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Unprecedented Surge in Chinese Illegal Immigration Raises Security Concerns

By: Simon Hankinson | May 16, 2024

Chinese immigrants sit on the ground next to the U.S. border wall — With some aliens tied to the Chinese Communist Party, the surge in Chinese illegal immigration is raising U.S. security concerns. Thousands are being released into the U.S. due to Biden’s open-border policies. Pictured: Chinese aliens attempting to cross into the U.S. from Mexico are detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the border on Nov. 11, 2023, in Jacumba, California. (Photo: Nick Ut/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY Simon Hankinson

Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.

Editor’s note: This week, we will be taking a brief break from Simon Hankinson’s originally scheduled Part 3 of his series on the three reasons President Joe Biden’s border chaos is intentional.

Instead, we bring you lightly edited excerpts from his breaking testimony Thursday before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability at a hearing on “Security Risk: The Unprecedented Surge in Chinese Illegal Immigration.”

——————

I served as a Foreign Service officer in seven countries. I have adjudicated thousands of visa applications to facilitate lawful visits, commerce, and immigration to the United States while excluding aliens who were legally inadmissible. The visa process I worked with overseas stands in total contrast to what happens at the U.S. border today.

Over the past two years, I have visited the border in Arizona, California, New York, and Texas. On those visits, I saw nationals of many countries apprehended by the Border Patrol. In San Diego last March, I watched Border Patrol dropping off dozens of aliens, including Chinese, at a bus stop to release them into the country.

Mass release of people who entered the country illegally happens nearly every day, multiple times, at multiple locations. At best, this is a mockery of U.S. immigration law and sovereignty. At worst, it is a huge national security and community safety risk. In addition to many Chinese aliens with connections to the Chinese Communist Party, People’s Liberation Army, and other state entities, it is statistically probable that the Department of Homeland Security is releasing people with serious criminal records.

According to U.S. law, DHS is supposed to detain aliens who enter the country illegally. But the Biden administration has replaced border control with mass processing, parole, and release. DHS has also abused immigration parole at an unprecedented scale.

In January 2021, which included the first 11 days of the new Biden administration, the Border Patrol encountered 17 Chinese aliens between ports of entry. By January 2024, it was 3,700 in that one month alone. As of April 30, this year, DHS had already encountered 48,501 inadmissible Chinese aliens in fiscal year 2024 (which began Oct. 1, 2023); 27,583 of them between ports of entry.

Nearly all are being released into an asylum process that will take years to conclude. At the end of that process, those ordered removed are extremely unlikely to be deported, because the Chinese government does not cooperate in accepting their nationals back.

In fiscal year 2023, Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed only 288 Chinese aliens, leaving up to 100,000 still in the U.S., despite final orders of removal.

Most Chinese entering illegally are seeking employment. They use asylum claims to enter, remain, and work in the United States. Illegal immigration ebbs and flows corresponding to a risk-reward calculation. Today, Chinese are coming in great numbers simply because they can. Worldwide awareness of our open border, spread by social media, shows them how.

For example, Chinese citizens do not need a visa to fly to Ecuador, after which they can continue by land north to the U.S. And starting on May 17, Air China will begin direct flights from Beijing to Havana. If Chinese aliens are willing to take the dangerous trek by land from Ecuador to the U.S. via the Darien Gap, why wouldn’t they also be willing to traverse the 90 miles by water to Florida?

Overseas, an in-person interview by a U.S. consular officer is the first line of “vetting” for foreign visa applicants wanting to come to the United States. This is buttressed by consular staff who know local languages, customs, and news. Larger embassies host other federal agencies that can assist with vetting investigations.

The second line of vetting is through automatic checks of U.S. government databases. Applicants are frequently refused entry based on adverse information that would not have been discovered had the person arrived illegally with no identity documents at the border.

Meanwhile, at the border today, most “national security decisions” of who gets into our country are no longer made by American officers. Under President Joe Biden’s policies, what was once a privilege for aliens has become a right.

Despite what the Biden administration wishes the public to believe, there is no real “vetting” of those released at the border, nor of those allowed in under parole programs, much less of the “gotaways” who enter covertly between ports of entry without inspection. The official visa “front door” competes with a wide-open back door at the border, where there are no routine criminal background checks using records from the person’s home country. Unless a foreign national has a record held by U.S. agencies, DHS is flying blind.

Concerning China specifically, Customs and Border Protection agents have reportedly reduced the number of standard questions asked of inadmissible Chinese aliens at the border from 40 to five.

But, however many questions, the process relies on an alien telling the truth and agents taking them at their word. Even if Customs and Border Protection requests additional information on an individual, China routinely ignores U.S. requests for verification of nationality, and they reportedly hide records of criminal and corruption cases.

DHS releases most aliens caught at the border with a Notice to Appear in immigration court—at a date far into the future. Aliens are then free to go wherever they want, with no way for ICE to easily find them.

There are more than 6 million aliens on ICE’s Non-Detained Docket, of whom only about 184,000 are tracked using what’s called Alternatives to Detention, which uses passive methods to track them, such as having the alien check in with ICE by phone every day. Only 2% of aliens tracked using Alternatives to Detention have actual GPS monitors.

To close this dangerous loophole, the U.S. needs to re-implement agreements with Mexico and Northern Triangle countries of Central America so that inadmissible aliens are not released into the interior of the U.S. pending the decision in their asylum cases, but instead remain in those countries as they await their determinations (the vast majority of which will result in their asylum applications being rejected).

Given the population, economy, and politics of China, the U.S. can never meet the demand for those seeking to enter our country illegally. The U.S. will at some point have to remove those who are ineligible to enter or remain, or else abandon the rule of law that made this country so attractive for so many immigrants in the first place.

The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.

Read Other BorderLine Columns:

The Ways the Left Exploits Illegal Immigration for Electoral Gain

The Ideological Roots of the Open Borders Push

US Should Adopt UK’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ to Address Illegal Immigration

Biden’s Precarious Parole Programs for Illegal Immigrants

My Look Inside Biden’s Illegal Immigrant Catch-and-Release Craziness

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Another Crushing Poll for Democrats

By: Kevin Jackson | May 12, 2024

The news keeps getting worse for Democrats. And it’s a pattern they’d better get use to.

Trump mooned Democrats in New York City. It’s only a matter of time before he’s done with these kangaroo courts. But while Democrats attempt election interference, Trump gets stronger with each hit.

Each attempt to get Trump acts as a reminder of the good ol’ days of the Trump administration. The Dow gave back most of its profits over just a few days. This dramatic drop came on the heels of the latest inflation numbers. Apparently, inflation isn’t going down, but instead continues going up.

Just in time for the holiday season, huh?

Back in 2016, Trump explained the situation with illegals. And post-coup, Trump explained that immigration would metastasize, and that’s exactly what happened. Biden fathered an invasion.

Trump called it; and America heard the call.

According to Axios, most Americans support mass deportations:

Share of Americans who say they support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants

Survey of 6,251 adults taken March through April 2024

A purple bar chart showing the share of U.S. adults who support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, by Race/ethnicity, political affiliation and generation. The data was collected from a survey of 6,251 U.S adults March through April 2024. It shows that 51% of the general public supports this policy. The highest support was Republicans at 68%, and the lowest was Black respondents at 40%. Notably, support decreases with younger generations, with 60% of Boomers or older in favor, compared to 48% of Millennials.

General public 51%

Race/ethnicity

White 56

Latino 45

Black 40

Political affiliation

Republican 68

Independent 46

Democrat 42

Generation

Boomer+ 60

Gen X 53

Millennial 48

Gen Z 35

Data: The Harris Poll; Chart: Axios Visuals

Half of Americans — including 42% of Democrats — say they’d support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to a new Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll.

And 30% of Democrats — as well as 46% of Republicans — now say they’d end birthright citizenship, something guaranteed under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

These items are gaining steam due to Trump’s bold stance on immigration. And what balls it takes for him to announce that he would implement mass deportations.

Don’t be surprised to see all these numbers improve as the election nears. Then, when Trump gets back in office, he will no longer allow the propaganda to propagate.

Why it matters: Americans are open to former President Trump’s harshest immigration plans, spurred on by a record surge of illegal border crossings and a relentless messaging war waged by Republicans.

President Biden is keenly aware the crisis threatens his re-election. He’s sought to flip the script by accusing Trump of sabotaging Congress’ most conservative bipartisan immigration bill in decades.
But when it comes to blame, Biden so far has failed to shift the narrative: 32% of respondents say his administration is “most responsible” for the crisis, outranking any other political or structural factor.

Axios Vibe Check: Amid a record number of border crossings, nearly two-thirds of Americans said illegal immigration is a real crisis, not a politically driven media narrative.

What they’re saying: “I was surprised at the public support for large-scale deportations,” said Mark Penn, chairman of The Harris Poll and a former pollster for President Clinton.

“I think they’re just sending a message to politicians: ‘Get this under control,’ ” he said, calling it a warning to Biden that “efforts to shift responsibility for the issue to Trump are not going to work.”

Ouch. There simply is no way to spin this. And Trump doesn’t back down:

Zoom in: Trump has vowed to carry out the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” eyeing sweeping raids and detention camps in a plan that would target millions of undocumented immigrants.

Americans typically aren’t eager to deport immigrants who have put down roots in the U.S. But the poll of 6,251 U.S. adults suggests that the dynamic may be changing amid rising fears about crime and violence.
Trump has fanned those fears at every opportunity, campaigning on false claims of a “migrant crime wave” and declaring that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

When asked to identify their greatest concern around illegal immigration, Americans most frequently cited:

Increased crime rates, drugs, and violence (21%).
The additional costs to taxpayers (18%).
Risk of terrorism and national security (17%).

The Left claims this data is wrong. However, these are the same people claiming that crime is dropping, while they omit data from the largest crime areas in the country.

Argentinian gang members beat up New York City cops and Democrats say ignore it. They released the guys almost immediately, too.

America is waking up, and Trump is the best alarm clock ever.

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UK’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ for Illegal Immigration an Effective Model for US: The BorderLine

By: Simon Hankinson / April 25, 2024

Dozens of migrants with lifejackets overflow an inflatable raft in the English Channel — The U.K.’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ could serve as a model for the U.S. as both countries struggle to stem illegal immigration. Immigrants should be deported or sent to a safe third country to await the processing of their asylum claims. Pictured: Illegal immigrants sit on an inflatable raft before attempting to illegally cross the English Channel to reach Britain, off the coast of Sangatte, France, on July 18, 2023. (Photo: BERNARD BARRON, AFP/Getty Images)

After nearly two years of legal and political challenges, Britain’s parliament has finally passed a law confirming that Rwanda is a safe place to send people who arrive in the U.K. illegally by sea. This is a major policy win for the Conservative government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and a victory for common sense. Britain, like the U.S. and Europe, is experiencing mass illegal migration in the guise of asylum claims. The British devised the Rwanda plan in response, but the U.S. already has successful equivalents that can be resurrected when there is a will to once again control America’s borders.

Like those coming to the U.S. by land, most people illegally arriving in Britain by boat are economic migrants. Britain’s asylum system has been swamped by growing demand, and backlogs for processing cases stretch into years.

In 2018, only 300 people arrived illegally in the U.K. by small boat from France across the English Channel. In 2022, it was more than 45,000. And in August 2023, the U.K. received its 100,000th illegal boat-borne immigrant, one of 700 who arrived each day. Nearly all of the 100,000 are still in Britain, joined by ever-increasing numbers.

From Jan. 1 to April 21 this year, 6,265 small boats arrived in the U.K. carrying illegal immigrants, with the largest numbers being from Afghanistan and Vietnam.

Having left the European Union, the British are unable to return asylum-seekers to the first safe country in the EU under what are called the Dublin Regulations. By mid-2023, 96% of asylum-seekers who arrived in 2021 had not received final decisions in their cases, and around 50,000 were being housed in hotels, costing the United Kingdom the equivalent of more than $8.8 million U.S. a day. The limitless liability of illegal immigration to the U.K. is an important electoral issue for Conservative Party voters.

Sound familiar?

In August 2023, Sunak’s government passed an Illegal Migration Act that barred people who entered illegally by sea from applying for asylum. The act requires British officials to return inadmissible aliens—without appeal—back to their birth country, if possible, or if not, to a safe third country.

To implement the act, Britain needed a safe third country to house putative asylum-seekers pending case processing. Britain does not have any developing-country neighbors, so they struck a deal with Rwanda in 2022 in which that Central African country would be compensated to take up to 1,000 putative asylum applicants over five years.

Anyone sent to Rwanda could opt at any time to return to their home country or to be resettled in Rwanda as refugees, but they could not return to Britain. The British government fought a series of legal challenges to its policy, but passage of the new law should clear the way for removal flights to Rwanda within weeks from now.

Sunak says he means business. “The only way to stop the boats is to eliminate the incentive to come, by making it clear that if you are here illegally, you will not be able to stay,” he said at a press conference. “We are ready. The plans are in place.”

The government has also set aside judges and courts on standby to handle the inevitable legal challenges.

The Rwanda plan is Britain’s attempt to regain control over its borders and national sovereignty. The goal is to cut off the possibility of asylum from boat arrivals, thus both destroying the business model of maritime smugglers and saving lives. This past week, five people died when over 100 illegal migrants attempted to cross the English Channel in an overcrowded boat.

The Rwanda plan has many opponents. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees argues that if the U.K. is successful, it will set a “worrying precedent for dismantling asylum-related obligations that other countries, including in Europe, may be tempted to follow …” Perhaps so, but the alternative is to cede control over immigration to foreign actors in perpetuity.

The British hope to emulate the success of Australia, which in 2001, started turning back boats carrying illegal migrants. The idea was to give “no advantage” to asylum applicants arriving illegally by boat over those arriving by air.

Australia set up detention and asylum processing centers on the island nation of Nauru, and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Eventually, Australia adopted a strict rule that no asylum-seeker arriving by boat and processed offshore would ever be resettled in Australia. The policy faced considerable political opposition but was highly effective in reducing demand.

The message was quickly understood by would-be boat migrants and migrant traffickers across Southeast Asia. “Arrival numbers went off a cliff once the Australians started to deport … because ‘news spreads like wildfire among refugees,’” wrote Matthew Paris in the Spectator.

When a later Australian government closed the Manus and Nauru centers, illegal migration soared again. In 2012, more than 600 people drowned when boats carrying illegal migrants capsized. In response, Australia reopened the offshore centers and resumed sending back all illegal aliens who arrived or attempted to arrive in Australia by sea.

As before, the putative asylum applicants remained in the offshore centers for the entire time, pending the adjudication of their cases. The offshoring policy and an unbending Australian government destroyed the market for maritime migrant smugglers. For example, in 2014, only a single boat carrying migrants made it to Australia.

At its peak in 2014, Nauru’s camp had 1,233 asylum applicants living there. By June 2023, only three remained. Though the boat-borne illegal migration virtually stopped, a credible ability to restart offshore processing is vital to Australia maintaining its current control over seaborne illegal immigration. Therefore, Australia is paying the equivalent of $288,000 U.S. a year to Nauru to keep the detention/processing option open in reserve.

The U.S. does not have the advantage of being an island. But as recently as the Trump administration, we had Safe Third Country agreements in place with Central American countries and the Migrant Protection Protocols with Mexico. Under these agreements, any asylum applicant coming to the U.S. and first passing through a third safe country to get here would be sent back to that country if he or she had not applied for asylum in that country. For example, all those who crossed illegally into the U.S. from Mexico were returned there pending their case adjudication.

The U.S. needs to use all the economic and diplomatic leverage at our disposal to revive those agreements. Meanwhile, similar to the U.K. and Australia, we should prohibit asylum applications from those illegally crossing between ports of entry to discourage frivolous and fraudulent asylum claims.

The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.

Read Other BorderLine Columns:

Biden’s Precarious Parole Programs for Illegal Immigrants

My Look Inside Biden’s Illegal Immigrant Catch-and-Release Craziness

What I Saw on My Latest Visit to the Border

You Can’t Fool All of the People All of the Time About Immigration

Haiti: Here We Go Again

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Report: Flyers Urging Illegals to Vote for Biden Found in Left-Wing Group’s Office in Mexico

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | APRIL 17, 2024

A flyer purportedly encouraging illegal immigrants to vote for Joe Biden

Flyers reportedly posted around a Resource Center Matamoros facility in Mexico encouraged illegal immigrants — who are not eligible to vote in the United States — to vote for President Joe Biden in November, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. One of the organizations operating out of the Resource Center Matamoros (RCM) has ties to Biden’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose articles of impeachment the U.S. House of Representatives delivered to the Senate Tuesday afternoon.

The flyers, which the Oversight Project posted photos of on X, read “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.” The Heritage Foundation said the flyers were first discovered by Muckraker but also confirmed to The Federalist that their own team had obtained a copy of one of the flyers “inside the RCM office.”

“The flyer in the X thread is a direct scan of the one our folks obtained on-site inside the RCM office,” a Heritage Foundation representative said. “The flyers were also posted all over the camp in the port-a-potties.”

Nevertheless, others have raised questions about the flyer, including Fox News’ Bill Melugin.

“I am extremely skeptical of this. The flier appears to be a word for word Google Translate copy & paste of a portion of the NGO’s English website, with ‘vote for Biden’ randomly added in at the end, when it does not appear on the site,” Melugin posted on X. “The translation is bad, then you have ‘bienvenidos’ spelled wrong and ‘todos con Biden’ added onto the flier with a Biden logo.”

Another social media user associated with a left-wing immigration group claimed to have spoken with the executive director of RCM and said the posters were “Totally fake” and “Made up by two posers.”

It is unclear whether RCM authorized the posting of the flyers, but the Heritage Foundation told The Federalist that because they found flyers in the RCM office, they have “every reason to believe” the flyer is from the organization. The Federalist reached out to RCM for more information but did not receive a response.

The flyers “appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA,” according to the Oversight Project.

These flyers were discovered by @realmuckraker throughout the Resource Center Matamoras (RCM) location including on the walls of port-a-potties

They also appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA pic.twitter.com/hvlkwOI5Xs
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) April 16, 2024

RCM says it is “a humanitarian organization that provides a safe space where refugees at the southern Texas-Mexico border can access legal and social support services.” Its “6-unit office complex” hosts the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which provides “legal assistance and assistance with obtaining formal documents for job search and integration into the city of Matamoros as [migrants] wait to access the asylum process in the US.”

RCM founder and executive director Gaby Zavala previously worked with La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE)– a left-wing organization that is partnered with the Open Society Institute, as pointed out by the Oversight Project. The Open Society Institute is funded by left-wing billionaire and mega-donor George Soros.

RCM also worked alongside Team Brownsville, a left-wing organization, and Angry Tias and Abeulas, which aims to help illegal immigrants cross the border, according to the Oversight Project.

RCM has significant ties to Soros-funded non-profits operating in the United States, including Save the Children, Team Brownsville Texas, and Angry Tias and Abuelas pic.twitter.com/cydCAM4PdE
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) April 16, 2024

Mayorkas — whose disastrous handling of the invasion at the southern border earned him impeachment by the House — was formerly on the board of HIAS and in his current role with the Biden administration has met with members of both Angry Tias and Abuelas as well as LUPE, according to Judicial Watch.

While illegal immigrants and other noncitizens are prohibited from voting in federal elections, federal voter registration forms simply require each individual to check a box affirming he is a U.S. citizen. The lack of any requirement that new voters show documentary proof of citizenship prompted former President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday to announce Republican legislation that would demand such documentation from new registrants.

The federal government currently prohibits states from requiring potential voters to provide such proof to register to vote in federal elections. States may require proof of citizenship to register for statewide elections, as Arizona does. But even in Arizona, a voter who attempts to register to vote with the state form but fails to provide proof of citizenship must then be registered to vote on a federal-only form.

During the 2020 presidential election, 11,600 voters voted using a federal-only ballot, AZ Free News reported. President Joe Biden won the state by 10,457 votes.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

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After He Dies in ICE Custody, Democrats Defend Illegal Convicted of Murder

BY: JORDAN BOYD | APRIL 04, 2024

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After he died last month in federal custody, Democrats are rallying around the death of an illegal alien who was convicted of murder more than two decades ago. Charles Leo Daniel, a Trinidad and Tobago citizen who illegally overstayed his U.S. visa, died due to unknown circumstances on March 7 in the Northwest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington.

Daniel was first jailed after he was convicted in 2003 of the brutal murder of his landlord roommate with a “bloody butcher knife.” Court documents say police arrived on the scene to find Daniel “covered in blood.”

Daniel claimed self-defense but the court determined that “testimony to be lacking in credibility” and “found the forensic evidence inconsistent with Daniel’s account of how he had stabbed” the victim, Raymond Lindsay. The court initially sentenced Daniel to “220 months prison and 24 to 48 months of community custody.” A per curiam decision issued in 2007 affirmed that sentence after concluding that “the court did not misapply the law of self-defense.”

After an immigration judge ruled in favor of expelling Daniel from the country in 2020, Daniel was transferred into the custody of the Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations, where he died.

Shortly after his death, researchers at the University of Washington quickly alleged that the circumstances of Daniel’s detention, which included “the second-longest stretch in solitary confinement of any person in ICE custody since 2018,” caused him suffering and may have played a role in his death. The UW activists demand that Congress send “written information requests of the agency’s Congressional liaison.”

“If members of Washington’s Congressional delegation have chosen not to make use of this tool to date, now is the time to start, in the interests of transparency, accountability, and supporting the leadership of Washington communities who are using every tool at our disposal in our effort to stop the abuse of our neighbors,” the “research update” concludes.

A few weeks later, a dozen Democrat Senators sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Patrick J. Lechleitner, the ICE official performing the duties of the director, on March 29 demanding an end to the “misuse of solitary confinement in immigration detention.”

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin, two of the signees, also spoke out against solitary confinement for those convicted of crimes connected to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. They did not, however, ever send a formal letter demanding better treatment for detained Americans than for illegal border crossers.

Democrats’ letter to ICE does not mention Daniel’s name. It does, however, use the same language as UW to pressure ICE into reducing punishments for foreigners who break U.S. law and murder Americans.

On March 21, Rep. Pramila Jayapal also released a statement scolding ICE for “overreliance on detention” and even suggested that “nearly 67 percent of people detained in ICE custody have no criminal record and many more only have minor offenses such as traffic violations.” While mentioning Daniel by name, she did not mention Daniel’s criminal record atop his violation of U.S. immigration law. Instead, she offered sympathy to his family for the “unacceptable tragedy.”

“First and foremost, my heart goes out to Mr. Daniel’s family and loved ones. His death is an unacceptable tragedy and there must be accountability and a full investigation to understand exactly what happened at the Northwest Detention Center,” she said.

Democrats’ attention to Daniel’s death received amplification from The News Tribune. The pro-illegal migration group La Resistencia also saw their fact-free claims of “harassment” and “intimidation” amid protests outside of the Tacoma detention facility published in a positive light.

Neither article mentioned Daniel’s criminal history.

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

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To Stop the Border Invasion, Get Tough on Mexico

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | MARCH 22, 2024

riot overwhelms border patrol at the border with Mexico

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

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

This is the moment when TX National Guard became overrun by migrants rioting to get across the border here in El Paso today

We were there and saw it all happen. Absolute chaos here. pic.twitter.com/VN6Kf663ie
— Jennie Taer (@JennieSTaer) March 21, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hugh Hewitt Op-ed: Morning Glory: An offer they can’t refuse

By Hugh Hewitt Fox News | Published February 29, 2024 5:00am EST

Earlier this month the Senate rejected a “compromise” on the border and sent a bill to the House that funds Israel’s many needs following the 10/7 massacre, Taiwan’s defenses, weapons for Ukraine and a significant spend on America’s defense industrial base. Now Speaker Mike Johnson has to decide what to do with it because he needs more support from his Caucus than the bill as currently written garners from the House GOP caucus. The best strategy for the Speaker? Make everyone an offer they can’t refuse: Build the wall.

The key to getting the Supplemental passed lies in a Washington Post article from February 27, the headline of which tells the story: “The Border Wall Has Never Been More Popular.”

The critical two paragraphs:

“Multiple recent polls have shown support for building a wall along the southern border creating a majority.

“Late last year, it was Quinnipiac University and Fox News polling that showed between 52 and 57 percent supported its construction. On Monday it was a Monmouth University poll that pegged support at 53 percent.”

Those are eye-popping numbers because the wall is former President Trump’s signature issue, but the collapse of security at the border and President Biden’s shrugging of shoulders at the flood of migrants who have crossed the border since he became president has changed public opinion dramatically in Trump’s and the wall’s favor.

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Trump had the border under control by the end of his first term and has promised to do so again in a second term.

Biden, in the sharpest contrast of the campaign ahead, abandoned the policies that led to control of the border and eight million people entered the country without permission in Biden’s first three years. That number has likely now passed 9 million total “encounters” at the border —and that number does not include “got-aways”: The illegal immigrants who do not enter through a port of entry and are never “encountered” by law enforcement anywhere. The “get-aways” include the cartels’ worst customers carrying the most fentanyl and the Chinese nationals who don’t want to be fingerprinted and then released.

It’s a mess. It’s a huge burden on all the states and cities flooded with migrants. It’s a threat to every kid who tries one pill because they think they have bought a Xanax online but it’s a knock-off laced with enough fentanyl to kill. And it’s a national security nightmare.

BIDEN, TRUMP TO MAKE US-MEXICO BORDER STOPS THURSDAY AS MIGRANT CRISIS ROILS ELECTION

Only 450 Chinese nationals were “encountered” at the border in Fiscal Year 2021. In FY 2022 “encounters” with Chinese nationals soared to 2,176. “In 2023, it ballooned to 24,314,” according to NBC News and in the first quarter of FY 2024, estimates are that another 19,000 have already entered and the surge in this demographic is increasing. That’s a national security issue of the first order. When the Soviet Union existed, do you think Ronald Reagan would have allowed 40,000 Soviets to enter the country and vanish into its interior? Of course not, but Joe Biden has done the equivalent of that by doing nothing.

Migrants in San Diego sector — Migrants are encountered by Border Patrol in the San Diego sector on Feb. 17. (Fox News)

When discussing this Chinese subset of the migrant flood with three former national security officials from the Trump era this past weekend, they guaranteed me that tens of thousands of Chinese nationals don’t slip easily out of the Chinese Communist Party’s control. They are very alarmed that the vast majority of these migrants are military-aged men.

Whatever one thinks about sanctuary cities, or California extending Medicaid to illegal immigrants (at a cost of more than $2 billion annually to a state with a $68 billion dollar deficit) the reality is that Americans of all political perspectives save the hard Left have awakened to the fact that this can’t go on.

The border with Mexico is 1,954 miles long. 900 miles are considered “passable.” When he left office, Trump was adding miles of Wall daily to try and get as much of the 900 miles of Wall needed built. But as soon as Biden was sworn in, construction stopped, and the film of migrants walking around the unfinished Wall or through openings created by the coyotes began playing. Americans noticed. They want The Wall and they want it now.

With funding for most of the Supplemental already enjoying majority support in the House, how to pass the necessary bill? Tack on funding for the wall as well as language that makes it clear that construction is to restart and conclude in a matter of months. That will also require language in the new law that approves that construction “notwithstanding any other law or treaty with any nation or sovereign Tribe.” That language blows past the obstacles to the Wall’s construction posed by the federal Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and National Environmental Policy Act while also mandating construction on tribal lands. This is America. We built the Interstate Highway system. We can build the Wall in a matter of months if the will, the money and the clear direction exist in the Congress.

Want the Supplemental? Build the Wall. It is that simple.

Hugh Hewitt is one of the country’s leading journalists of the center-right. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990, and it is today syndicated to hundreds of stations and outlets across the country every Monday through Friday morning. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and this column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his forty years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio show today.

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How Illegal Aliens Flooding Our Border Skew Elections for Democrats Without Ever Casting A Vote

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | FEBRUARY 28, 2024

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Why did President Joe Biden reverse former President Donald Trump’s order excluding noncitizens from being counted in the census, while simultaneously issuing a slew of executive orders decimating the integrity of our southern border? While illegal immigrants cannot vote in elections (despite Democrats’ best efforts), the left is using their illegal presence to rig elections by shifting the political landscape through apportionment.

Both congressional and electoral college apportionment is derived from the number of residents in a particular area. Trump signed a memo in July of 2020 that barred illegal immigrants from being counted in the census, which is used to apportion representation in Washington. Biden, however, reversed the policy and ordered the census to include illegal immigrants and other noncitizens.

This means that American citizens aren’t receiving balanced representation in their government.

States can pick up — or lose — a congressional seat depending on the size of their population, despite the fact that some of that population may not even be allowed to vote. Millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom are in large, left-leaning cities, dilute the voting power of American citizens who may live in a mildly populated area composed of legal residents.

And Democrats know what they’re doing.

[READ: 2020 Census Asks For Your Racial Identity, But Not If You’re A Citizen]

Democrat New York Rep. Yvette Clark said during a 2021 hearing that her district “can absorb a significant number of these migrants” because “I need more people in my district, just for redistricting purposes.”

NY Congresswoman Clarke (D) saying the quiet part out loud about the border:

"I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes." pic.twitter.com/bbDss7cnls
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 8, 2024

Clark’s resurfaced clip prompted Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and others to introduce the “Equal Representation Act” which would mandate only legal citizens are counted for congressional districts and the Electoral College map.

Sanctuary Cities

So-called “sanctuary cities,” which promise not to enforce immigration laws and often guarantee lodging to illegal residents, have long blurred the lines of law, bucking federal immigration policy and then begging taxpayers to foot the bill. But despite the drain on government resources — and sometimes violence — these policies invite, these cities and left-leaning states have reason to incentivize illegal immigrants because it helps them adjust for apportionment.

As residents flee blue states like California and New York for more family-friendly and taxpayer-friendly states like Florida and Texas, Democrats need to recoup their population losses. Illegal immigrants inflate the census data, which in turn could help Democrats retain their power.

Constitutionally Suspect

The framers likely would not support Biden’s position that illegal immigrants deserve to be counted in apportionment to determine representation.

The Constitution’s original census clause stated:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment stipulated that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.”

But “whole number of persons” was likely not intended to encompass those illegally residing in the states.

Prior to the ratification of the Constitution, most northern states advocated for no slaves to be counted in the apportionment proceedings so that slaveholding states, some of which had slave populations as high as 43 percent of their total residents, would not have an unfair amount of representation compared to their actual voting weight.

The three-fifths compromise also lessened the incentive for slaveholding states to import more slaves in order to expand their population and increase their representation.

No ‘Colorable Constitutional Claim’

Lower courts had blocked Trump’s memorandum from taking effect after 23 states challenged the memo, saying it violated the Constitution and federal census statutes. The Supreme Court has never weighed in on the question nor answered whether the word “persons” encompasses illegal immigrants for the purpose of apportionment. But the high court has previously ruled in Mathews v. Diaz, a case regarding the Social Security Act, that while illegal immigrants are entitled to due process protections under the Fifth and 14th Amendments, they are not entitled to the benefits of citizenship. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the unanimous court:

Neither the overnight visitor, the unfriendly agent of a hostile foreign power, the resident diplomat, nor the illegal entrant, can advance even a colorable constitutional claim to a share in the bounty that a conscientious sovereign makes available to its own citizens and some of its guests.

If voting, which is a benefit exclusively for citizens, is off-limits to illegal immigrants, it would be hard to imagine that illegal immigrants should be empowered to dilute the weight of a vote by artificially expanding the population and increasing the representational advantage of one area while taking it away from another area that is populated by legal residents. And yet, thanks to Democrats, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

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Gallup Poll: Biden’s Border Invasion Is Americans’ No. 1 Worry

BY: M.D. KITTLE | FEBRUARY 27, 2024

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A New Gallup poll finds a record-high number of Americans believe illegal immigration is a “critical threat” to the nation’s vital interests. Voters are clearly blaming President Joe Biden and his band of leftists for the invasion the nation has endured over the past three years.

The latest survey of more than 1,000 adults nationwide, conducted Feb. 1-20, shows 55 percent of U.S. respondents believe that “large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally” is a “critical threat” to the nation — up 8 percentage points from last year’s poll. The significant majority of Americans deeply concerned about illegal immigration surpasses the previous high of 50 percent recorded in 2004, according to Gallup.

“Significantly more Americans name immigration as the most important problem facing the U.S. (28%) than did a month ago (20%),” the famed national pollster notes. “Immigration has now passed the government as the most often cited problem, after the two issues tied for the top position the past two months.”

Concern over the illegal immigration crisis is at the highest level in the 40-plus years Gallup has been tracking the issue.

The poll finds congressional job approval, long in the basement, dipped to just 12 percent. It’s the lowest approval rating for the legislative body since November 2015, when it hit 11 percent, and just a few points above its rock bottom of 9 percent in November 2013.

Gallup conducted the poll as a ludicrous border “reform” bill, which was really just a Trojan horse for more Ukraine funding and would have codified the continuing illegal immigration threat, faltered in the U.S. Senate. The deal, puppeteered in large part by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would have faced a near-certain death in the Republican-controlled House.

Biden’s job performance on immigration has sunk to 28 percent, a personal low for the Democrat, according to the new Gallup poll. That’s down from a CBS poll last month that found just 32 percent of respondents approved of Biden’s handling of border security, an all-time low at that time. The latest monthly Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, released on Monday, records a 35 percent approval rating for Biden on immigration, his lowest rating on any issue in that survey.

“While many Americans regard the economy, generally, or inflation, specifically, as the most important problem facing the U.S., far more name immigration,” Gallup notes in an overview of the poll. “Immigration now sits alone at the top of the most important problem list, something it has done only occasionally in Gallup’s trend and not since 2019.”

Biden’s Border Debacle Hitting Home

Not even the coddling accomplice media can cover for the addled president and the disasters his immigration policies have wrought. The let-‘em-all-in left certainly can’t hide from the stark numbers.

In fiscal year 2020, the last full year of President Donald Trump’s tenure, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded about 400,000 encounters of illegal aliens attempting to enter the southwest United States. Three years later, on Biden’s watch, agents encountered 2.4 million illegal immigrants at the border with Mexico, 3.2 million nationwide.

Facing abysmal poll numbers and a real threat to his reelection chances, Biden audaciously told 30 of the nation’s governors last week that his hands are tied on cleaning up the mess he’s made. In a bald-faced lie for the ages, the president barked at a White House meeting that he’s not to blame for the border debacle and that the governors need to “show a little spine” and urge their members of Congress to pass the “bipartisan security bill” that recently went down in flames.

Half of the nation’s governors are standing with Texas in its right to defend itself against the invasion of illegal immigrants attempting to flood the Lone Star State. The Biden administration has fought against Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to “fill the dangerous gaps created by the Biden Administration’s refusal to secure the border,” according to the governor’s office.

“Every individual who is apprehended or arrested and every ounce of drugs seized would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and the nation due to President Joe Biden’s open border policies,” stated an Abbott press release issued after the governor welcomed 13 of his fellow Republican governors to Eagle Pass, a border town overtaken by illegal aliens.

Biden’s helpless act isn’t playing well with Americans. Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said the president has had the authority to tighten security at the southwest border since he took office at noon, Jan. 20, 2021 — if nothing else, by leaving things alone.

“The law is not only clear that he not only can enforce immigration laws, he is required to enforce them and he simply has been ignoring them,” the immigration reform activist told me last week on the “Simon Conway Show” on WHO in Des Moines.

In fact, Biden has signed an array of executive orders — early and often — reversing Trump’s work on securing the border. One of his first acts as president was killing construction of his predecessor’s border wall. Biden brought back catch-and-release and ended the remain-in-Mexico policy, among other executive actions that have effectively erased the United States’ southwest border.

“I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy,” Biden said at the time.

The results have been devastating, well beyond the border. Americans from the largest cities dealing with the massive influx of illegal aliens to small towns confronting rising crime and a fatal fentanyl epidemic are on the frontlines of Biden’s war on the border.

Last week, 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student Laken Hope Riley was assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered. An illegal immigrant from Venezuela has been arrested in connection with the crime, according to law enforcement, and is reportedly “expected to be charged with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, kidnapping, hindering a 911 call and concealing the death of another.” As my Federalist colleague Jordan Boyd writes, corporate media are trying to cover up that inconvenient truth, but Americans know the deadly consequences of Biden’s open border policies. The latest poll numbers confirm it.

Organizations like the Job Creators Network want to make sure Americans don’t forget who is responsible for the border invasion. JCN recently put up a billboard in New York City’s Times Square featuring a video of NYPD officers being beaten by a group of illegal immigrants. The billboard’s message to the president — and the country: “Hey Joe! If cops aren’t safe because of your open borders, nobody is.”

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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Chinese Nationals Are Surging Over the Border — This Isn’t a Crisis, It’s an Invasion.

BY: JORDAN BOYD | FEBRUARY 14, 2024

Chinese nationals illegally cross U.S. border

The uptick in Chinese nationals illegally crossing the southern border proves the record-breaking number of foreigners walking into our nation and being shipped by border agents to American cities with little to no vetting is no longer a crisis but a full-fledged invasion.

The Biden administration’s long-held talking point is that the current border crisis is fueled by a surge of struggling migrants from unstable Latin American countries. Chinese migrants, however, not natural disaster victims in Central America, have become the fastest-growing people group to take advantage of the lapsed southern U.S. border.

Border Patrol agents in San Diego alone recorded encounters with 269 Chinese nationals on Monday, Fox News’s Bill Melugin reports. Since the 2024 fiscal year began, Customs and Border Protection clocked more than 20,000 Chinese nationals illegally crossing into the U.S. via the southern border. Some of them crossed with the help of the Chinese Communist Party-linked app TikTok.

The 2024 number is already dangerously close to the 24,000 Chinese border crossers who were apprehended in the 2023 fiscal year and up significantly from the 450 Chinese arrests border agents made during President Joe Biden’s first year in office.

A large amount of the illegal crossings in San Diego sector happen in Jacumba where there is a small gap in the wall that illegal immigrants pour through every day. (We shot this a couple weeks ago).
Inexplicably, the Biden admin has made no effort to fill or fix this small gap. pic.twitter.com/wqQRI917VU
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) February 13, 2024

Likely, not every illegal border crosser from China is a Communist Party-linked spy. But to assume the CCP spent years carefully surveilling and infiltrating key American institutions like government, academia, pharmaceuticals, Wall Street, sports, Big Tech, Hollywood, and media but hasn’t figured out how to plant its operatives among the millions of illegal border crossers exploiting Biden’s open border policies would be a mistake.

In January alone, border agents encountered 176,205 illegal border crossers. That number may be a significant drop compared to recent record-breaking months, but it still exceeds 23 of the last 24 Janauries on record.

Border Patrol chiefs in several high-traffic sectors have warned that the overwhelming number of foreign illegal border crossers entering the U.S. puts our nation at risk because “information can be hidden” and “their agendas, their ideologies, the reason for them coming could be missed.” Gloria Chavez, chief patrol agent for Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol, complained to the House Homeland Security Committee last year that the influx of specifically Chinese migrants has slowed her agents’ interview process to seven hours to ensure some level of vetting.

Even then, CBP does not turn them away. Instead, busloads of Chinese nationals are dropped off in the heart of the U.S. and told to appear for an immigration court date that is often set years in advance.

“My Committee has been informed that some of these Chinese nationals have even been found to be affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and those are just the ones we’ve been able to vet,” Chairman Mark Green noted. “As the CCP works to undermine and infiltrate our institutions and even military installations, Secretary Mayorkas has made it clear to the entire world that our borders are open. This is simply unsustainable, and the national security risks are massive.”

America’s number one foreign enemy isn’t just sending spies through gaps in the abandoned border wall. It’s also actively fueling the death and destruction at the open southern border. Communist China has long taken advantage of Biden’s lax policies to poison hundreds of thousands of Americans with one of the most potent, lucrative, and lethal drugs on the black market.

One gram of fentanyl alone, about the size of a pack of table sugar, can kill approximately 500 people. Yet, in 2023, CBP seized 27,000 pounds of fentanyl, nearly twice as much as they seized in 2022. Since Biden was elected, CBP has reported record-breaking fentanyl seizures nearly every month, marking an 800 percent jump since 2019.

Cartels do most of the fentanyl smuggling, but their operations are directly sustained by investors linked to the Chinese Communist Party, who fund thousands of illegal marijuana-growing and selling operations in Mexico and the U.S. They produce the precursor chemicals required to make fentanyl in Asia and then ship them to packaging facilities close to the southern American border.

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.

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

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | FEBRUARY 06, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Senate Border Bill Is Nothing but a Democrat Propaganda Op

BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | FEBRUARY 06, 2024

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After the much-anticipated “bipartisan” Ukraine and border bill finally dropped on Sunday, it took little time to confirm that all 370 pages are worse than intelligent observers predicted. The $118 billion boondoggle is dead on arrival in the House. For Democrats and their accomplice media, however, the legislation and House Republicans’ response to it are going exactly as planned.

Not only did national disgrace Sen. Mitch McConnell (feat. useful idiot James Lankford) work tirelessly with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on this bill to keep America’s borders open, give out amnesty Oprah-style, and write more blank checks to Ukraine and Hamas sympathizers in the Middle East, they also helped the corrupt corporate media run a propaganda operation against House Republicans and the rest of the GOP. Worse, they’re deliberately running it during an election year to boost Joe Biden on the border issue — which the near-dead incumbent has aided and abetted, and voters say is top of mind next to Bidenomics.

The Republican-majority House predictably isn’t going for the bill. Why would they? It would allow nearly 2 million illegal aliens into the country in one year — as long as the numbers stay below 5,000 entries per day for seven consecutive days, or below 8,500 border encounters in a single day — before triggering “emergency authority” for the Department of Homeland Security and closing the border. Even then there are exceptions.

Worse, if Biden decides it’s in the “national interest” to beckon some more Democrat representation padding and likely future voters across the Rio Grande, he can unilaterally suspend the border closure for 45 days per year. There’s more where that came from.

If GOP members of Congress had taken the bait, Democrats would have come out on top, having

convinced their political foes not only to continue funding a no-win forever war in Eastern Europe but also to keep letting illegal aliens into the country virtually unrestricted. Bonus: A codified open border could hamstring “the fixer” Donald Trump if he wins the general election later this year, zapping his political power to rehabilitate U.S. security and sovereignty.

Yet even without the House conceding to the bill, Democrats win anyway. Now Biden and his accomplice media can simply blame Republicans for not solving the crisis this administration caused. That’s exactly what’s happening, starting with Biden pointing fingers at Republicans:

Working with my administration, the United States Senate has done the hard work it takes to reach a bipartisan agreement. Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border?

Biden’s media lapdogs dutifully advanced the narrative, which they’d already been spinning before the text of the bill was even released.

“GOP Blames Biden for Border Crisis That GOP Refuses to Solve,” blared one Daily Beast headline. “Republicans are yelling about a crisis at the border. But they’re also unwilling to do anything to address it for fear that it’d give Joe Biden a political win,” the subheading continued, taking its talking points straight from the president and Senate Democrats like Chris Murphy.

“Why Republicans Don’t Want To Solve the Border Problem — But do want to make deals to cut taxes,” read another headline in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer by Jonathan Chait.

“Republicans Who Screamed About A Crisis On The Border Now Oppose A Plan To Fix It,” said HuffPost, claiming Republicans oppose the border bill not because it’s nightmarish but because they want to hurt Biden. “Border Patrol Supports ‘Strong’ Immigration Deal. Republicans Don’t Care,” wrote Rolling Stone.

Vanity Fair claimed, “Republicans Don’t Want to Lose Their Favorite 2024 Talking Point,” with Bloomberg opting for a simple, “House Republicans Don’t Want to Fix the Border.”

Cable television has been as bad. A host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” said the “bipartisan border deal is doomed to fail … because Republicans have turned on it.” The “Today” show framed the gridlock as Republicans “threaten[ing] to block the border bill they negotiated,” as if McConnell and his sidekick colluding with Democrats behind closed doors amounts to a good-faith bipartisan negotiation.

This run-of-the-mill propaganda is to be expected from the corporate media, but it’s just so brazen considering Republicans’ efforts to secure the border earlier in Biden’s term and Democrats’ subsequent refusal to cooperate.

We’re all old enough to remember less than a year ago when the House passed a stronger border bill that would have restarted Trump-era border wall construction, required aliens to remain in Mexico while waiting out their usually fraudulent asylum claims, restricted asylum eligibility to legal ports of entry, enacted harsher punishments for overstaying expired visas, kept Title 42-esque “expulsion authority” in place, and supplied border authorities with additional grant funding. Senate Democrats wouldn’t lift a finger.

But sure. It’s Republicans “playing politics.”

Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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The Border Crisis Is The Definition Of A Foreign ‘Invasion’

BY: JOSHUA S. TREVIÑO | FEBRUARY 06, 2024

On Monday, February 25, 2019, a group of illegal aliens were apprehended by Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents near Yuma, AZ. The Yuma Sector continues to see a large number of Central Americans per day crossing illegally and surrendering to agents. CBP photo by Jerry Glaser.

When the Rev. Al Sharpton used the word “invasion” to describe the onslaught of migrants at the southern U.S. border on Monday, his MSNBC guest suddenly stopped nodding along. And then the fast blinking began — he was triggered. Because to the American left, the word “invasion” is off-limits and even “violence-inciting.”

But the word — and the concept — are at the heart of what’s happening in Texas, as Gov. Greg Abbott stands up to the Biden administration and its open border policies. He rightly contends that according to the U.S. Constitution, Texas does not merely have the Constitutional power to defend itself — it has a constitutional and moral responsibility to do so.

To qualify as an invader in the constitutional framework requires two qualities: entry into a sovereign territory, and enmity toward the sovereign. An immigrant without enmity is not an invader, nor is an enemy that stays outside our borders.

Consider some examples of what the Founders did consider invaders: foreign powers, pirates, and hostile tribes. In today’s context, a vast multinational criminal cartel whose activities and personnel enter America, harm Americans, destroy or commandeer property, defend routes on private and public lands, coerce American officials through extortion or bribery, and do so with the collaboration and collusion of a foreign state power is absolutely an invader, and would have been immediately recognized as such by the American Founders.

Sharpton wasn’t siding with Abbott, however; he was pushing the new Senate border bill.

But that bill misses the mark almost entirely on all these points. With its stupefying allowance of several million illegal entries per year, its comically constricted “border emergency” framework, its loosening of the asylum process, its billions in funding for the human-trafficking complex, and its wildly permissive structure for allowing the executive branch to override even its own minor strictures, the bill is right now Exhibit A in the contention that the border crisis is a choice made by Washington, D.C.

The border-security crisis is also a choice by Mexico’s own powerholders, stemming from two major motivations. The first motivation is simple: money. We must understand this very clearly: The Mexican state and the Mexican cartels are the same — including the president of Mexico himself.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has repeatedly sided with the criminal cartels, particularly the Sinaloa cartel. This includes his rhetorical generosity toward it, his public visits to honor the aged mother of the jailed drug lord El Chapo, and his political party’s use of its sicario enforcers to kill opposition candidates and rig elections.

AMLO’s policy of “abrazos no balazos” (hugs, not bullets), effectively prevents the use of force against cartel violence; he has handed over civil powers to his own army apparatus, which itself is a major trafficking organization and uses violence against Mexican civilians who defend themselves against cartels; and he has vowed to use the Mexican armed forces to defend Mexican cartels against the Americans.

The second motivation for Mexico City is leverage: leverage versus the United States, which is the only power capable of arresting and disincentivizing Mexico’s slide into narco-state status.

Mexico City understands two things very well: It makes billions off the border-security crisis, especially in human trafficking, and the crisis gives it leverage over U.S. officeholders, especially as the latter come under pressure from the American people to secure the border and defend our communities.

Texas has undertaken a variety of efforts in defense of itself and its citizenry that the federal government has refused to do:

Texas has illuminated the national scope of the border crisis, and invoked the principle of equity within it, by its transportation of migrants to leftist-run localities across the country.
Texas has used its military forces for their proper and primary purpose, in the defense of its own territory and citizenry, with the use of the Texas Military Department, including the personnel of the Texas Army National Guard, in Operation Lone Star.
Texas has built effective border-barrier infrastructure not once, but twice — with its innovative buoy barriers in the Rio Grande, and its barriers on the river’s north bank.
Texas has a new law that allows Texas law enforcement to intercept and de facto deport illegal entrants into Texas.

The federal government ought to be doing all these things — but it is not, and therefore Texas must see to its own self-defense. As Abbott has noted, in failing to do so, the federal government has abdicated its own Constitutional responsibility to the states.

Make no mistake, Texas is faithfully executing the law — both its own, and the Constitution’s, which provides in Article I, Section 10, for a state to defend itself against invasion.

Read the author’s full testimony on the border security crisis delivered to the U.S. Congressional Border Security Caucus on Feb. 6.

Joshua S. Treviño is the Chief of Intelligence and Research and the Director for Texas Identity at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

JOSHUA S. TREVIÑO

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Under The Senate’s Atrocious Border Bill, Everybody Gets Asylum

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 05, 2024

immigration protester carry signs that say "asylum is a right"

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The Senate’s emergency appropriations bill released on Sunday won’t address the border crisis, and contrary to the accomplice media’s spin, the spending bill won’t “severely curtail asylum at the US southern border.”

The bill could have had the Senate reclaim the reins of lawmaking from the executive and judicial branches and clarify that widespread criminality in another country is not a basis for asylum in America. Instead, the 370-page bill, the “Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024,” includes funding for both Israel and Ukraine, plus decidedly insufficient provisions for addressing aliens and immigration.

The backers of the Senate bill seek to portray its provisions as, in the words of Joe Biden, the “toughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades.” There is little that is “tough” in the bill, however, and what is can easily be sidestepped — either by the Biden administration or the throngs of illegal aliens invading from the south.

Consider, for instance, the “emergency authority” the bill would grant to the secretary of homeland security to “summarily remove” aliens. But that authority only arises if the number of encounters with aliens at the border averages 4,000 for seven consecutive days or more than 8,500 in any one day.

Beyond the flood of aliens allowed to enter the United States without triggering the emergency authority, the statutory exemptions gut the secretary’s authority. Specifically, the bill provides that the border emergency authority cannot be used against “an unaccompanied alien child,” so every illegal alien who is under 18 — or can pass as someone who is under 18 — will be allowed in.

Likewise, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can exempt aliens from the “border emergency authority” based on supposed “operational considerations.” An immigration officer can exempt other aliens for public health, humanitarian, and a smattering of other reasons. The president also has the power under the Senate bill to unilaterally suspend the secretary’s border emergency authority, meaning Biden can stop summary removals at will — at least temporarily.

The country has seen these types of exceptions swallow the rule since the Biden administration supplanted President Trump’s border policies, and there is no reason to believe things will be any different after nearly four years of an open border.

Empty Asylum Reform

The Senate bill’s claimed toughening of asylum procedures is similarly impotent. Most glaring is its provision stating that individuals seeking asylum will be “released from physical custody.” The sections and subsections that follow then detail the process for handling asylum claims.

The supposed improvement here is that asylum decisions are to be completed expeditiously, within 90 days. But the Senate includes the squishy “to the maximum extent practicable” to that 90-day timetable. That’s assuming the alien, who recall is “noncustodial,” does not abscond. The bill also allows for aliens to seek review of negative decisions, meaning they’ll have a second opportunity to flee even if they appear for the first hearing.

That the Senate bill provides for the release of aliens pending a hearing renders any other tightening of the asylum process meaningless. What would have sent a message, however, would have been for the Senate to clarify that facing general violence, including gang violence, in a country of origin, is not a basis for asylum.

Congress previously defined the grounds for asylum as limited to those who are unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion…” The statutory “membership in a particular social group” language has led to claims for asylum premised on spousal abuse, threats by gang members, and individuals targeted because of their occupation.

Attempts at Reform

Under the Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sought to “return some semblance of meaning to the ‘membership in a particular social group’ category by holding that an applicant ‘must demonstrate: (1) membership in a group, which is composed of members who share a common immutable characteristic, is defined with particularity, and is socially distinct within the society in question; and (2) that membership in the group is a central reason for her persecution.’”

As Sessions explained in his decision interpreting the statutory language, “nothing in the text of the [Immigration and Nationality Act] supports the suggestion that Congress intended ‘membership in a particular social group’ to be ‘some omnibus catch-all’ for solving every ‘heart-rending situation.’” The former AG’s opinion further indicated that “victims of private criminal activity” will generally not qualify for asylum, absent “exceptional circumstances.”

Following Joe Biden’s election, his DOJ issued an opinion vacating Sessions’ opinion, suggesting asylum was more readily available for victims of private criminal activity. But rather than explain, Merrick Garland noted he would leave the question to rule-making. Such a fundamental question should not be left to unelected bureaucrats, however, especially given the unsustainable levels of asylum applications seen in the last few years.

Asylum for All

Maybe Congress wants to open America to every citizen of the world who heralds from a country where the government cannot control crime — which is the conclusion that follows from the Biden administration’s all-inclusive reading of the statutory “membership in a particular social group” language. If so, Congress should say so. But if not, Congress should make clear that asylum provides a safe haven for those persecuted by their government because of their race, religion, sex, political views, or whatever other specific classifications our elected officials believe appropriate.

The irony here is that the Biden administration’s reversal of the Trump policies has fortified the funding of cartels, gangs, and traffickers — so much so that those flooding our shores will now be able to honestly say their government cannot protect them. And if “non-gang members” qualifies as a “social group,” it will be asylum for all.

Is that what Congress believes is appropriate? We don’t know because the cowards prefer to leave it to the administrative state. The Senate bill proves that.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Senator Mike Lee Op-ed: Schumer And McConnell Want Senators to Pass Their $106B Border Bill Without Reading It? Hell No

BY: Senator MIKE LEE, (R-UT) | FEBRUARY 02, 2024

Joe Biden meets with Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and others

Yesterday, a reporter standing outside the Senate chamber told me that after four months of secrecy, The Firm™️ plans to release the text of the $106 billion supplemental aid/border-security package — possibly as soon as today. Wasting no time, she then asked, “If you get the bill by tomorrow, will you be ready to vote on it by Tuesday?”

The words “hell no” escaped my mouth before I could stop them. Those are strong words where I come from. (Sorry, Mom.)

The reporter immediately understood that my frustration was not directed at her. Rather, it was directed at the Law Firm of Schumer & McConnell (The Firm™️), which is perpetually trying to normalize a corrupt approach to legislating, in which The Firm™️:

Spends months drafting legislation in complete secrecy
Aggressively markets that legislation based not on its details and practical implications (good and bad), but only on its broadest, least-controversial objectives
Lets members see bill text for the first time only a few days (sometimes a few hours) before an arbitrary deadline imposed by The Firm™️ itself, always with a contrived sense of urgency
Forces a vote on the legislation on or before that deadline, denying senators any real opportunity to read, digest, and debate the measure on its merits, much less introduce, consider, and vote on amendments to fix any perceived problems with the bill or otherwise improve it.

Whenever The Firm™️ engages in this practice, it largely excludes nearly every senator from the constitutionally prescribed process in which all senators are supposed to participate. By so doing, The Firm™️ effectively disenfranchises hundreds of millions of Americans — at least for purposes relevant to the legislation at hand — and that’s tragic. It’s also un-American, uncivil, uncollegial, and really uncool.

So why does The Firm™️ do it?

Every time The Firm™️ utilizes this approach and the bill passes — and it nearly always does — The Firm™️ becomes more powerful.

The high success rate is largely attributable to the fact that The Firm™️ has become very adept at (a) enlisting the help of the (freakishly cooperative) corporate media, (b) exerting peer pressure in a way that makes what you experienced in middle school look mild by comparison, and (c) rewarding those who consistently vote with The Firm™️ with various privileges that The Firm™️ is uniquely capable of offering, such as committee assignments, help with campaign fundraising, and a whole host of other widely coveted things that The Firm™️ is free to distribute in any manner it pleases.

It’s through this process that The Firm™️ passes most major spending legislation. And it’s through this process that The Firm™️ likely intends to pass the still-secret, $106 billion supplemental aid/border-security package, which The Firm™️ has spent four months negotiating with the luxury of obsessing over every sentence, word, period, and comma.

I still don’t know exactly what’s in this bill, although I have serious concerns with it based on the few details The Firm™️ has been willing to share. But under no circumstances should this bill — which would fund military operations in three distant parts of the world and make massive, permanent changes to immigration law — be passed next week.

Nor should it be passed until we have had adequate time to read the bill, discuss it with constituents, debate it, offer amendments, and vote on those amendments.

There’s no universe in which those things will happen by next week.

Depending on how long it is and the complexity of its provisions, the minimum period of time we should devote to this bill after it’s released should be measured in weeks or months, not days or hours.

Mike Lee is a U.S. Senator from Utah and author of “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document.”

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Texas Isn’t ‘Ignoring’ The Supreme Court, It’s Upholding the Law

BY: DAVID HARSANYI | JANUARY 25, 2024

A talking point cropping up on social media and press contends that Texas Governor Greg Abbott is “ignoring” or “defying” the Supreme Court by continuing to erect fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border. This is wrong.

Abbott can’t ignore the Supreme Court because Texas wasn’t ordered to do anything. SCOTUS vacated an order against the Department of Homeland Security [sic] that stopped the Feds from cutting down razor fencing along the border. Nothing says that Texas can’t erect the fencing.

Though, you must marvel at the breathtaking audacity of Democrats suddenly treating the court’s (non-existent) words as if they were sacred text. This very week, President Joe Biden again ignored the court, rolling out yet another iteration of his unconstitutional student “loan forgiveness” program. Biden habitually circumvents, ignores, defies, attacks, and demeans SCOTUS — and Democrats cheer him on along the way. Senate leaders and “dark money” fake media organizations like ProPublica have poured millions into delegitimizing and smearing the court to undermine its authority.

Now, it is true that Biden has the power to ratchet up the fight, take federal control of the border, and implement any policy he desires — or, more specifically, any non-policy he desires. The Biden administration is standing in the way of Texas’ efforts to enforce state and federal law. Once that happens, we can have our constitutional crisis.

As a political matter, the case tells us that the border mayhem is not only a matter of historic incompetence but is also driven by ideology. Many Democrats believe limiting illegal immigration is immoral. They believe anyone who wants to walk over the border should be able to do so without any incumbrances.

This week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that razor wire at the southern border is ineffective and gets “in the way” of law enforcement. I’m no expert on border control, admittedly, but I am relatively certain that any fence is better than what is happening now.

A few years back, Nancy Pelosi distilled the left’s view on physical barriers when she called them an “immorality,” the “least effective way to protect the border,” and too expensive. “I can’t think of any reason why anyone would think it’s a good idea — unless this has something to do with something else,” the then House Speaker said. None of that is true, either. The idea that real fences and walls can’t mitigate the movement of people is undermined by looking at the entirety of history. The least effective way is probably what we’re doing now.

The “something else,” of course, is meant to call you a racist. The reality is that Mexico is the top origin country for legal immigrants. Most Americans still see immigration as a net positive. The lawlessness at the border, and now in major cities, is helping undermine that sentiment.

One of the vital jobs of the federal government is to protect the sovereignty, borders, and citizens of the nation — even more important than creating “book ban” czars or banning Zyn packets. But not only has Biden abdicated his responsibility on that front, he wants to stop others from doing their duty, as well. But sometimes, it seems like the lawlessness is the point.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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Abbott: Texas Has A Constitutional Right To Defend Its Sovereignty

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 24, 2024

Greg Abbott speaking at FreePAC in Arizona

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement on Wednesday asserting that the Lone Star State has a constitutional right to defend its sovereignty in the wake of an invasion facilitated by President Biden’s open border policies.

“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now,” Abbott wrote. “President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them. The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration.”

According to the Washington Examiner, more than 10 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended by U.S. border officials since Biden assumed the presidency in January 2021. Those figures don’t even include the estimated 1.7 million “gotaways” who evaded capture upon illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

In his statement, Abbott slammed Biden for facilitating the ongoing invasion and noted how the president’s “refusal to protect the States” has resulted in “more than 6 million illegal immigrants” traversing Texas’ border alone. That figure is greater than the population of more than 30 states.

The Texas governor further underscored the federal government’s obligation to defend states from invasion and the states’ right to defend their sovereignty from outside forces, citing Article IV, § 4, and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, of the U.S. Constitution. While the former stipulates that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” the latter recognizes “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.”

“James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border,” Abbott wrote. “The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense.”

“For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” he continued. “That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”

[LISTEN: How Biden’s Open Border Is Wrecking Texas]

Abbott’s remarks appear to come in response to a Monday decision by the U.S. Supreme Court allowing the Biden administration to authorize Customs and Border Protection officials to cut razor wire installed along the border by Texas to stymie illegal immigration. Five of the court’s nine justices sided with the administration, including Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Cal Thomas Op-ed: Supreme Court allows migrants to keep streaming over the border

By Cal Thomas Tribune Media Services | Published January 24, 2024 2:44pm EST

By a vote of 5-4, with two conservative justices joining the liberals, the Supreme Court has ruled that federal agents can cut razor wire installed along the Texas-Mexico border while a lawsuit over the wire continues. The Border Patrol Union and its agents who have spoken to reporters favor the razor wire installation because it is working in that section of the state in keeping migrants, criminals, and fentanyl out, but that apparently doesn’t matter to the court.

While the emergency appeal of a lower court ruling upholding the action by Texas did not require an explanation for their votes, it likely is because the majority felt the Constitution grants power to the federal government over individual states when it comes to border control. The obvious question which the court did not address: why is the federal government not enforcing immigration laws which migrants are breaking to enter the country?

Suppose a Mexican army — no, forget an army — suppose a ragtag bunch of drug dealers decided to invade Texas, the governor acted to stop them — including installing more razor wire — and the Biden administration did nothing to stop them? Would the High Court be OK with that? The effect is the same as if an army of any kind was crossing the border.

SUPREME COURT SIDES WITH BIDEN IN TEXAS BORDER RAZOR WIRE CASE; BORDER PATROL UNION BLASTS DECISION

How many more murders, rapes and drug deaths are to be tolerated before the administration begins to enforce laws passed by Congress and signed by presidents of both parties? If this is not a violation of Biden’s Oath of Office, what would qualify?

Video

A statement from White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez is laughable: “Texas’ political stunts, like placing razor wire near the border, simply makes it harder and more dangerous for frontline personnel to do their jobs.” Except, as anyone can plainly see from watching pictures of tens of thousands of migrants streaming across the border, they are not doing their jobs because the Biden administration won’t let them.

Even President Biden recently stated the obvious when he said after months of denials by himself and his Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that the bord er is not secure. If his previous statements weren’t lies, we need a new definition of the word.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said in response to the court ruling that the razor wire is an “effective deterrent” to the illegal crossings and “I will continue to defend Texas’ constitutional authority to secure the border.”

Video

Local police and the Department of Public Safety officers have been arresting migrants on trespassing charges, but ultimately they will be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which is likely to continue releasing them into the country. From there they will likely head to already overcrowded cities seeking low-paying jobs, taking playground and other spaces from school children and in the case of New York, depositing human waste in parks, in the streets and in some cases in cups they leave on the doorsteps of local residents.

That this will — and already is — a major issue in this year’s presidential race is clear. According to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris poll. “More voters pointed to immigration than to inflation as a top policy concern. The survey found that 35 percent of respondents listed immigration as their paramount concern among an array of issues, with inflation in a close second, named by 32 percent of respondents.”

Beware Democrats. You are on the wrong side of this issue.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM CAL THOMAS

Cal Thomas is one of America’s most widely syndicated op-ed columnist in the U.S. He is the author of several books. His most recent is “America’s Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires, Superpowers and the United States.” Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.

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Democrats Talk About Illegal Immigrants the Same Way They Used to Talk About Slaves

BY: EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO | JANUARY 13, 2024

“We need immigrants in this country,” Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler said Thursday during a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement hearing. “Our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants — many illegal immigrants.”

“The fact is, the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level,” he continued. Nadler is adamantly anti-life and given that abortion is responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn American children, it’s unlikely that he’s sincerely concerned about the United States’ replacement rates.

Nadler’s remarks recall the Democratic party’s past reasoning for supporting slavery. Federalist Senior Editor Mark Hemingway pointed out that Democrats in 1823 were backing slavery because if there were no slaves, “Who would pick our cotton?” Today, Democrats are making the argument that low-wage working illegal migrants are necessary to pick “our vegetables.”

Another striking comparison is the Democrats’ past support of slave traders and their current aiding of human trafficking at the southern border. As Federalist CEO Sean Davis explained, “Before the Civil War, Democrats bought their slaves from human traffickers who kidnapped them and then shipped them across the Atlantic. In 2023, they use cartels to smuggle illegal immigrants across a border Democrats refuse to close.”

Indeed, human trafficking at our southern border is now a multi-billion dollar business, and Democrats have no plan to stop the abuse. In December alone, over 300,000 illegal immigrants crossed into the United States.

Now, illegal immigration isn’t just a problem for border states but the entire nation. Massive influxes of aliens are now invading places like New York City and Chicago, putting massive strain on city resources. Meanwhile, the fentanyl crisis created by the open southern border is taking countless American lives in all corners of the country — both urban and rural.

[Read: Border-Jumpers Are Pushing American Kids Out Of School All Across The Country]

This week, citizens were given some hope after the Texas Military Department took over a 2.5-mile long stretch along the Rio Grande River, supposedly to stop illegal immigration in the high-traffic crossing area and keep out federal border officials who “perpetuate illegal immigrant crossings in the park and greater Eagle Pass area.”

However, as my colleague Jordan Boyd explained, the move appears to be nothing more than political theater. “Yet despite the addition of personnel, barriers, gates, concertina wire, and military Humvees’ to the area,” Boyd wrote, Texas Gov. “Abbott has not authorized the Texas National Guard to detain and deport illegal immigrants, who are still being turned over to Border Patrol for processing and, in most cases, release.”

“So, while the move prompted an outcry from the Biden administration and federal border officials who say the state’s interference prevents them from doing their jobs,” she added, “Abbott’s move won’t fundamentally change the dynamic at the border.”

In other words, the border remains open, and the drug and human trafficking crises caused by it rage on. But, according to Nadler, it’s all worth it because the vegetable industry needs people to pick produce for exploitative slave wages.

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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Border-Jumpers Are Pushing American Kids Out of School All Across the Country

BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 10, 2024

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JOY PULLMANN

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Democrats’ open border is turning the entire United States into a refugee camp. The record-breaking numbers of foreigners allowed to break U.S. border laws are most heavily affecting large and sanctuary cities like New York City, but the numbers are so high they can’t help but affect cities across America as well.

Yesterday, a Brooklyn high school informed parents their children will be

getting low-quality remote instruction because their school is being turned into a refugee camp. The 4,000 students are being displaced on behalf of approximately 1,900 foreign lawbreakers. In spring 2023, city officials also occupied school gyms with migrants, prompting safety concerns from parents about unvetted, military-age male foreigners sharing buildings with their kids.

As the “Louder with Crowder” blog notes, “Brooklyn went 74%-25% to Joe Biden, whose policies started the current border crisis. Also, pro-illegal immigration Governor Kathy Hochul won Brooklyn 72% to 28%.”

BREAKING: Buses are now pulling up to @JMHSBklyn and dropping off illegals. School is closed tomorrow because illegals will be sleeping in the school’s gym. This is disgraceful! NYC is prioritizing illegals over Americans. pic.twitter.com/2jmKXfRTHX https://t.co/ViZiWlqTX5
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 9, 2024

James Madison High School is going remote tomorrow to accommodate this. NYC just can't stop putting kids dead last. https://t.co/uxLNxXBWO2
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) January 9, 2024

This is just a stark illustration of a phenomenon affecting the 50 million American K-12 kids still

seriously struggling to recover from three years of lockdown learning damage. Just as they’ve gotten back into schools, American kids everywhere are being placed in classrooms with even more illegal migrant kids who don’t speak the language, don’t share our customs, are in high-risk

circumstances linked with bad classroom behavior, and whose trafficking into America is swelling the fortunes of evil cartels.

A slightly earlier mass influx of foreigners, mostly Somalis, to the Midwestern Twin Cities has helped turn parts of the city and its schools into no-go zones. A majority of staff feel unsafe in high-violence St. Paul schools, and only one in five students in that district are meeting math and reading benchmarks. Foreign-born English language learners are the least proficient in reading, with aggregate scores even lower than those of homeless kids.

Statewide, Minnesota kids’ latest reading and math scores are the lowest on record. Kids don’t learn anything in those schools except violence-justifying racial grievance ideology. At this point, they’re not actually schools; they’re juvenile detention centers. A key factor making them juvenile detention centers is Democrats’ influx of illegally present foreign-born kids.

It’s completely impossible for a teacher to help kids seriously learn when several in a classroom don’t even speak English and arrive with little foundation for learning. Creating this situation is stiffing all the kids already here, who in cities like Minneapolis already enter school struggling. Further stretching already broken public institutions is not charity — it’s avoiding existing responsibilities.

The open border is rapidly replicating these circumstances across the country. The Biden administration is depositing pockets of “refugees” and fraudulent asylum seekers in flyover cities, making the border problem national. An Afghan “refugee” relocated to Billings, Montana was quickly charged with rape, which some Islamists consider a form of jihad. In Europe, “refugee” influxes have accompanied dramatic increases in rape. The Billings migrants also enter a city with already overcrowded schools.

Sioux City, Iowa schools are majority-minority, a dramatic and quick change. The district pays for services that help translate English into more than 150 languages. Most kids in the district are under the federal poverty level, qualifying them for multiple welfare programs and subsidies.

The same is true in Chicago, Boston, Denver, Washington D.C., and smaller cities across the American heartland. Des Moines, Omaha, Kansas City, Wichita, and St. Louis all dramatically increased in foreign-born residents from 2010 to 2019 by 10 to 50 percent, and given border data since Biden took office, it’s certain that has seen yet another spike.

All these school districts were lower-performing than the rest of their states even before lockdowns and migrant dropoffs. Those two have made things even worse for everyone in town and everyone across the nation funding this national self-destruction. Admitting illegal border crossers to public schools violates American citizen children’s rights, secured in most state constitutions, to an effective education.

It is not the American government’s job to teach every poor kid in the world English, give them breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and provide their housing and health care. It sounds charitable, but it’s really an abdication of the government’s core duty to secure the rights of its own citizens. It is logistically impossible and existentially destructive for American taxpayers and communities to be forced to accept massive numbers of people whom our social institutions radicalize against this country rather than assimilate.

It’s ridiculous to think Americans should tolerate our libraries, schools, public parks, shopping malls, and every other public area made completely inhospitable by people breaking our laws and stealing our peace. This is our home, and we have a right to evict all trespassers who exploit our goodwill and generosity. Nobody would tolerate squatters in his living room because that violates Americans’ natural rights to affirmatively consent to those who would join our communities, as well as to property and safety.

New York City residents are dying in the streets in droves. Native kids in their schools can hardly read and write by eighth grade. It’s utterly ridiculous to think that city or any other should be doing anything for random foreigners when it cannot keep its own people from dying in their bodily excretions on the curb. The solution to refugee camps is not to make them cover the entire country.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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Report: U.S. Sets Record For Most Single-Month Illegal Encounters At The Southern Border

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 02, 2024

Rad more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/02/report-u-s-sets-record-for-most-single-month-illegal-encounters-at-the-southern-border/

border wall at the U.S. southern border.

More than 300,000 illegal immigrants were encountered by U.S. border officials in December, marking a record for the highest number recorded for a single month.

REPORT: Migrants are camping in people's yards in San Diego, California as the Biden migrant crisis continues to spin out of control.

It didn't have to be this way.

Migrants are now chopping down San Diego residents' trees and using them for firewood. One land owner says the… pic.twitter.com/z9uW5VfOgy
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 29, 2023

According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources who spoke with Fox News, “more than 302,000 migrants were documented attempting to cross the U.S. southern border” between Dec. 1-31. Totaling more than 785,000 illegal encounters in the first quarter alone, December’s numbers signify the first time CBP has engaged more than 300,000 illegals in a single month.

While the former figure is larger than the population of Seattle, Washington — which, as of July 2022, hosts roughly 749,000 people — the latter is enough to fill America’s largest football stadium “almost three times,” according to The Daily Signal.

In fiscal year 2023, CBP encountered “more than 2.47 million” illegals, marking an increase from the roughly 2.38 million recorded in 2022 and 1.73 million in 2021. An October report published by House Republicans estimates there have been more than 1.7 million “gotaways” since President Biden took office.

Contrary to the White House’s claims, Biden and his administration have done nothing to stymie the ongoing invasion at America’s southern border. In fact, the administration has actively sought to prevent border states such as Texas from enacting measures designed to halt foreign nationals’ infringement upon their sovereignty.

Last year, for example, Biden’s Department of Justice sued Texas for placing barriers in the Rio Grande River to prevent illegals from streaming onto their land. More recently, the DOJ threatened to file a lawsuit against the Lone Star State if it enacts legislation that would authorize state and local law enforcement to “arrest, jail and prosecute [individuals] suspected of entering the U.S. unlawfully.”

I’m so damn sick and tired of seeing these videos with NOTHING being done.

Is ANYBODY, ANYWHERE going to stop this and close the Border??? https://t.co/vXEQ4zOAv8
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) December 27, 2023

Meanwhile, House Republicans have failed to use their majority to enact significant border policy changes in spending bills or hold Biden and officials such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas accountable for their intentional destruction of America’s southern border. In November, for instance, eight GOP representatives voted with Democrats to block a resolution introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to impeach Mayorkas for his allowance of the disaster to continue unaddressed.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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One More Time….

December 27, 2023

I’m so damn sick and tired of seeing these videos with NOTHING being done.

Is ANYBODY, ANYWHERE going to stop this and close the Border??? https://t.co/vXEQ4zOAv8
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) December 27, 2023

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The BorderLine: Climate Change Is Not Responsible for Mass Migration

By: Simon Hankinson / December 15, 2023

A woman wearing traditional indigenous clothes walks down an alley of shacks in Panama. — A study discredits the claim that climate change is largely responsible for mass migration, suggesting that the Biden administration is using it to distract from its open-border immigration policies. Pictured: A woman walks down a street in Gardi Sugdub, Panama, on Oct. 11. (Photo: Adri Salido/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Simon Hankinson

Simon Hankinson, a former foreign service officer with the State Department, is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.

———————————————————

To avoid admitting that President Joe Biden’s own policies are responsible for mass illegal migration, his administration is keen to implicate “climate change” as the root cause instead. Biden has done everything in his power to facilitate unlimited immigration, from setting up overseas “Safe Mobility Offices” to encouraging asylum claims to inventing “lawful pathways” that are really unlawful, using mass immigration parole to bypass requiring a visa for entry into the country. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has shifted all available resources from deterring illegal aliens to instead bringing them into the country.

By releasing thousands of illegal aliens at the border daily and fostering nearly unlimited asylum applications, the Biden administration adds to court backlogs already so long that aliens have de facto amnesty. The small percentage of asylum cases that eventually qualify have been buried by fraudulent and spurious ones. This is all by design. But the Biden administration is hoping to distract from this dismal record by blaming the whole thing on climate change.

The White House’s “Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration” declares “the United States will need to strengthen the application of existing protection frameworks, adjust U.S. protection mechanisms to better accommodate people fleeing the impacts of climate change, and evaluate the need for additional legal protections for those who have no alternative but to migrate.”

That word salad could mean more bogus immigration parole programs and including climate change in the criteria for granting asylum. But blaming illegal mass migration on warmer weather is politics, not science. Linking small changes in annual planetary average temperatures to specific weather patterns is difficult. Blaming weather for individual decisions to illegally come to the United States—often through several safe countries on the way—is not credible.

A recent Migration Policy Institute report notes that “[e]nvironmental issues are generally minor factors in people’s migration decisions, typically far behind economic imperatives, even in highly climate-affected countries.” A report by the Dialogue cites “political crises, economic insecurity, violence, weak social protection systems, COVID-19 contagion, low vaccination rates, and natural disasters” as “factors explaining current migration.” It concludes that “overall, aspirational or poor material conditions in the homeland is an important common denominator.”

And a new report by The Heritage Foundation, “Powering Human Advancement: Why the World Needs Affordable and Reliable Energy,” concludes that a lack of fossil fuel energy in some countries promotes immigration to countries that have the advantages of fossil fuels:

A lack of affordable and reliable energy is associated with a lack of access to clean water, adequate medical care, affordable transportation, and economic opportunities, all of which stall human advancement, especially in the most vulnerable countries. Energy, in all its diverse forms, should be harnessed by all societies—because high-income societies are also high-energy societies.

(The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)

In other words, when illegal aliens select the U.S. as their destination, their main reason is to leave poverty and look for a better life either through finding a job or relying on America’s social safety net.

Under U.S. immigration law, being poor or wanting a better job don’t qualify an alien for asylum. To be eligible, applicants have to prove that if returned home, they would be persecuted on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The “particular social group” category, already too broad, was expanded beyond reason by Biden administration guidance to the government staff who decide asylum cases. With the system already overburdened, activists now want to expand the asylum criteria even further.

The New York Times recently reported on the Miskito people of Honduras. Historically poor, subject to hurricanes, and now beset by drug cartels, some of them picked up and left. They didn’t relocate within Honduras or go to the nearest safe countries—Mexico or Guatemala—but trekked 2,500 miles north to the United States. Drawn by Biden’s open border, they now plan to claim asylum based on “extreme weather wrought by climate change,” helped by the National Immigration Project.

But the reality is that America is not to blame for their plight. U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have been falling. This is not because of Biden’s massive subsidies to renewable energy and electric vehicles; it’s the fruit of improved technology and investment by the private sector, as well as the conversion to cleaner natural gas.

In Europe, Germany and Britain are crippling their economies and sticking their populations with huge increases in energy costs in the pursuit of lower emissions. Meanwhile, China is building a coal-fired power plant every two weeks and continues to increase emissions year over year. India isn’t far behind.

This doesn’t stop the global Left from using climate change as an irrefutable catchall cause for illegal immigration, for which they blame only the developed world. Beijing wins again as mass migration based on fraud only targets desirable countries like the U.S. Other than maybe North Koreans, no one is lining up to get into China.

The plight of the Miskito, and of hundreds of millions of people across this crowded planet, can inspire our sympathy and aid, but it is not grounds for asylum. If we wish to remain a stable and prosperous society in an uncertain world, it can never be grounds for asylum.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims that “[p]rojected population displacements by 2050 in Central and South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia due to climate change, rang[e] from 31 million to 143 million people.” To call that range “ballpark” would be generous, but there is no doubt that millions will continue to migrate, for various reasons, in the future. That doesn’t make it the duty of every desirable country on earth to surrender control over its borders, identity, and destiny in response.

Who comes to the United States, how many, and where from is a decision for American voters, not for globalist climate crusaders. The U.S. should offer our expertise and example to help countries overcome the challenges of a changing planet, but we can’t be the world’s default refuge.

Our current asylum system was designed for the 1950s, with the fresh memory of Jews fleeing Nazi extermination and dissidents fleeing communist tyranny. This humanitarian program was not intended for, and it has been destroyed by, mass migration for largely economic reasons. The result is engendering political pushback across the developed world. The U.S. needs to rethink the Refugee Act of 1980, which defines who qualifies for asylum. Climate change should be explicitly excluded, and the “particular social group” category eliminated or, at the very least, tightly restricted.

Under the Biden administration, it doesn’t really matter to the Miskito or other asylum claimants how unsound the basis of their claim is. They’ll be allowed to remain in the United States and work while they wait out a many-years-long court process. That’s ridiculous, and it’s why, in May of this year, the House of Representatives passed needed reform of the asylum criteria that would require people to wait for their asylum decision outside the U.S.

In the national interest, the Senate and Biden should accept these necessary reforms and abandon the canard that climate change justifies the president’s failed immigration policies.

Read Other BorderLine Columns:

Biden Prefers to Put Your Safety at Risk and Play Recidivism Roulette With Criminal Aliens

Memo from McAllen—A Look Inside the Mayorkas Migration Machine

Will Biden Going Soft on Venezuelan Dictator Lead to Increase in Immigrants to US?

Senate Hearing Shows—Again—Why Mayorkas Should Be Impeached

New York’s ‘Right to Shelter’—Why Are Taxpayers Forced to House Unlimited Illegal Aliens?

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DHS Admits Biden’s Border Crisis is Making it Easier for Terrorists to Enter America

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | OCTOBER 11, 2023

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted in a September report that foreign terrorists are exploiting the Biden-manufactured border crisis to illegally enter the United States.

Released last month by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the “Homeland Threat Assessment” for fiscal year 2024 includes an admission by the agency that international terrorists are looking to capitalize on the Biden administration’s open border policies and the resulting influx of illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border to enter the American homeland. Under the section titled, “Border and Immigration Security,” the report specifically noted how “[t]errorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.”

The agency further acknowledged “individuals with potential terrorism connections” are actively attempting to enter the U.S. thanks to the ongoing crisis. Months before the 2023 fiscal year ended, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had already encountered approximately 160 individuals on the Terrorist Screening Data Set (TSDS), or “watchlist” — more than the 100 or so encountered in the entirety of the 2022 fiscal year. According to the report, “Inclusion in the TSDS ranges from known associates of watchlisted individuals, such as family members, to individuals directly engaged in terrorist activity.”

Despite proclaiming support for a “secure” border, President Joe Biden and his administration have routinely dismantled policies that helped stymie the ongoing crisis. In addition to auctioning off border wall construction materials, Biden moved to gut the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy shortly after taking office. That policy required illegal border crossers seeking asylum to stay in the Latin American country until their court hearing.

It’s estimated that nearly 7 million illegal immigrants have been “encountered” at the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office, according to the New York Post. And that doesn’t even include the potentially millions of “gotaways” who evaded capture by CBP agents.

Last month’s DHS assessment was issued weeks before Hamas — an Iranian-backed terrorist organization operating out of Gaza — launched a series of unprovoked and barbaric attacks against Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The attacks have since prompted concerns that foreign-based terrorist organizations could exploit America’s open border to illegally enter the U.S. and launch similar operations.

In response to possible threats, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the state’s public safety division to coordinate with local and federal law enforcement on “heightened public safety measures,” with a particular focus on raising awareness of possible threats against the state’s Jewish community by Iranian-backed terrorist groups.

In its new threat assessment, DHS specifically highlighted Iran — the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism — and its “intent to plot attacks against current and former US government officials.”

“Iran relies on individuals with pre-existing access to the United States for surveillance and lethal plotting—using dual nationals, members of criminal networks, and private investigators,” the report reads, adding that Tehran has even attempted to carry out plots “that do not require international travel for operatives.”

The report also listed Hezbollah — another Iranian-backed terrorist group operating out of Lebanon — as another source of potential foreign terror threats.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Moving On Up

A.F. BRANCO | on September 24, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-moving-on-up/

A.F. Branco Cartoon – What Goes Around

A.F. BRANCO | on September 25, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-what-goes-around-2/

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – 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 cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

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

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

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

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

Louis CK: if we allow open borders, America is going to have a lot of problems… and that’s good. We should have problems. It’s not fair that life in America should be good while it being bad in third world countries
pic.twitter.com/yRCv1JgsQs
— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) September 19, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

BREAKING: Mass illegal crossing of well over 1,000 migrants into Eagle Pass, TX taking place right now, w/ many of them telling me they are from Venezuela. Others telling my producer @AlexandriaHrndz they just arrived on a train in MX. Many still in water crossing. MASSIVE group. pic.twitter.com/kuTyAQDN8I
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) September 20, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – He Made His Bed

A.F. BRANCO | on September 8, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-he-made-his-bed/

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

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

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

SEPTEMBER 01, 2023

7 MIN READ

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JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a blatantly false claim from the White House podium. There were more than 7,000 migrants apprehended by Border Patrol on Tuesday alone after they crossed illegally. Following a brief lull in the weeks after the end of T42 in May, illegal crossings are surging once again. https://t.co/POYcaGuFLj
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) August 31, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – No Mas!

A.F. BRANCO | on May 29, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-no-mas/

Mayor Adams no longer wants New York to be a sanctuary city due to the number of illegal immigrants flooding in from the southern border.

New York Sanctuary City — Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – On Target

A.F. BRANCO | on May 28, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-on-target/

Target is feeling the wrath of customer boycotts going woke with losses of around a $9 billion.

Target Gets Woke — Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT, and VERY TRUE, Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – On the March

A.F. BRANCO | on May 9, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-on-the-march/

As Title 42 end it’s National Guard to the rescue to help process the hoards of illegal immigrants.

Ending of Title 42 — Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

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Biden Administration’s Decision To Deny Unvaxxed Novak Djokovic Entry Proves Covid Jabs Were Always About Conformity, Not Containment

BY: JORDAN BOYD | MARCH 06, 2023

Novak Djokovic in interview — Until Djokovic’s entry is on their terms, when they say being unvaccinated is acceptable, the Biden admin will sentence him to the sidelines.

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

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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.

Covid jabs are technically required for the tens of thousands of legal land travelers who frequent the pedestrian bridges between the U.S. and Mexico, but DHS policy simply allows for those travelers to give verbal confirmation that they are vaccinated. Others simply don’t have to have received the shot to cross so long as they are under 18, say they are unvaccinated “due to medical advice,” “lawful trade, emergency response, and public health purposes.”

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.

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Joe Biden Fiddles with World War In Ukraine as U.S. Border, Railways Burn

BY: JOY PULLMANN | FEBRUARY 20, 2023

**Where is Biden as his country is in flames? Hiding from his crimes against Americans and our Constitution by urging atrocities in Ukraine.**

Author Joy Pullmann profile

JOY PULLMANN

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

Americans received a pristine view of Democrats’ disastrous America-Last policies this morning as Joe Biden paid a surprise visit to Ukraine while his own country literally burns with manmade disasters he continues to inflame.

Biden’s Federal Emergency Management Agency denied any money to help clean up a burning chemical disaster zone in the Republican state of Ohio, but Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that Biden will get a blank check to slosh around hundreds of billions from U.S. taxpayers to prolong the carnage of war in Ukraine — and the profits from it from insane deficit spending that also threatens U.S. national security.

Not only is key U.S. infrastructure on fire stateside, but Biden, in violation of his oath of office, also set the U.S. border figuratively on fire immediately upon assuming the presidency by lifting former President Trump’s effective enforcement of U.S. national security laws. Cities and towns across the United States are overwhelmed with mass human trafficking and the outsourcing of U.S. border control to international drug cartels allied with the top U.S. foreign adversary, Red China.

It’s no surprise that American support for expanding the U.S. proxy war with Russia is declining. They can see that their neighbors have to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for health insurance even if they never see a doctor because they’re really paying off the health expenses of illegal migrants, and that their neighbors are dying from the fentanyl trafficked with the human flood of misery across the border.

And where is Biden as his country is in flames? Hiding from his crimes against Americans, our laws, and our Constitution by urging continued atrocities while doing a dog and pony show in Ukraine. While forcing his own people — and those whose migration keeps the cartels supplied with the billions to buy military-grade weaponry — to suffer murder, rape, and other heinous crimes, Biden is abroad encouraging ongoing violence in Ukraine.

War is hell, especially for the vulnerable — women, children, and the elderly. But Democrats and their military-industrial complex believe death, rape, starvation, and continued demolishing of Ukranian homes and towns are a worthy trade for a shiny new excuse to open U.S. coffers wide to high-dollar campaign donors with no oversight. It’s no coincidence, surely, the dollar spigots are also flooding toward the very same country that supplied millions to politically influence Biden’s family — and, according to his family, to influence Biden himself.

This is Joe Biden’s “mission accomplished” moment. Or, it would be, if the hapless and embarrassing George W. Bush were as patently evil as the Democrats running Biden.

Remember, six weeks after he invaded Iraq, Bush stood in front of a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” U.S. troops remained in Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 more years, spending precious soldiers’ lives and trillions in American treasure to weaken our national security by distracting us from higher foreign policy priorities, such as China. Right after Bush gave the “Mission Accomplished” speech, Iraqi insurgents redoubled their efforts.

**U.S. Navy Photo by Photographer’s Mate Third Class Juan E. Diaz. Public domain / Wikimedia**

Democrats’ media mouthpieces may have controlled U.S. discourse so much that only the brave like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis can point out the foolhardiness of tempting another world war by refusing to seek peace for Ukraine. But the rest of the world is not fooled. They’re aware that Democrats are weak, that they hate America, and that they are willing to sell the labor, security, and peace of their American brethren to the highest bidder.

Biden may be trying to look tough by visiting Ukraine weeks after allowing Chinese spy balloons to traverse the United States and then shooting down $6 hobby balloons with $400,000 missiles. But the only person he’s fooling is himself.

Biden’s weakness is the Democratic Party’s weakness is the U.S. foreign policy cabal’s weakness. And weakness invites aggression. Photo ops are not going to reduce the threat of a world war. Patently weak appearances by Biden in fact escalate the threat of world war. Seeking to de-escalate is the only prudent choice. We all had better pray someone with power figures that out before China and Russia continue to align against us. History tells what happens when leaders fiddle after setting their cities ablaze.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her just-published ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. Her many books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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

BY: JORDAN BOYD | FEBRUARY 07, 2023

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

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

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

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

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

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

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

And staggering those numbers are.

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

Democrats Opt for Smears over Accountability

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

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

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

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

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

Cartels ‘Leveraging Chaos’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fentanyl Pipeline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Biden Administration’s Border ‘Parole’ Plan Takes Illegal Immigration to a Whole New Level

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JANUARY 09, 2023

Joe Biden talks with CPB at the border — **The Biden administration doesn’t need a parole policy. It needs a border enforcement policy.**

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MARGOT CLEVELAND

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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.

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Today’s THREE Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – My Baby Body

A.F. BRANCO | on January 8, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-my-baby-body/

Minnesota democrats Reject ban on partial-birth Abortion. Why is the baby’s body a choice?

Partial-Birth Abortion in Minnesota — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2033.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Ring Master

A.F. BRANCO | on January 7, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-ring-master/

RINOs want Speakership with McCarthy while true conservatives fight for more Concessions.

RINO Controlled Speaker — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Broken Border System

A.F. BRANCO | on January 6, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-broken-border-system/

Biden has Broken the Trump border policy that was working well but now is a complete disaster.

Broken Immigration System — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

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Health, Political

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Ann Coulter Op-ed: All the Presidents’ Insurrections

December 21, 2022 by Ann Coulter

Well, the Jan. 6 committee has produced its long-awaited report. In a surprise move, the committee referred former President Donald Trump for criminal prosecution, accusing him of inciting insurrection, among other crimes.

In fairness, Jan. 6, 2021, was the day that Trump announced he would open our southern border and allow nearly 5 million unvetted illegal immigrants into our country, whereupon they would be flown to various cities around the U.S. and given full access to all our welfare programs.

Obviously, this constitutes insurrectionary behavior. The committee had no choice but to demand criminal charges.

LATE BULLETIN: It was NOT the former president who did this, but the current president, Joe Biden. In another development, it turns out that engineering a foreign invasion of our country has been redefined as a “humanitarian mission.”

When will this “humanitarian mission” end? Apparently, never — not until all 7 billion humans living in places less luxe than America have moved here, at which point America won’t be so hot anymore, so no one will want to come.

Thus, The New York Times quoted Jennifer Quigley, of Human Rights First, saying of our intervention in Afghanistan: “We can’t claim mission accomplished. There are still too many vulnerable people abroad.”

After spending billions of dollars trying to build a semblance of civil society in that stone-age culture, evidently now we’re supposed to open our doors to everyone who lives there. Even granting that absurd notion, I can’t help but notice that Quigley seamlessly shifted from “Afghanistan” to “people abroad.”

So we have to take in every “vulnerable” person who doesn’t already live in the U.S.? Is there any other way to interpret her statement?

CNN demands that we fly Afghans here directly, not content to wait for these future Nobel Prize-winners to take the air-land route from Afghanistan through Central America into our country — which they are also doing.

For the last few weeks, CNN has aired a story almost every hour about how Afghans “risked their lives” to save Americans, so now we owe them permanent residency in our country. It’s unclear whom we were ever fighting, inasmuch as everyone in the country seems to have been a “translator.”

CNN hosts triumphantly produced a letter by “retired diplomats,” warning that if the U.S. doesn’t “support its allies” [by allowing them to move here], “in the future our allies will be less likely to support the U.S. missions.” (And then who will teach third-worlders about feminism, gays and George Floyd?)

Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan must be relieved to hear liberals admit that how we treat those who put their lives on the line for our country will determine how we are willing to do so in the future. Whelan, you’ll recall, is rotting in a Russian prison, because a lesbian, Women’s National Basketball Association star (but I repeat myself) took precedence over him in a prisoner trade. We’re looking for a few good men. Anybody? Anybody?

We’ve already taken in 76,000 Afghans since Biden’s smooth withdrawal last year. (Please, God, tell me we rescued the Afghans who helped paint the George Floyd mural.)

And look at what a blessing they’ve been!

Mohammad Haroon Imaad was among the first batch of beloved Afghan “translators” brought to America last year. He was still living on the Fort McCoy military base in Wisconsin when he was charged with beating and choking his wife. She explained that he beat her all the time back in Afghanistan, once blinding her in both eyes.

Obviously, the Imaad household is going to be a real boon to our country. Yeah, we’re gonna have to raise the Social Security retirement age and start means-testing, but on the bright side, we’ve provided housing to Mrs. Imaad and paid for her astronomically expensive eye operations.

On the very same military base, another cherished Afghan ally, Bahrullah Noori, committed multiple forcible sexual assaults on children within weeks of arriving. Other Afghans flown to Fort McCoy showed up with child brides and multiple wives.

Just weeks after the Afghan-of-the-Month competition at Fort McCoy, another Afghan on our “must-have” list, Zabihullah Mohmand, was accused of raping a woman in Missoula, Montana. How long had he been here? A week? But the good news is, Mohmand was fully vetted by our government, according to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. If you can’t trust those guys …

In response, the media promptly stopped reporting those stories. Perhaps a better idea would be for CNN to have a word with the 76,000 “translators” already deposited on our shores. Hey, guys! Remember, for the next few months, NO RAPING!

Again, these were the most-favored Afghans, the ones who qualified for the first round of emergency admissions. And they just keep coming.

Now, that’s what most people call an “insurrection.”

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

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | DECEMBER 14, 2022

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

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Untouchables

A.F. BRANCO | on October 20, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-untouchables/

Democrats are protecting criminals, Cartels, illegal aliens, and Hunter and the Biden Family.

Democrat Protected Species — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

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.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Queen of the Hill

A.F. BRANCO | on October 4, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-queen-of-the-hill/

Nancy says to America farmers need illegal immigrants to pick the crops.

Nantoinette — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

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.

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EXCLUSIVE: ‘A Nexus To Terrorism’: Illegals Flagged As Potential National Security Risks Soared Nearly 600% In Last Year

By JENNIE TAER, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER | October 03, 2022

67415 — **Jennie Taer//The Daily Caller News Foundation**

The number of illegal aliens labeled as “special interest migrants” for potential national security risks increased by nearly 600% to 25,627 in fiscal year 2022, according to internal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Of the total, 60% of the illegal migrants were from Turkey, a country where Islamic State and other foreign terrorist organizations are known to operate, according to the State Department.
“Anybody that doesn’t think that serious threats to this country are sneaking in right now is naïve,” former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott told the DCNF.

Border Patrol saw an almost 600% increase in fiscal year 2022 in the number of illegal migrants flagged as “special interest” over national security concerns, according to internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

A “special interest” migrant is someone who isn’t a U.S. citizen who frequently travels in areas designated as national security concerns due to terrorist activity or other types of “nefarious activity,” according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Border Patrol agents encountered 25,627 “special interest” illegal migrants compared to the 3,675 encounters in fiscal year 2021, according to the data.

“Special interest aliens” can include individuals who “possibly have a nexus to terrorism,” according to 2019 DHS fact sheet. The newly-obtained internal data refers to these individuals as “special interest migrants,” however.

Most of the encounters were recorded at the southern border, with the highest in El Paso, Texas, according to the data.

“When you have an open border, you don’t get to control who or what enters your home,” former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “There are significant real threats coming across the border.”

“Unfortunately, all the current administration wants to focus on as an economic migrants and trying to say that they have a kinder, gentler migration policy, but they’re putting the entire Nation at Risk, as well as the millions of migrants that are handed to the cartels to be trafficked across the border,” Scott said.

CBP officials encountered over 2,000,000 migrants at the southern border between October 2021 and August 2022, a record number. Of those, CBP encountered 78 individuals on the terror watchlist.

Jennie Taer//Daily Caller News Foundation

Daily Caller News Foundation

“What you’re seeing is like a snapshot of what’s crossing the border, what the agents are encountering. That the bigger threat is they’re so overwhelmed that they’re leaving hundreds of miles of border on patrols every day,” Scott said.

If CBP can’t find derogatory information on them, “special interest” illegal migrants are typically released into the country, according to Scott.

“Unless when they run the record checks on that individual person flagged for some type of derogatory information, they’re going to be processed just like any other illegal alien. It basically means that they’re going to be processed, set up for a hearing in the future and released into the United States. We overly rely on the United States to have by current and valid information people that are global database, and that does not exist.”

Most of the “special interest” illegal migrants were from Turkey, which made up 60% of the grouping, with 15,376 encountered. Border Patrol also encountered 3,246 illegal migrants from Uzbekistan and 2,446 from Bangladesh.

Turkey, for example, is a “source and transit country” for Islamic State terrorists and other terrorists operating in Syria and Iraq, according to the State Department.

The Biden administration has implemented a number of policies that have allowed many illegal migrants to stay in the country. In August, it ended the Migrant Protection Protocols, which forced certain illegal migrants to await asylum proceedings in Mexico.

On the president’s first day in office, DHS issued a memorandum putting in place a 100-day moratorium on deportations. The notice also limited immigration enforcement to those who pose risks to national security, border security and public safety.

“Anybody that doesn’t think that serious threats to this country are sneaking in right now is naïve,” Scott said.

The FBI declined to comment on the matter. DHS did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated.

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Martha’s Vineyard Isn’t The First Time Democrats Failed To Live Up To Their Empty ‘Sanctuary’ Promises

BY: SIMON HANKINSON | SEPTEMBER 22, 2022

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot complaining about illegal immigrants being sent to her city

SIMON HANKINSON

Earlier this month, a Washington Post editorial acknowledged there was “no end in sight to the procession of buses inbound” to Washington, D.C., and praised Mayor Muriel Bowser for earmarking $10 million for the nearly 10,000 illegal immigrants who have arrived in the capital — about 15 percent of whom intend to remain there.

The Biden administration pretends it has the burgeoning problem of illegal immigration under control. Late last month, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that people aren’t just walking across the border. And just last week, Vice President Kamala Harris insisted the border was “secure.”

Much of the national media are happy to play along with this deliberate deception. The same corporate media that last year blithely ignored the federal government’s mass, midnight airlifting of illegal immigrants to New York; Jacksonville, Florida; and points beyond are now obsessed when a southern governor flies 50 Venezuelans to swanky Martha’s Vineyard.

In their eyes, when the administration ships tens of thousands of illegal immigrants under cover of darkness, it’s no big deal. But if the Post spots 50 people flown into Martha’s Vineyard, somehow, it’s a “crisis.” The media never accused the administration of using migrants as pawns or being inhumane, yet the latter is doing exactly what Texas and Arizona are on a vast scale.

The Post’s editors argue that “state and local officials nationwide must accommodate a flow of migrants — in schools, shelters, streets” as if there is no alternative. They seem unaware that for 250 years, the United States had an immigration law and that, for much of that time, the executive branch did its job, enforcing the law and defending our border.

What the open-borders, sanctuary-city crowd are at last realizing is that their blank checks can be cashed. New York and Washington’s social services are drowning under a mere 10,000 arrivals each. They’re lucky not to be El Paso (population 684,000), which is dealing with 1,400 illegal migrants arriving per day, or Yuma (population 97,000), which has received 250,000 so far this year.

Mayor Bowser’s $10 million might sound like a lot but putting just 200 people in hotel rooms in Washington at $200 per night comes out to upwards of $15 million annually, and educating the “about 70” new illegal immigrant children now enrolled in D.C. public schools will cost a couple million more for the first year. What happens next year?

New York City already has 7,600 migrants in its homeless shelters, which are 99 percent full, and is struggling to find housing for 5,000 new arrivals. As if trying to put out a fire with an eye-dropper, the city has opened a $6.7 million “welcome center” in Manhattan to receive migrants arriving by bus. Cost estimates for housing the city’s noncitizens already exceed $300 million a year. To complicate things, New York requires residents to spend at least 90 days in a shelter before being eligible for housing vouchers. It also requires a background check to verify applications. This normally takes a month, but it will presumably longer to process illegal immigrants who have no records that can be checked.

Even assuming all the new arrivals actually claim asylum, the average wait for an initial hearing in New York is over three years. In the meantime, they will be public charges on the city’s schools, hospitals, and housing. How long will New York taxpayers put up with this? Well, Mayor Eric Adams has admitted that the city is reaching the end of its rope, and officials are now said to be reconsidering their “right to shelter” commitment to house unlimited foreign indigents on top of New York’s plentiful home-grown needy.

New York and Washington actually look tough compared to Chicago. Mayor Lori Lightfoot proudly signed a “Welcoming City” ordinance in February 2021 to stop city police from working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But when the first busloads of 50 migrants arrived in early September, she packed them off to neighboring Burr Ridge without telling its mayor.

Later, when 500 migrants arrived in Chicago, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker declared an emergency and called out the National Guard. Coincidentally, Chicago has suffered almost the same number (491) of murders this year, but that’s not considered an emergency worthy of mobilizing the guard.

How long will this game of pass-the-parcel continue? Migrants deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion. However, that does not require those who enter illegally to stay here — on the taxpayer’s dime — until our overwhelmed immigration courts can get around to hearing their cases. Under the Migrant Protection Protocols, they could be housed outside our borders while their cases are considered. Even if not, ICE has to be allowed to do its duty, and those who fail to file for asylum or whose cases are denied after due process should be quickly deported as the law requires. It’s time President Biden stopped denying the crisis at the southern border and accepted the truth. Only then can we work for a national solution to the ongoing migrant crisis.

A former State Department official, Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Affairs.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Prison Reform

A.F. BRANCO | on September 22, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-prison-reform/

Maduro of Venezuela is clearing their prisoners and sending them to Biden’s U.S. open borders.

Venezuela Prisoners to the U.S. — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

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.

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

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

6 MIN READ

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Unfriendly Skies

A.F. BRANCO | on September 20, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-unfriendly-skies/

The sanctuary island Martha’s Vineyard has deported 50 illegal immigrants out of the area proving that hate does live there.

Martha’s Vineyard Hypocrites — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

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.

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Crime Runs Rampant In Democrat Strongholds, With Shootings, Beheading Last Weekend

BY: SOPHIA CORSO | SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

Author Sophia Corso profile

SOPHIA CORSO

In Democrat-run cities with defund the police initiatives, gun control policies, and illegal immigrants, crime has dramatically increased. While most crime that the leftist media covers at length is done to further their political narrative, much more crime that does not garner the same coverage makes these cities a dangerous place to live.

This weekend was no exception, as crime ran rampant in Democrat strongholds across the nation. Here are just a few highlights.

Philadelphia, PA

Over the weekend, 20 people were shot in the city of Philadelphia, four of whom were pronounced dead. There were an additional four stabbings this weekend in the east coast city. This deadly weekend put the city at 380 homicides for the year so far as of Saturday. While 2021 was the deadliest year the city has seen, Philadelphia is set to surpass last year’s record this year if this murder rate continues.

The four fatalities included a 64-year-old man who was repeatedly shot then pronounced dead at the hospital, according to a local news outlet. Joseph Durpee, a man who was in the area when this shooting occurred, stated, “It’s exhausting.” Like other Philadelphians, he wants “to walk around and not fear for [his] life.”

As a result of this rise in crime, reports show that the people of Philadelphia, specifically women, are increasingly becoming gun owners. According to Breitbart, “women began flooding into concealed carry classes as crime rose last year” and “outpaced men ’51 percent to 49 percent’” in concealed carry permit applications.

Former police firearms instructor Terrance Lappe stated, “I’ve been living in Philadelphia for almost 64 years and have never seen anything like this.” She added, “That’s why I carry a gun.”

Chicago, IL

Six people were shot and killed in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago this past weekend, with an additional seven teenagers wounded among the 28 total non-fatal shootings. The shootings occurred between 5:00 p.m. Friday and 5:00 a.m. Monday.

Among the fatal attacks over the weekend included a 45-year-old man who was found in Washington Park on the South Side with a gunshot wound to the chest Friday evening. He was pronounced dead at University of Chicago Medical Center.

Four minors were shot within a six-hour span on the South Side, including a 17-year-old boy who was wounded in a drive-by shooting and taken to the hospital in critical condition. A 14-year-old boy was also wounded in a drive-by shooting but was in “good condition” when taken to the hospital.

While shootings are down from last year in Chicago, overall crime has risen to upwards of 45 percent in some districts, driving businesses out of the crime-ridden city. Despite this major uptick, Lightfoot stated last month that Chicago is making “progress” on crime. Violence committed and shootings of multiple Chicago residents each weekend, including teenagers, does not “scream” progress to people outside of Lightfoot’s line of thinking.

San Carlos, CA

Illegal immigrant Jose Rafael Solano Landaeta is in custody on murder charges for the brutal beheading of his ex-girlfriend Karina Castro this past Friday. Castro, who was also a mother of two, had placed a restraining order against Landaeta in April, according to law enforcement sources. Landaeta also “has criminal priors,” a report stated.

Castro’s grandmother stated that Landaeta was “a diagnosed schizophrenic on meds” and “would use that as an excuse for his behavior.”

Unfortunately, this murder is not the only crime states have seen as a result of mass illegal immigration. Just last month, two Mexicans who entered the United States illegally were charged with the murder of a North Carolina sheriff’s deputy.

Another illegal immigrant was just sentenced 29 years in a U.S. prison for “violent” and “sadistic” home invasions in Texas. Not only are legal U.S. residents shelling out massive amounts of taxpayer dollars to provide for lawbreaking migrants, their cities see crimes committed by this population rising as well.

According to reports, the Biden administration has allowed several hundred suspected terrorists inside the United States as part of its poorly vetted Afghanistan refugee pool.

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.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Walls Are Closing In

A.F. BRANCO | on August 30, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-walls-are-closing-in/

Due to Biden’s open border policy, he has decided to build “the wall”, around his house in Delaware.

Biden’s Wall — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022**

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.

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Over the Line

A.F. BRANCO | on August 25, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-over-the-line/

Democrats love illegal immigrants unless they’re sent to their blue cities like New York and Washington D.C.

Illegal Immigrant in New York — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco Cartoon ©2022.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Panderer and Thief

A.F. BRANCO | on August 26, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-panderer-and-thief/

Biden, in an attempt to buy votes with our tax dollars, is forgiving student loans angering many who have paid their own.

Biden to Forgive Student Loans — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

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.

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

REPORTED BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JULY 06, 2022

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

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

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.

Official statement by Senior Fellow @KenCuccinelli and President @russvought ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/4cVysDIYfk
— 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
— Jaeson Jones (@jaeson_jones) June 3, 2022

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.

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County Officials in Texas to Declare Border Crisis An ‘Invasion’

Reported by JENNIE TAER, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER | July 05, 2022

U.S. authorities continue to enforce the Title 42 rules in Del Rio — **REUTERS/Marco Bello**

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
— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) July 5, 2022

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.

Blake Mauro contributed to this report.

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Political

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Empty-Sull and Crossbones

A.F. BRANCO | on June 29, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-empty-sull-and-crossbones/

Biden’s immigration policy body count continues to rise with the tractor-trailer container of 51 dead migrants.

Biden’s Bloody Immigration Policy — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

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.

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Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘illegal Immigration’

By: Simon Hankinson | May 16, 2024

COMMENTARY BY Simon Hankinson

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By: Kevin Jackson | May 12, 2024

The news keeps getting worse for Democrats. And it’s a pattern they’d better get use to.

Trump called it; and America heard the call.

Share of Americans who say they support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants

Half of Americans — including 42% of Democrats — say they’d support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to a new Axios Vibes survey by The Harris Poll.

Ouch. There simply is no way to spin this. And Trump doesn’t back down:

The Left claims this data is wrong. However, these are the same people claiming that crime is dropping, while they omit data from the largest crime areas in the country.

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By: Simon Hankinson / April 25, 2024

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By Hugh Hewitt Fox News | Published February 29, 2024 5:00am EST

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BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | FEBRUARY 28, 2024

This means that American citizens aren’t receiving balanced representation in their government.

Sanctuary Cities

As residents flee blue states like California and New York for more family-friendly and taxpayer-friendly states like Florida and Texas, Democrats need to recoup their population losses. Illegal immigrants inflate the census data, which in turn could help Democrats retain their power.

Constitutionally Suspect

No ‘Colorable Constitutional Claim’

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

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BY: M.D. KITTLE | FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Biden’s Border Debacle Hitting Home

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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BY: JORDAN BOYD | FEBRUARY 14, 2024

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BY: JOSHUA S. TREVIÑO | FEBRUARY 06, 2024

Joshua S. Treviño is the Chief of Intelligence and Research and the Director for Texas Identity at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 05, 2024

Empty Asylum Reform

Attempts at Reform

Asylum for All

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BY: Senator MIKE LEE, (R-UT) | FEBRUARY 02, 2024

Mike Lee is a U.S. Senator from Utah and author of “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document.”

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BY: DAVID HARSANYI | JANUARY 25, 2024

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 24, 2024

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By Cal Thomas Tribune Media Services | Published January 24, 2024 2:44pm EST

Cal Thomas is one of America’s most widely syndicated op-ed columnist in the U.S. He is the author of several books. His most recent is “America’s Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires, Superpowers and the United States.” Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.

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BY: EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO | JANUARY 13, 2024

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 10, 2024

Yesterday, a Brooklyn high school informed parents their children will be

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By: Simon Hankinson / December 15, 2023

COMMENTARY BY

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BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | OCTOBER 11, 2023

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Moving On Up

A.F. Branco Cartoon – What Goes Around

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