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Dispatch From Eagle Pass: Biden Officials Won’t Enforce Laws But ‘Don’t Want Anyone Else To’ Either


BY: M.D. KITTLE | FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/13/dispatch-from-eagle-pass-biden-officials-wont-enforce-laws-but-dont-want-anyone-else-to-either/

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In his appearance Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” embattled U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did what any failed political leader possessing little integrity and less self-awareness would do: He blamed others for his mistakes. Asked whether he bears any responsibility for the nightmare the Biden administration has wrought at the U.S. southern border and beyond, Mayorkas effectively said, don’t look at us. 

“It certainly is a crisis and we don’t bear responsibility for a broken system, and we’re dealing a tremendous amount within that broken system,” he told moderator Kristen Welker. 

Maybe the secretary should talk to the people living in and around the border towns, local law enforcement, and his own U.S. Border Patrol agents. 

Ira Mehlman and the folks from FAIR — the Federation for American Immigration Reform — did just that earlier this month. 

“Ask the people at the border in Texas. They think the blame belongs squarely with [the Biden administration],” the FAIR media director told me Monday morning on “Need to Know With Jeff Angelo” on NewsRadio 1040 in Des Moines. 

Earlier this month, Mehlman and his traveling companions saw the illegal immigration crisis firsthand at Eagle Pass, a south Texas city of about 28,000 people bordering Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the Rio Grande. As the Dallas Morning News explained, “Eagle Pass, with two small international bridges, features relatively gentle Rio Grande currents that invite migrant crossings. It became a focal point of Texas action in December when the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants over multiple weeks overwhelmed Border Patrol agents and city resources.”

The border town has become a hive of humanity, as its population swells from a wave of illegal aliens pouring over the border on promises of easy entry from President Joe Biden and his nearly impeached Homeland Security chief. U.S. Customs and Border Protection still has yet to post numbers for January apprehensions at the Southwest border, but December saw a new all-time monthly record with more than 300,000 migrant apprehensions. Eagle Pass and its Del Rio sector alone have recorded a whopping 152,252 encounters in the first three months of the federal fiscal year, beginning in October, according to the agency.  

Eagle Pass is now ground zero in a standoff between the state of Texas and the Biden administration, just as it is Exhibit A in the administration’s chaotic immigration policy. Gov. Greg Abbott, backed by several states, ordered state National Guard troops to stand guard at Eagle Pass’s gates and erect razor wire to check the invasion. A divided 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court order gave the administration the go-ahead to cut the wire, but Abbott is holding firm, arguing his state is under attack and the president is doing nothing to stop it. Abbott stands on his constitutional obligation to defend and protect his state, and the United States at large, from invasion.  

“The message from the Biden administration is: Not only don’t we want to enforce immigration laws, we don’t want anyone else to do it,” Mehlman said. 

The immigration reform activist says, from what he saw on his latest trip to Eagle Pass, Abbott’s strategy is working. And, from what’s he’s heard from law enforcement officials, there have been few attempts from federal authorities to remove the deterrents Texas has put in place. Abbott has said his Operation Lone Star has reduced illegal immigration numbers, a claim backed by a new Washington Examiner analysis. 

“The numbers show how the percentage of arrests in Texas versus other border states has shifted. In 2021, 69% of illegal immigrant arrests across the southern border occurred in Texas,” the publication reported on Monday.

“As Abbott stepped up security at the start of the Biden administration in 2021, arrests of illegal crossers began to fall and dropped to just 34% last month.”

“This is a manageable problem, as Gov. Abbott has now demonstrated. If you deter people from coming across you will see the results almost immediately,” Mehlman said. 

Mehlman does acknowledge, however, that the migrants are simply rerouting to Arizona and California, border states led by leftist governors committed to Biden’s open border policies. 

Shifting blame, Mayorkas insists Congress is the “only one who can fix” the five-alarm border fire that he and Biden have dumped gasoline on. The secretary conveniently omits the many Trump-era policies the president has reversed and the orders he could sign to turn the tide of the illegal immigration flood. My colleague Tristan Justice last week detailed the dozens of times Biden has gutted border security since he took the oath of office. 

The U.S. Senate’s bad joke of a border deal that died an ignominious death last week would have essentially codified the Biden administration’s awful policy to date. Mehlman and other critics say it would have exacerbated the crisis. He said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his top negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., “sold out” the House’s “good” version of the bill, creating a “lose-lose situation” for lawmakers serious about border security. 

Meanwhile, last week’s failed effort by House Republicans to impeach Mayorkas is regrouping. Speaker Mike Johnson appears to believe his fellow Republicans will have the numbers —narrowly — this time around as Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., is back to political business after undergoing cancer treatment during last week’s vote. 

Mehlman said Mayorkas deserves to be impeached. 

“He has undermined the enforcement of our immigration laws, he has violated his oath of office and he’s been derelict in his duty as secretary of Homeland Security,” the Federation for American Immigration Reform official said. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

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The Total Fiscal Cost Of Illegal Immigration Is A Staggering $135 Billion, Report Says


Reported by Photo of Will Racke Will Racke | Immigration and Foreign Policy Reporter | 12:05 PM 09/28/2017

 

Illegal immigrants and their children eat up $135 billion in public funds every year, according to a report that examines the fiscal impact of unauthorized immigration in the U.S. The study, released Wednesday by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), is one of the most comprehensive analyses of the costs of illegal immigration to date. It concludes that illegal immigration is a “staggering and crippling” drain on the public treasury.

Governments at the federal, state and local levels spent a total of $134.86 billion on illegal aliens in 2016, according to FAIR estimates.

At the same time, tax contributions by illegal immigrants did not come close to offsetting expenditures. Governments at all levels collected just $18.97 billion in taxes from illegal aliens, meaning that illegal immigration was responsible for a net fiscal drain of $115.89 billion last year. The net fiscal cost for 2016 was nearly $3 billion higher than the $113 billion cost in 2013. Over the last three years, the annual fiscal impact of illegal immigration has increased 2.6 percent, even as some experts say the total population of illegal immigrants has remained flat.

As the FAIR report notes, estimates of the costs of illegal immigration are largely dependent on determining the true number of unauthorized immigrants living in America. The nationwide illegal immigrant population was just over 11 million in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center.

FAIR’s definition of illegal immigrant, however, is broader than the one used by Pew and other groups, which do not include the large population of unaccompanied minors, DACA recipients and others with temporary protected status. FAIR argues those groups should be included in the count because they only have a temporary reprieve to be in the U.S. but consume American taxpayer funds nonetheless.

As a result, FAIR estimates the U.S. is home to 12.5 million illegal aliens, plus their 4.2 million U.S. citizen children. Each one of those individuals accounts for $8,075 in taxpayer spending, FAIR says.

 

While illegal immigration and its costs are largely thought to be a federal problem, states and cities spend far more on illegal immigrants than Washington, according to the FAIR report. Illegal immigration costs state and local governments about $89 billion in 2016, almost twice the $45.8 billion in federal expenditures.

States and cities were particularly burdened by the cost of educating illegal immigrants and their children. Education expenditures ran up to just over $44 billion, half of all state and local spending on illegal immigration. As The Daily Caller News Foundation has previously reported, states with large illegal alien populations spend billions of extra dollars per year on special programs for students with limited English proficiency, a problem that persists across generations. (RELATED: Cash-Strapped California Schools Under Fire For Asking Citizenship Questions)

After education, states spent the most on health care and criminal justice, which cost $12.1 and $10.8 billion, respectively.

At the federal level, the lion’s share of spending on illegal immigrants came from health care expenses, including billions spent on Medicaid uncompensated hospital visits. Illegal immigration cost the U.S. government $17.1 billion in medical expenses in 2016, or about 37 percent of all federal outlays to illegal immigrants.

Read the full report here.

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Send tips to will@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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10 Times the Number of Syrian Refugees that Obama wants to Bring to the US are already here!


waving flagReported by

URL of the original posting site:  http://freedomoutpost.com/2015/12/10-times-the-number-of-syrian-refugees-that-obama-wants-to-bring-to-the-us-are-already-here/#Zhq8S4cZVSUdAgWI.99

Many, myself included, have made much about the 10,000 refugees the administration has announced would be coming from U.N. refugee camps in Europe, people who have allegedly escaped their country and are seeking a better life. The problem is that these people could be anyone. We have no way of verifying their papers or their past. But what is worse is that it might be too late.

Fox reports:

Some 102,313 Syrians were granted admission to the U.S. as legal permanent residents or through programs including work, study and tourist visas from 2012 through August of this year, a period which roughly coincides with the devastating civil war that still engulfs the Middle Eastern country. Experts say any fears that terrorists might infiltrate the proposed wave of refugees from United Nations-run camps should be dwarfed by the potential danger already here.

“The sheer number of people arriving on all kinds of visas and with green cards, and possibly U.S. citizenship, makes it impossible for our counterterrorism authorities to keep track of them all, much less prevent them from carrying out attacks or belatedly try to deport them,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Do you wantIf the potential for ISIS to come in with the 10,000, it would then be ten times more likely that they are already here. They could have come in as anyone, and there would be no way for us to vet them.

Fox continues:

“It is highly unlikely that the 102,313 Syrians who were muslim-obamaadmitted over the past three years were effectively vetted,” said spokesman Ira Mehlman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “Even in countries where we have a strong diplomatic presence, the sheer volume of background checks being carried out precludes the kind of thorough vetting that is necessary.”

So, instead of looking forward to 10,000 potential terrorists, we have to worry about the over 100,000 that have already come since the war in Syria began. But how are they getting in if not through the refugee program which is not yet in effect?

Fox reports:

The Syrians being admitted are coming directly from their homeland, usually through the U.S. visa program, as opposed to the refugees President Obama is seeking to take in through U.N.-run refugee camps. Most have secured legal entry before they arrive. 

Those who escaped Syria’s grinding civil war, which has killed an estimated 300,000, and made it to the U.S. are more likely to be those with the money and means to access the U.S. immigration bureaucracy, say experts. But even that system is susceptible to fraud.America are you really paying attention

It is susceptible to fraud for the same reasons that the vetting of refugees is susceptible to fraud. We have no way of verifying any information the Syrians give our officials. The Syrian government is not a cooperating country with our immigration system. We cannot verify identity, past history, or political affiliation.

Fox added:

Mehlman said the same concerns raised in regard to the refugees – mainly that no reliable documents can be issued in a country in complete meltdown – apply to the Syrians already here.

“All civil order has collapsed, and meaningful background checks are impossible,” Mehlman said. “Instead, we rely on cross-checking databases. However, many people with ties to terrorist groups are not in any databases, which means there is no way we can identify them before they arrive here.”Islam is NOT

The people looking to attack us next are most likely here already. They are either Syrians who came here with evil intent or those who have come here and became sympathetic to ISIS after they arrived. And all we can do is wait on them to raise their heads and hope we catch them before they kill any of us.

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