that the U.S. taxpayer-funded IOM was providing material support to an ongoing mass migration harmful to America’s national interest.
A couple of weeks later, Texas Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, and 11 other House Republican co-sponsors introduced the “No Tax Dollars for the United Nations Immigration Invasion Act” bill. It would prohibit the $3.8 billion in contributions currently proposed in the White House 2022 budget to the IOM and other UN-supported organizations. A Daily Caller story that broke news of the bill’s introduction quoted Gooden citing my Reynosa photos.
When I took the photos, I wasn’t exactly sure of exactly what I was seeing in Reynosa. But here’s what I have learned since: The money card is confirmed beyond doubt, but also “hard cash in envelopes” and “movement assistance”; and an online IOM “Emergency Manual” describes what I saw as part of a program it terms “Cash-Based Interventions,” or CBIs.
A plastic IOM cash card given to an aspiring border-crossing migrant in Reynosa, Mexico on November 20. Photo by Todd Bensman.
Paying People Who Illegally Enter the United States
So, for starters, country-specific IOM “Cash Working Groups” are indeed coordinating the handouts of the cash-holding plastic cards I saw (referred to as prepaid debit cards, e-wallets and e-cards) to intending U.S. border crossers in Reynosa, Mexico. But it turns out that is just an iceberg tip. The IOM is handing out cash and other material support to intending illegal border crossers in as many as 100 other shelters it helped build, expand, or supports from Central America north. Some form of this has been around for years, but starting with a mass-migration event and Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy in 2019, the IOM supercharged the program and “institutionalized” it. This doubled the countries where it is used in 2020 and increased by 77 percent the number of recipients to 1.6 million worldwide, according to an annual 2020 IOM report. That would include Mexico.
The IOM Emergency Manual document says this cash assistance also includes less-seeable bank transfers, mobile transfers, and e-vouchers that go to intending illegal border crossers en route or at least temporarily blocked like many of those I saw and interviewed in Reynosa. In addition to those and the pre-paid plastic cards, the IOM says in its Emergency Manual that it also sometimes hands out “cash in envelopes (hard cash).” No details are offered on that. Many payments are given as “unconditional; unrestricted cash transfers” for “multi-purpose use,” the manual says. Still other handouts subsidize the lodging, rent, and utilities of intending border crossers for “safe tenure, to reduce the risk of forced eviction.”
Start Tapping U.S. Taxpayers Before You Get There
Then there is “movement assistance” in the form of conditional or unrestricted cash transfers. The IOM describes this money as providing transportation access after, say a camp is closed, but also simply “to sites and other situations related to onward movement of population.”
To border hawks, all of this looks, feels, and acts like an agency providing the means for illegal border crossings. The IOM’s own stated purpose for cash-based interventions would only reinforce the perception: the money is intended to “restore feelings of choice and empowerment for beneficiaries.”
Migrant advocates defend cash support to aspiring illegal border crossers as a means to prevent death and suffering among populations they believe have no choice but to migrate and would whether or not any UN agency helps out. But the legitimate flip side of that claim is that cash in envelopes or in e-wallets—filled in part by U.S. taxpayer money—can also be said to enable, sustain, or even entice many driven not by urgent dangers but by a desire for better jobs amid reports that Americans would let them in.
Spending U.S. Money to Encourage ‘Invasion’
An aggravating irony among the fast-expanding coterie of Republican congressional critics of the UN largesse is that U.S. taxpayer money is being spent in contravention of American immigration law and national interest in controlling the border against economic migration.
“All of this sounds like they’re using U.S. tax dollars to encourage this invasion into the nation, and it seems strange to me that we would support an organization that encourages and funds this,” Gooden told me. “It’s totally crazy. I am baffled that there’s not more outrage, but I think the lack of outrage is due to the lack of knowledge.”
While it may be true that IOM money relieves the suffering of intending border crossers, it is just as arguably true that it creates financial breathing room they need to prepare for more opportune crossing moments. The money enables that highly desired payoff, rather than a forced trip home for lack of funds after, say, an expensive smuggling journey that ended with U.S. expulsion. Those ones arrive in villages with a deterring don’t-try-this message to friends and neighbors.
Regarding the importance of such messaging in the development of mass migration crises, I’ve never met one who didn’t carry a cell phone connected to Internet social media. In interviews with perhaps hundreds of migrants in Mexico and beyond, I learned that this live-time social media grapevine constantly sings with news from the trail upstream that directly informs decisions downstream as to whether to launch north or remain in place. So when word of these IOM cash, lodging, and transportation benefits spreads via social media to hometowns, friends and relatives undoubtedly feel more emboldened to invest smuggling money for their own journeys to UN waystations. Because of all this, monthly IOM cash for food, lodging, and “movement” assistance amounts to material support for illegal immigration. It influences decisions to cross.
Increasing U.S. Cash Support for Illegal Immigration
It’s unclear just how much the United States gives IOM to sustain intending border crossers until they succeed, or how many got some during 2021. But the cash giveaways have been on a steep skyward trajectory since 2019 and only show signs of continuing upward.
The public reporting as to how much the United States, through the State Department, gives IOM and how many got it is opaque at best. President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget calls for $10 billion in humanitarian assistance “to support vulnerable people abroad.” But there’s no detailed breakout.
A Fiscal Year 2019 summary (starting page 37) by the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), which provides U.S. funding to the IOM and many other United Nations agencies, offers one clue of the pre-expansion levels. IOM spent more than $60 million in 2019 for activities in the northern part of South America, Central America, and Mexico during the so-called “caravan migrant crisis” earlier that year, the fiscal year report said.
State Department-funneled money helped IOM provide 29,000 people in the Western Hemisphere with cash and voucher assistance and supported 75 shelter waystations, the State Department report states on page 42, much like the one I visited in Reynosa. Along the northern border of Mexico in July 2019, at the height of a “caravan” crisis, the IOM provided 600 beds and essential items to the Mexican government and helped it expand existing shelters and build new ones to accommodate the “asylum seekers.”
This came as a response to the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” turn-back policy. That deported economic migrants trying to abuse the asylum system, while others chose to wait for Democrats to take the White House in November 2020—a sound bet, it turned out.
The IOM decided to increase the size and scope of the program after 2019, even after President Biden took office and ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. The extent is unclear, but the IOM institutionalized cash handout programs in Panama, El Salvador, and Mexico in 2020. Ambiguously, the IOM’s annual 2020 report on the program showed only that it gave cash to somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people in Mexico that year.
Whatever the recipient numbers since 2019, the IOM clearly intends an upward trajectory for the cash giveaways. The IOM’s Emergency Manual stated several times it would do so in alignment with a fairly recent pact among an international consortium of organizations known as The Grand Bargain, of which the IOM is a signatory. The Grand Bargain pact dates to 2016.
An Inter-Agency Standing Committee Grand Bargain website reports that number 3 on the objectives list is “Increase the use and coordination of cash-based programming.” A November 26, 2021 Grand Bargain caucus on cash coordination had all principals agree to increase the use of cash “beyond current low levels” through the use of even more means of delivery.
The section’s first line starts out using familiar language seen in the IOM’s Emergency Manual: “Using cash helps deliver greater choice and empowerment to affected people…”
Here’s the problem: with the greater choice and empowerment that IOM money can buy, aspiring migrants are able to remain within striking distance of the southern border to choose the time of their inevitable illegal border crossings. No one should wonder why border hawks hate this system and open borders advocates love it.
Todd Bensman is a Texas-based senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies and a writing fellow for the Middle East Forum. For nearly a decade, Bensman led counterterrorism-related intelligence efforts for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. Follow him on Twitter @BensmanTodd. Bensman also worked for The Dallas Morning News, CBS, and Hearst Newspapers. He reported extensively on national security and border issues after 9/11 and worked from more than 25 countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
Deportations of illegal immigrants, including those convicted of serious crimes such as burglary and homicide, dropped to the lowest levels in decades during President Joe Biden’s first six months in office, according to new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In total, deportations of illegal immigrants from Jan. 21, 2021, through July 9, 2021, dropped by 90 percent compared with the same time period in 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic, which ground attempted migration into the United States to a near halt.
The curb in deportations extended to all types of illegal immigrants living in the United States, including those with criminal convictions. Deportations of illegal immigrants with convictions for crimes such as aggravated assault, kidnapping, sexual assault, and homicide fell by double-digit percentages in the first six months of 2021 when compared with the previous two years. The number of illegal immigrants with serious criminal convictions deported declined by more than 50 percent from 2020 and 65 percent from 2019.
The data, obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request from the Center for Immigration Studies, provide a picture of the dramatic change in immigration policy and priorities from the White House. The drop in deportations is due to a mix of factors, according to the report’s author. Biden promised to pause removals for his first 100 days in office, and new bureaucratic procedures from political appointees have made it nearly impossible for ICE agents to carry out their mission. Jessica Vaughan, who wrote the report and is the director of policy studies at the center, said the Biden administration has paralyzed immigration enforcement at a time when border crossings have reached unprecedented levels.
“This collapse in deportations is undeniably due to the policies President Biden put in place upon taking office, including a deportation moratorium (later blocked in federal court) and by severely restricting the types of cases ICE officers can pursue,” Vaughan told the Washington Free Beacon. “Officers are allowed to take action against only the most egregious illegal alien lawbreakers, and even then they have to complete voluminous paperwork for what would normally be routine deportation cases.”
Earlier this year, ICE acting director Tae Johnson said the agency would focus on deporting illegal immigrants who present “threats to national security, border security, and our public safety.” The announcement came as part of a new federal directive to reevaluate how ICE uses its resources.
Although illegal immigrants with serious criminal convictions did make up a larger number of total deportations—32 percent in the first half of 2021 versus 14 percent in 2020 and 9 percent in 2019—the total number of deportations dropped significantly. During the first six months of 2021, ICE removed just 6,000 illegal immigrants with serious criminal backgrounds, about a third as many as the Trump administration removed during the same time period in 2019.
The deportation numbers provided to the Center for Immigration Studies do not make a distinction between interior and border removals, meaning some of the decline in ICE’s activity could be attributed to the Biden administration’s use of Title 42, a public health measure that has allowed immigration authorities during the coronavirus pandemic to turn away migrants as soon as they enter the country. The center maintains that the severe drop in deportations from ICE field offices—in San Antonio, for example, deportations dropped from 44,523 in 2019 to 2,386 in 2021—are evidence of the Biden administration weakening immigration enforcement. Some ICE field offices were virtually inactive during the first six months of Biden’s term, with the Baltimore field office removing just 32 illegal immigrants during that time.
“In addition to requiring what is essentially pointless busywork to seek an extra layer of approval for each arrest, agency leadership has also reduced interior enforcement by downsizing the number of working officers,” the CIS report reads. “This has been accomplished in many ways, including sending officers to work at the border and even by paying officers not to work.”
The 2021 fiscal year saw 1.7 million migrant arrests on the southern border, more than any other year on record. In fiscal years 2013 through 2019, border arrests averaged around 540,000 annually.
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Illegal Haitian migrants are crossing the southern border of the U.S. via a new route in Yuma, Arizona, as Border Patrol braces for the arrival of up to 60,000 Haitian migrants. “Haitian migrants find new route to cross illegally into United States in Yuma, Arizona, location is known as ‘The Gap,’” the Daily Caller’s Jorge Ventura tweeted Thursday.
“As the state of Texas prepares for 60,000 Haitian migrants to arrive later this month, Haitian migrants find new route in the Yuma sector.”
Ventura shared a video of “three Haitian adults with three young children making their way to the United States.”
“We’re getting early reports of Haitian migrants starting to make their way into Yuma, Arizona, after the 15,000 Haitian caravan arrived in [Del Rio, Texas] in late September,” Ventura said.
Haitian migrants find new route to cross illegally into United States in Yuma, Arizona , location is known as 'The Gap". As the state of Texas prepares for 60,000 Haitian migrants to arrive later this month , Haitian migrants find new route in the Yuma sector pic.twitter.com/8sFgZEPs83
A second video showed a human smuggler receiving a cash payment from illegal Cuban migrants who had arrived at “The Gap.”
“Before crossing into the United States illegally, human smuggler gives his final instructions to these Cuban migrants and receives his cash payment. Cuban migrants cross into Yuma, Arizona,” Ventura tweeted.
Before crossing into the United States illegally, human smuggler gives his final instructions to these Cuban migrants and receives his cash payment. Cuban migrants cross into Yuma, Arizona. This route is known as 'The Gap', Haitian migrants are also crossing through this route pic.twitter.com/SqIGt4NQFa
“These are three Cuban migrants who are also taking the same route here in Yuma as the Haitians and Central Americans,” Ventura said.
“This area of Yuma has been hit with a huge migrant surge. They’re seeing a 2,000 percent increase compared to the same time last year,” he added.
Last month, Ventura documented illegal migrants crossing into the U.S. in Roma, Texas, including over 100 on rafts.
“Migrants coming off the raft were wearing bracelets that cartels/smuggling groups put on them to track and determine payment,” he tweeted.
Many of those crossing the border illegally were children.
Border Crisis Continues : Last night we witnessed human smugglers bring over 100 Central American migrants with small rafts from the Mexican side. You can see small children on the rafts being smuggled into the United States throughout the night. @DailyCallerpic.twitter.com/Ahhxf9B9m6
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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met with Border Patrol agents in Texas, reportedly stating “we’re going to lose” the border crisis in an audio recording leaked on Friday.
“A couple of days ago I was down in Mexico, and I said look, you know, if, if our borders are the first line of defense, we’re going to lose and this is unsustainable,” Mayorkas said, according to audio reportedly obtained by Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin.
Biden DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the border crisis in leaked audio:
“We can’t continue like this, our people in the field can’t continue and our system isn’t built for it,” he added.
“In July there were over 212,000 illegal immigrants who came into the country (and that’s not counting the ‘got-aways’ / only God knows how many we missed),” South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted.
“The men and women of the Border Patrol are heroes who are being asked to do the impossible.”
The leaked audio comes as it was reported authorities made 212,672 apprehensions at the southern border in July. The number marks a 13 percent increase over June and a 21-year high for a single-month total, according to U.S. News & World Report.
“The U.S. also saw a 24 percent uptick in the number of unaccompanied children at the southwest border as well as a nearly 50 percent jump in the number of families,”The Hill reported on Thursday.
The surge of illegal immigrants has led Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs to pursue the impeachment of Mayorkas. Biggs filed the articles of impeachment on Tuesday, tweeting, “I just filed articles of impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas.’
“His impeachment is well overdue and critical for the security of our nation.”
Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton agreed with Biggs, tweeting on Thursday, “Time for Secretary Mayorkas to go.”
Even so, the impeachment is unlikely to move forward in the Democrat-controlled House.
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A new video shows up to 1,000 illegal immigrants were held for processing outdoors under a bridge near the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday as the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector in Texas continues to experience a surge of people crossing the border.
Fox News reporter Bill Melugin tweeted, “This is the largest group of migrants we’ve ever seen being held by Border Patrol under Anzalduas Bridge in Mission, TX. Looks like it could be up to 1,000 people. We can only get a look at the area with our drone. There’s a popular Rio Grande crossing area nearby.”
NEW: This is the largest group of migrants we’ve ever seen being held by Border Patrol under Anzalduas Bridge in Mission, TX. Looks like it could be up to 1,000 people. We can only get a look at the area with our drone. There’s a popular Rio Grande crossing area nearby. @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/AsAygsO966
Townhall.com reporter Julio Rosas also shared photos of the scene on Twitter, saying, “I’ve seen Border Patrol’s processing site underneath the Anzalduas International Bridge in Mission, TX off and on since March.
“I can say this is the most illegal immigrants I’ve seen at the site at one time. It’s close to 100 degrees out right now.”
Rosas also shared a video from Sunday night of another group, saying, “Another night in La Joya, TX another large group of illegal immigrants turning themselves over to Border Patrol. There are well over 150 people here. There is also a lot of sneezing and coughing among the group.”
Another night in La Joya, TX another large group of illegal immigrants turning themselves over to Border Patrol. There are well over 150 people here. There is also a lot of sneezing and coughing among the group. pic.twitter.com/cFkwdD8qnT
“Can’t stress enough that I’ve never seen such a large group at one time who have as many individuals who appear/sound to be sick,” he said.
The report comes as the delta variant of the coronavirus has led to a spike in new cases in recent weeks while President Joe Biden’s administration welcomes illegal immigrants into the country. Last week, authorities said a charity in the border town of La Joya had rented an entire hotel to house illegal immigrants who have tested positive for COVID-19, giving no notification to the local community.
“Police in La Joya, TX, a Border town, announce a charity has rented an entire hotel here for COVID-positive migrants,” Fox News State Department Correspondent Rich Edson tweeted Wednesday night. “They say they only found out when a family, showing symptoms and staying there, ate at a restaurant next door. A customer flagged down a police officer.”
A later post added, “They’re advising La Joya to mask up and distance.”
“The La Joya Police Department said a patrol officer was waved down Monday by someone concerned about a group that appeared to be sick at a Whataburger fast food restaurant,”Fox News reported late Wednesday night.
“The officer found a family inside who were coughing and sneezing and not adhering to health guidelines, including the wearing of masks, authorities said during a news conference,” the report said.
La Joya Police Sgt. Manuel Casas said his department and the city had not been notified of the situation.
“We did not know this,” he said. “No one told the city of La Joya. No one told the police department that these people were here, and no one told us that these people were possibly ill.”
The reported individuals were staying at Texas Inn & Suites after being released by Border Patrol.
(Photo by DARIO LOPEZ-MILLS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
A major surge in coronavirus infections is being recorded at crowded U.S. immigration detention centers, according to The New York Times.
As apprehensions at the border spiked in recent months, the number of migrants being held in detention centers has almost doubled, with more than 26,000 migrants being detained in facilities last week, compared to about 14,000 in April, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). As a result, more than 7,500 new cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the centers between April and last week, and account for more than 40% of all reported cases in ICE facilities since the beginning of the pandemic, according to The New York Times.
Reporting from an undisclosed location near the border in McAllen, TX we encountered around 190 migrants. I saw lots of small children and a few babies with this group who came from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Full story and interviews posted soon.@dailycallerpic.twitter.com/VJEOdV0Yym
Public health officials have warned of the threats that increasingly crowded facilities pose during the pandemic, noting how few of the detained migrants received the vaccines, according to CNN. Only around 20% of the detainees coming into the migration centers have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, The New York Times reported.
Dr. Sharon Dolovich, director of the Covid Behind Bars Data Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, expressed her concerns about the low rates of vaccination among migrant detainees, in a statement to The New York Times.
“You have people coming in and out of the facility, into communities where incomplete vaccination allows these variants to flourish, and then you bring them inside the facilities, and that variant will spread,” she said. “What you’re describing is the combination of insufficient vaccination plus the evolution of the virus, and that is really scary.”
ICE has been the subject of criticism over the last year due to its handling of the coronavirus in its detention facilities.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit in November 2020 against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE in an effort to force federal agencies to release information about the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic in immigration detention centers.
“For the better part of this year, public health experts have been sounding the alarm that immigrant detention centers would be hotspots for the spread of COVID-19. Fiscal Year 2020, which ended September 30, was the deadliest year for ICE detention in 15 years,” the ACLU claimed in a statement at the time. “This year has also seen numerous reports about the lack of even basic COVID precautions taken by ICE, as well as evidence that ICE has attempted to silence detainees who tried to speak out for better care.”
Former President Donald Trump has also been a harsh critic of the Biden administration’s handling of the border crisis. Last week, the former president accepted Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s invitation to visit the southern border. “We have a sick country in many ways,” Trump said at an event with Texas officials and law enforcement, according to The Hill. “It’s sick in elections, and it’s sick in the border. And if you don’t have good elections, and if you don’t have a strong border, you don’t have a country.”
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Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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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
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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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
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
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
Legal Insurrection
Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, originally at Google Blogger. We hit our one-millionth visit about 11.5 months later, our second million a few months after that, and since then readership and linkage from major websites have grown drama
NEWSMAX
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Spiritual
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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![Jorge Ventura joins The Ingraham Angle to discuss the border crisis [Screenshot Fox News]](https://images.dailycaller.com/image/width=960,height=411,fit=cover,f=auto/https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Screen-Shot-2022-06-22-at-8.13.30-AM-e1655900211866.png "Jorge Ventura joins The Ingraham Angle to discuss the border crisis [Screenshot Fox News]")
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