Not only is the U.S. failing to create enough new Americans through birth — it is also failing to turn immigrants into Americans in any meaningful sense.
“First world nations are dying,” Pat Buchanan warned in his 2002 book The Death of the West. “They face a mortal crisis, not because of something happening in the Third World, but because of what is not happening at home and in the homes of the First World.”
And what was not — and still is not — happening at home is childbearing. Buchanan was referring to fertility rates, which have been on the decline for decades.
Data released on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows U.S. birth rates are dropping to levels of civilizational suicide, with women having on average 1.6 children. According to the CDC data, birth rates dropped for women aged 15-34 between 2023 and 2024 while rising for women aged 40-44. The general fertility rate (GFR), which is the number of births per 1,000 females ages 15-44, “is down 22% from 2007 to 2024.” While fertility rates are down, the number of births increased by roughly 1 percent between 2023 and 2024, according to the data.
Women are delaying having children or completely casting it aside — thanks in part to the rise of the obnoxious hyper-independent girl boss mentality that has asserted that marriage and motherhood are shackles, along with the “loss of religiosity” and “availability of birth control” and abortion, as pointed out in these pages by David Harsanyi.
The result? The country is dying.
As Buchanan warned, a nation that will not reproduce will not survive. A shrinking native population leads to one inevitable outcome: mass immigration.
As noted by The Heritage Foundation’s Jonathan Abbamonte, “without a substantial increase in fertility, the United States will continue to be increasingly dependent on immigration to slow down population ageing and prevent population contraction.”
One of the most obvious results of a shrinking population is a shrinking workforce. But a workforce is rather interchangeable. A country can always import labor — the United States can import labor for the foreseeable future if there is a shortage of workers. But what a country cannot import is a culture, a heritage, a set of particular values that will help the republic endure.
America simply cannot outsource her future to people from other places. And it’s not about “xenophobia” or whatever other “phobia” the left will throw at Americans. A country — any country — that replaces its population with people from somewhere else because its own people will not reproduce becomes something else entirely. If we don’t make more Americans, we won’t have any more left. And without Americans, there will be no America.
Not only is the U.S. failing to create enough new Americans through birth — it is also failing to turn immigrants into Americans in any meaningful sense — making the prospect of boosting the dying population with foreigners even more problematic. Of course, this hasn’t always been the case. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. successfully assimilated millions of immigrants — Germans, Italians, Poles, Irish, and so on and so forth — because they shared a foundation of similar cultural and social norms, values, and religion. They often became Americans within a single generation.
But since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, that assimilation process has broken down. America has seen a wave of mass migration from nations that are dissimilar to it. Different languages, cultures, religions, and political philosophies are all things that act as barriers to assimilation. And the one thing that could ease the assimilation process has been undermined by the left — that thing being a shared national identity. The left abhors American exceptionalism. They demonize it, teaching children and young adults that America is an evil place that must atone for her sins. So how are we supposed to assimilate foreigners into America’s culture and way of life when we ourselves have vilified and rejected our own heritage?
American birth rates have now dropped to levels of civilizational suicide. And in the vacuum left by a people that won’t reproduce, another people will — but they won’t be American.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
President Donald Trump on Monday said CNN refuses to report accurately on the decrease in migrants crossing the southern border because “they hate our country.” During a meeting with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office, Trump talked about military and law enforcement recruitment that has surged.
“Actually, what you’re doing with the border is remarkable. It has dropped, what, 95%? It’s incredible,” Bukele said to Trump.
“As of this morning, 99%, 99.1% to be exact,” Trump replied.
“Why are those numbers not in the media?” Bukele asked.
“Well, they get out, but the fake news, you know, like CNN — CNN over here doesn’t want to put them out because they don’t like putting out good numbers … because I think they hate our country, actually,” Trump said.
Trump then asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to comment.
“It’s just been absolutely phenomenal what a great leader can do,” Noem said. “Clear direction. Our laws matter. We should only have people in our country that love us. And our Border Patrol and our ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers and law officers have done fantastic work. So, we’re proud of them.’
“Now, we just need to get the criminals and murderers and rapists and dangerous gang members and terrorist organizations out of our country.”
After the media availability ended, CNN’s Dana Bash took issue with Trump’s words.
“I just want to say, for the record, since we heard President Trump say in the Oval Office that CNN hates our country, CNN does not hate our country,” she told viewers. “That should go without saying.”
Bash added, “I’ve been here for 32 years, and I see a rhetorical device in him trying to say such a thing. That said, I want to focus on the news that we heard.”
The United States District Court for the District of Columbia, the source of many of the cases interfering with President Donald Trump’s authority, has 15 judges, (Counting Chief Judge James Boasberg) and five of them were born outside the United States.
While country of origin doesn’t come up in most jobs, it is worth asking if judges with ties to foreign nations and cultures are the right ones to make decisions affecting the U.S. military or immigration.
The concept of foreign-born judges is a newer phenomenon in this district. In addition to the 15 main judges, the D.C. District has 10 older, senior judges who still occasionally hear cases in the district. This group, nominated as far back as Ronald Reagan the 1980s, were all born in the U.S.
But starting in 2014, former President Barack Obama appointed Judge Tanya Sue Chutkan, born in Kingston, Jamaica. She was in the U.S. by 1979, attending George Washington University. Before sitting on federal court, she had no experience as a judge. Chutkan is overseeing the legal challenge to DOGE’s work to slash excess government spending.
Obama also appointed Judge Amit P. Mehta to the D.C. court. Mehta also had no previous experience as a judge. Mehta was born in Patan, Gujarat, India. He and his parents came to the U.S. when he was a baby, age one. He was raised in Maryland. Mehta will oversee four January 6 civil cases that aim to blame Trump for injuries and squeeze money, court time, and political embarrassment out of him.
The other three foreign born judges were nominated by former President Joe Biden.
Judge Ana Cecilia Reyes was nominated in 2021, also with no prior experience as a judge. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and moved to Spain, and while still a child, moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she grew up. She is the first openly LGBT Latina to be appointed to this court. Reyes presided over an objection to Trump’s executive order declaring “gender dysphoria” as “inconsistent” with the “high standards for troop readiness,” as The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood reported. Reyes blocked Trump’s order with a preliminary injunction.
The first Muslim and Arab American in the D.C. district court, Judge Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali was born and raised in Canada to Egyptian parents. According to his Questionnaire for Judicial Nominees, Ali was not required to register for the U.S. Selective Service. That is because he was not a citizen until 2019. He graduated from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada with a software engineering degree in 2008 and then attended Harvard Law School in the U.S., graduating with a law degree in 2011. He worked as a volunteer on Biden’s 2020 transition team and for a phone bank in support of Biden’s presidential campaign. He worked for some nonprofits but never served as a judge until Biden appointed him in 2024. Amir has written extensively and negatively about Trump’s so-called “Travel ban,” a 2017 Executive Order which restricted travel to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days.
In his writing, he said, “prejudice and intolerance” were “the very hallmark of [Trump’s] campaign against Muslims.”
Before he was a judge, Ali spoke at the National Press Foundation and gave tips to reporters about how to cover the courts.
When confirmed, Amir was a member of the Capital Area Muslim Bar Association; Muslim American Judicial Advisory Council; National Arab American Bar Association; National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; National Police Accountability Project; and the Native American Bar Association of D.C., among others.
Ali single handedly restored $2 billion in USAID spending to foreign nonprofit contractors that the Trump Administration had paused for 90 days, in a stunning overreach of authority last month.
The newest judge on the D.C. District Court is also foreign born.
Before slinking out of office, Biden and his handlers got Judge Sparkle Sooknanan confirmed. She was sworn in Jan. 2, 2025. Born in the dual-island nation Trinidad and Tobago in 1983, she left her home country at age 16 to pursue college and graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 2010.
She was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and during the Biden Administration she was the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division for the Department of Justice before Biden tapped her for her first ever judge gig in the D.C. Court, according to her Questionnairefor Judicial Nominees.
Last week, Sooknanan dutifully did her part to slow Trump’s agenda, ordering the reinstatement of Democrat Susan Grundmann to the Federal Labor Relations Authority, a move that keeps the board in a Democrat majority.
None of these cases have gone in front of conservative judges in conservative states, say in Missouri or South Dakota. They all happened to land in the laps of judges that have spoken out or ruled against Trump or his policies in the past.
Out of all the judges in the nation, all five foreign-born judges of the D.C. District court managed to get their fingerprints on a controversial Trump case.
Evidence that judges have seized control of our country.
Federal injunctions, by president: 🔵 Barack Obama: 12 🔴 Donald Trump, 1st term: 64 🔵 Joe Biden: 14 🔴 Donald Trump, 2nd term (2 months): 15
The United States is in the midst of a soft coup. Not the violent kind that takes out a nation’s leader, but one orchestrated by judicial actions that choke off executive power before our eyes.
We have seen other obvious, corrupt schemes in plain sight before. The Biden basement presidential campaign of 2019; the “insurrection” that wasn’t; the mask and vaccine mandates; the Biden is mentally competent story; the “flawless” Afghan withdrawal; the “secure” borders; and the incompetent candidate swap to Kamala Harris, made Americans realize the best chance we have to stop corruption is to vote it out.
The public did its part by voting in a clear mandate for Trump’s agenda. But corruption is still visible, though court decisions by unelected activist judges. The only remedy now is for the Supreme Court to step in and this time, get its hands dirty, deliberate, and make real decisions based on the Constitution.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
Last night, millions tuned in to watch Fox’s Bret Baier interview Vice President Kamala Harris in a brief but substantive exchange. One of the most interesting aspects of the interview was the purely pedestrian view of the presidency that Harris presented in the interview. Harris repeatedly responded with “I will follow the law” while refusing to say where she personally stands on immigration, transgender athletes, and other issues.
After confining interviews to largely softball forums like The View, Harris faced a serious journalist who pushed for actual answers on policies. While confined to a short time by the Harris campaign, Baier kept pulling Harris back to these questions to cut off the evasions that have characterized past interviews. Baier noted that she has previously campaigned on some of these issues and publicly declared that she worked for such things as gender transitioning operations for undocumented persons. Harris now refuses to state her position on such issues and says “I will follow the law.”
Yet, Harris is not adopting that pedestrian model in other areas like abortion rights where she is pledging to use executive powers to resist pro-life laws. The Biden-Harris Administration has used such orders to negate both constitutional and statutory authority. That includes orders that were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on issues like the national eviction moratorium.
Notably, Harris did flip her position on decriminalizing unlawful entries. Despite running on that pledge in her earlier unsuccessful run for the White House, Harris now says that she is against such decriminalization. As with her past opposition to fracking and gun rights, the change is likely to draw criticism that Harris is adopting a new persona for a close race.
The refusal to give her position on these issues is reminiscent of Joe Biden’s last campaign where he simply refused to say if he opposed packing the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority. What is different is that Harris previously stated strong and public positions on these questions but is now refusing to confirm that she continues to support those policies, including some that rank near the top of issues for voters.
Baier did a heroic job in trying to prevent the filibustering of the interview and push for answers on these questions. It was the first such interview where Harris faced a dogged interviewer. Given the frantic effort of the staff to end the interview (after showing up late), it is likely to be the last.
The mantra of “I will follow the law” ignores that a president plays a major role in the legislative process and has considerable executive powers in determining how such laws are enforced. The presidency is more than a promise of “joy” and compliance. It is about leadership on issues that matter to voters.
The interview had a seasonal feel with Halloween approaching like a political reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven where every question is answered by “Nevermore.”
That could well be the theme of the Harris campaign. When pressed on contradictions or controversies, Harris seemed to declare “Nevermore Trump” over and over again. We will see if that is enough in a matter of a few weeks.
In the meantime, real journalists will be left seeking answers that never come, exclaiming like Poe’s protagonist “tell me—tell me, I implore!” However, “Quoth the [Harris] ‘Nevermore.’”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is pleading with lawmakers to send the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) more money after the disaster relief agency emptied the coffers to provide services for illegal immigrants.
“FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season,” Mayorkas told reporters on Air Force One Wednesday, with hurricane season running from June 1 through Nov. 30.
“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” he said, after Hurricane Helene brought devastation to the southeastern United States.
The storm crashed into Florida as a Category 4 hurricane last week and poured a record-breaking 40 trillion gallons of water across the South, washing away entire Appalachian towns. Ryan Cole, the assistant director for emergency services in Buncombe County where Asheville became isolated due to broken roads and no power or cell service, characterized the aftermath as “Biblical.”
“You’ve heard us say, ‘catastrophic devastation within our county.’ I would go a little bit further and say we have Biblical devastation through the county,” Cole said Sunday. “We’ve had Biblical flooding here, and it has been extremely significant.”
But while communities across southern Appalachia scramble to rebuild following the torrential downpour that killed roughly 200 people, federal relief efforts have come up short. One woman named Alyse Adams, who spoke to NBC News about her family stuck in the North Carolina mountains, said she’s been stunned by the slow response from the Biden-Harris administration.
“I don’t know how you did not have a formal press conference or something from either President Biden or Kamala Harris,” Adams said. “FEMA is not on the ground there at all. They are not in these cities, not in these towns, and not in these villages.”
This woman has family trapped in Spruce Pine, North Carolina for 4 days… She just called out Biden and Harris live on NBC: pic.twitter.com/FFT11nuOPM
While the emergency response agency is typically proactive, with pre-staged supplies ready for immediate rescue operations, that same support was clearly not available to the Appalachian towns where Hurricane Helene wrought havoc. Instead, the Biden-Harris administration restructured FEMA to provide services for illegal migrants with a new bureaucratic mandate to instill “equity as a foundation of emergency management.” Storm preparedness ranks as a third priority for the disaster relief task force under “lead[ing] whole of community in climate resilience.”
According to the government’s website, FEMA has spent more than $1 billion “to provide humanitarian services to noncitizen migrants following their release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” under the “Shelter and Services Program” just within the last two years. The agency allocated nearly $364 million to the program in the fiscal year 2023 and $650 million for 2024.
“Over the last 4 years the Biden-Harris admin has steadily transformed FEMA — the agency responsible for responding to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene — into an illegal alien resettlement agency that emphasizes DEI over public safety,”reported America First Legal, a conservative non-profit. AFL published a series on online posts outlining where FEMA spent tax dollars meant to assist Americans in the aftermath of major storms and hurricanes.
“The Shelter and Services Program is designed to exclusively provide shelter and services to illegal aliens,” AFL reported, with millions in grants spent to groups primarily across the Southwest. AFL also highlighted the “Emergency Food and Shelter Program” as a “separate program” that has given $685 million “to fund illegal aliens.”
/4 Moreover, the Emergency Food and Shelter Program has been reshaped to provide funding to “families and individuals encountered by the Department of Homeland Security” – aka illegal aliens.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, FEMA gets most of its funding from supplemental appropriations bills passed by lawmakers following natural disasters. This hurricane season, however, has only brought two major storms to the U.S. that caused widespread devastation: Helene and Beryl, which hit Texas in June. Yet Mayorkas is now demanding more funding for FEMA after the administration diverted the agency’s resources for the continued migrant crisis under President Biden’s “border czar,” Kamala Harris.
“We have, of course, made a significant request of Congress with respect to stable funding for the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which should not be a political issue,” Mayorkas said Wednesday. “This is something that Americans need desperately.”
Americans in the washed-out towns of southern Appalachia also need the support of their federal government more than the illegal border crossers in California and Texas, desperately.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
News coverage following Thursday night’s CNN interview with Vice President Kamala Harris predictably recast the episode in ways that were unfamiliar to anyone who watched live and who has even just loosely followed her career in national politics.
New York Times reporter Reid Epstein said Kamala “parried questions from Dana Bash on Thursday without causing herself political harm or providing herself a significant boost.” Aaron Blake at The Washington Post said she “didn’t really stumble or seem to do anything that might hamper her momentum.” Politico’s popular morning “Playbook” newsletter gleaned that the interview “suggested to us how tough Donald Trump’s job is now …”
These are supposed to be the big “takeaways” from the event, but any fair-minded person who watched knows that the reality wasn’t so forgiving. What the taped interview with Nancy Pelosi’s favorite journalist did was reinforce the Kamala we all knew before we were told one day two months ago that she’s a beloved sex symbol — the Kamala who’s in over her head, has no vision for the country, and has no interest in governance.
There’s a reason that Democrats and the media have forced an amorphous, ever-shifting concept of “joy” to be the animating force of Kamala’s campaign. This interview, containing not a single unexpected question, illustrates perfectly why they’ve done so. (Here’s a link to the full CNN transcript for reference.)
Kamala can’t withstand scrutiny.
She implied that she’s never been in favor of banning fracking but when confronted with her position when she ran for president in 2020, she skated past the question to only say she has “made very clear” she’s not in favor of it. In that exchange alone, she used the word “clear” five times. Much like the constant hammering with messages about how average and dad-like Tim Walz is unpersuasive, if you have to repeatedly state how “clear” you’ve been, nobody is convinced.
Kamala can’t articulate an argument for herself.
Confronted with her on-record position to decriminalize unauthorized crossings at the southern border, she started talking about climate policy. “My values have not changed,” she said. “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time. We did that with the Inflation Reduction Act.” (Yes, Kamala admitted the “inflation reduction” bill was actually about funding the electric cars scam.)
Kamala can’t even fake a fundamental grasp of critical foreign policy issues.
The war in Israel is just one of two violent global conflicts to break out under the Kamala-Biden administration, and in the almost year since it started, the closest she could come to explaining her depth of understanding about it or how to bring it to an end was to repeat in frustration, “We have to get a deal done.”
— “We have got to get a deal done.”
— “We — we were in Doha. We have to get a deal done.”
— “This war must end.”
— “And we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out.”
— “Let’s get the ceasefire done.”
— “We have to get a deal done.”
— “Dana, we have to get a deal done.”
— “A deal is not only the right thing to do to end this war but will unlock so much of what must happen next.”
Look at all that joy! Damn, that’s a lot of joy!
Kamala looked tired. Admittedly, she’s vice president and simultaneously running for president on a platform that ignores she’s currently in the White House. Oh, and joy. I’d be exhausted, too.
We’re finally getting to see again the Kamala we knew all along.
Immigration is at center stage as the Republican National Convention resumes Tuesday, with speakers spotlighting a key issue for former President Donald Trump that helped endear him to the GOP base when he began his first campaign in 2015. Meanwhile, Trump and JD Vance. his choice for running mate, are scheduled to appear in the convention hall every night this week, according to two people familiar with the schedule who were not authorized to speak publicly. The nominee and his newly minted running mate sat together Monday night in what was Trump’s first public appearance following the assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Vance is expected to give his own speech Wednesday night, with Trump to headline Thursday night’s closing evening. One of Trump’s top GOP primary rivals will take the stage Tuesday night, the latest signal the party is solidifying its fight to take President Joe Biden on in November.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will speak in primetime Tuesday night. A senior Trump campaign adviser says that fact shows that Republicans have mended any fences in need of repair following the bruising primary season.
Two days after surviving an attempted assassination, Trump appeared triumphantly at the convention’s opening night Monday with a bandage over his right ear, the latest compelling scene in a presidential campaign already defined by dramatic turns. GOP delegates cheered wildly when Trump appeared onscreen backstage and then emerged in the arena, visibly emotional, as musician Lee Greenwood sang “God Bless the USA.” That was hours after the convention had formally nominated the former president to head the Republican ticket in November against Biden.
Trump, accompanied by a wall of Secret Service agents Monday night, did not address the hall — his acceptance speech is scheduled for Thursday — but smiled silently and occasionally waved as Greenwood sang. He eventually joined his newly announced running mate to listen to the night’s remaining speeches.
The raucous welcome underscored the depth of the crowd’s affection for the man who won the 2016 nomination as an outsider, at odds with the party establishment, but has vanquished all Republican rivals, silenced most conservative critics, and now commands loyalty up and down the party ranks.
“We must unite as a party, and we must unite as a nation,” said Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley, Trump’s handpicked party leader, as he opened Monday’s prime-time national convention session. “We must show the same strength and resilience as President Trump and lead this nation to a greater future.”
But Whatley and other Republican leaders made clear that their calls for harmony did not extend to Biden and Democrats, who find themselves still riven by worries that the 81-year-old is not up to the job of defeating Trump.
“Their policies are a clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values and our people,” said Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, welcoming the party to his battleground state, which Trump won in 2016 but lost to Biden four years ago.
Pennsylvania delegate John Fredericks had a simple recommendation for Tuesday’s immigration speakers, “Close the border. If you’re here illegally, get them out – now. That’s all I’m interested in. Get them out.”
Trump’s campaign chiefs designed the convention to feature a softer and more optimistic message, focusing on themes that would help a divisive leader expand his appeal among moderate voters and people of color.
In her first public appearance of the convention Tuesday morning, RNC co-chair Lara Trump encouraged more than 200 Pennsylvania delegates and guests to vote early. The guidance signaled a flip the party has made for this election, after the former president previously cast doubt on early and absentee ballots and urged same-day, in-person voting.
On Monday, a night devoted to the economy, delegates and a national TV audience heard from speakers the Trump campaign pitched as “everyday Americans” — a single mother talking about inflation, a union member who identified himself as a lifelong Democrat now backing Trump, a small business owner, among others.
Featured speakers also included Black Republicans who have been at the forefront of the Trump campaign’s effort to win more votes from a core Democratic constituency.
U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas said rising grocery and energy prices were hurting Americans’ wallets.
“We can fix this disaster,” Hunt said, by electing Trump and sending him “right back to where he belongs, the White House.”
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
New York Times reporter J. David Goodman in a recent report accused Republicans of having “seized on” the brutal murder of Jocelyn Nungaray in order to politicize border security. Goodman included quotes that framed Nungaray’s alleged killers as “remorseful” and criticized Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for supposedly not caring that young women “were raped.”
The June 25 report comes after two illegal aliens from Venezuela allegedly lured 12-year-old Nungaray under a bridge, stripped her naked to the waist, bound her, sexually assaulted her for two hours, strangled her to death, and dumped her body into shallow water nearby, according to the Houston Police Department and local news reports. The accused killers, Jose Pena Ramos, 26, and Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel, 21, were caught and released by Border Patrol agents after illegally crossing the southern border this year. They are both charged with capital murder.
Goodman referred to the alleged killers as “migrants” and inexplicably included the detail that Pena regretted sexually assaulting and killing a child.
“Daniel Werlinger, one of two defense lawyers appointed to represent Mr. Pena, described his client as ‘remorseful,’ saying that he ‘understands the gravity of the situation’ that he is in,” Goodman wrote. Goodman went on to criticize Republicans’ focus on the multiple child rapes and murders that have taken place as a result of the Biden administration’s openborderpolicies.
The Times report centered Democrat political operative Matt Angle’s claim that Abbott is not sincerely concerned over child rape but is instead using the issue for political gain.
“It’s all a performance for them,” Angle told the Times regarding Abbott’s call for law and order. “These guys don’t care about this 12-year-old or any 12-year-old.” Angle also claimed that Texans are “not threatened” by the border crisis. His comments stood in stark contrast to the reaction from Nungaray’s family.
“She was amazing, I still see her face in the back of my head every day, all day. I keep getting little signs about her throughout the days, and it’s been a very, very hard time for me and my family,” Nungaray’s mother said in a news conference.
Goodman, still, neglected to acknowledge that even one preventable child murder is too many.
“[D]espite a number of high-profile cases, studies have found that migrants commit fewer crimes than legal residents,” Goodman wrote. But the report contains no information regarding the “studies” cited, and Goodman did not return a request for comment.
A previous report from the Times cited data from 1970 to 2010 that made no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. A report from the Cato Institute reveals Goodman’s claim is misleading, stating, “[T]here is little data available about illegal immigrant criminality to answer this question. Most state governments do not record the immigration statuses of those who are convicted of crimes and federal census data on the incarcerated population do not identify illegal immigrants.”
Goodman’s focus on the overall crime rate failed to address concern over specific crimes committed by individuals whose entry into the United States was illegal in the first place. Republicans continue to argue these crimes are inherently preventable and Nungaray would not be dead if her killers had been detained by Border Patrol.
“Every single crime committed by an illegal alien invader is preventable,” former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli said in a recent statement to Congress. “Crime rates do not matter. Only the raw number of crimes and the harm caused by those crimes matter. Over 10 million illegal alien invaders have entered America since Joe Biden became our President and opened our borders.”
Monroe Harless is a summer intern at The Federalist. She is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science.
Vicious lawbreakers are able to enter the United States illegally because the Biden administration has a border policy by which criminal checks are done at the end of the process rather than at the beginning, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Newsmax on Tuesday. Lankford made the comments after a El Salvador man, who had been in prison in his own country for murder, and illegally fled to the U.S. was arrested over the weekend for the killing last year of a Maryland mother.
The White House announced Tuesday the Biden administration will soon permit certain spouses of U.S. citizens without legal status to apply for permanent residency and eventually, citizenship, a move that could affect some half a million people here illegally.
Lankford called the new policy “out of touch” telling “Wake Up America,” “this is something I have said all along.
“For years I’ve said we don’t know if people are fleeing from the law or if they are fleeing from poverty: We don’t know because [this administration is] not checking it, they are not evaluating it,” Lankford added.
“Any criminal checks they are doing for individuals are actually at the end of the process, years after they have been in the country rather than at the very beginning. This is one of the things I have fought for, to have a criminal check at the very beginning and turn people around immediately rather than release them into the country.”
What makes the new Biden policy even worse is he announced recently that “he is going to close down the border,” Lankford said, “but doesn’t do it, as it was just a public show [and he] is actually not enforcing that.
“And then he announces, Oh, we are also going to allow half a million people that are in the country illegally to now get a path to citizenship, which is just a big flag to everyone internationally to say, Get into the country as fast as you can, because we are going to give you citizenship.”
Biden just get worse with every move, according to Lankford.
“This has been a challenge of Biden all along,” he continued. “He has done 94, now 95 executive orders opening the border up and inviting more people to come and then announces that he is going to close the border down and actually does not.”
“Day after day they have said [in regards to illegal immigration] that basically what [former President Donald] Trump did was mean, and so now we’re going to open the border up. What I have said over and over again to this administration is following the law is not mean.”
“We are a nation of the rule of law,” he concluded, “so as crimes increase, as murders increase, as all these problems that happen are a direct result of a president saying, Well I’m going to try to do something fair for these individuals. Instead, let’s do something fair for the American people.”
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Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
Senate Republicans have united to block a bipartisan border security deal that many previously supported.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., plans to hold a vote on the bill Thursday but no Republican senators have expressed support, according to The Hill. The bill was endorsed by the National Border Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Schumer’s plan was a gimmick and he told President Joe Biden the GOP would not vote for it. McConnell previously called the bill a “huge success,” according to the report.
“I said to him,” McConnell told The Hill, “‘Mr. President, you caused this problem. There’s no legislation that allows the problem to be fixed. Why don’t you just allow what the previous administration was doing.'”
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who negotiated the bill and voted for it in February, said the vote was political theater designed to protect vulnerable Senate Democrats up for reelection.
“This is not trying to accomplish something,” Lankford said. “This is about messaging now. This is trying to poke Republicans rather than try to actually solve a problem.”
The legislation would reform the nation’s asylum laws and give the president power to shut down the border if migrant crossings average 4,000 per day.
Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Mitt Romney, R-Utah — who supported the bill in February — told The Hill they were undecided on how they would vote.
Schumer blamed Republicans of caving to former President Donald Trump, who opposed the bill, because Schumer claims Trump wants to make the border an issue going into the presidential election.
“This is the same bipartisan bill Republicans pushed for, then backed away when they got orders from President Trump [and] made an about-face turn and then voted no,” Schumer told The Hill.
Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif. said he would oppose the bill. Padilla also opposed the bill in February, because it did not offer any assistance to migrants.
A U.S. federal judge granted a preliminary injunction preventing Texas from enforcing the SB4 immigration law, which made it a crime to cross the Texas-Mexico border illegally.
U.S. District Judge David Ezra on Thursday halted the lawl’s enforcement, which was set to begin March 5, while the case continues to be litigated in court. Texas is being sued by the federal government and several immigration advocacy organizations. Ezra said in his statement that the federal government “will suffer grave irreparable harm” if the law took effect because it could inspire other states to pass their own immigration laws.
“SB 4 threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice,” Ezra wrote.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in December signed SB4 into law in the state’s most recent effort to stem the unprecedented flow of illegal border crossings coming through the Rio Grande from Mexico. After Abbott’s action, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas, and the Texas Civil Rights Project sued Texas on behalf of El Paso County. In January, the U.S. Department of Justice filed its own lawsuit with the two having since been combined.
Earlier in the month, Ezra gave indications that he would likely file an injunction when he scolded Texas lead attorney Ryan Walters saying, “A little more care, in fact maybe a lot more care, could have gone into the drafting of this statute.”
Adding that the law could result in every state writing immigration laws for themselves which could “turn us from the United States of America to a confederation of states.”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/2jmKXfRTHXhttps://t.co/ViZiWlqTX5
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.
Mexican and U.S. officials have agreed to work together more closely to tackle record migration at their shared border, the countries’ governments said in a joint statement Thursday, a day after high-level talks on stemming record numbers.
Following a visit to Mexico by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the countries said they would seek to strengthen a sponsorship initiative for Venezuelan, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Haitian migrants and look to tackle the root causes of migration.
The delegations, who are set to meet again in Washington next month, also discussed regularizing the situation of beneficiaries of the U.S. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program – the so-called Dreamers who were brought into the country illegally as children – and long-time undocumented Hispanic migrants living in the United States.
The talks came after the U.S. temporarily shuttered some border crossings to redeploy agents toward enforcement, sparking a trade slowdown and criticism by Republicans of the Biden administration’s border policies. Immigration and the border are expected to be top issues in the U.S. 2024 elections, where President Joe Biden, a Democrat, is running for a second term.
Earlier Thursday, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the two parties had agreed to keep border crossings open after the temporary closures.
“This agreement has been reached, the rail crossings and the border bridges are already being opened to normalize the situation,” Lopez Obrador told a morning press conference.
Lopez Obrador said Wednesday’s meetings with the U.S. delegation were “direct,” and he praised the Biden administration’s relationship with Mexico.
‘Faith in God’
More than half a million migrants this year crossed the dangerous Darien Gap jungle connecting South America with Central America – double last year’s record – with many fleeing crime, poverty and conflict to seek better prospects in the United States.
The latest of a series of caravans of migrants and asylum seekers, many with small children, is slowly walking across southern Mexico, heading towards the U.S border. Lopez Obrador estimated that the caravan counts some 1,500 people but some activists and local media have put the figure at 7,000.
“We have to have faith in God,” Honduran migrant Marvin Mejias said as he traveled with his son, who has had foot surgery. Mejias said he hoped the governments had reached a deal which would help him enter the U.S. and be able to work there.
Lopez Obrador said the issue of fentanyl, a powerful and deadly opioid that Mexican cartels have been trafficking into the U.S., was “hardly discussed” in Wednesday’s meeting.
The United States has been pressing Mexico to do more to combat fentanyl trafficking, while Mexico has been pushing for stronger U.S. controls to prevent U.S. firearms from reaching the powerful cartels.
One of the most unintentionally hilarious quotes from the media of 2023 appeared in Thursday’s edition of the Politico Playbook newsletter.
“The first reaction was shock,” an anonymous Washington Post reporter said, referring to a recent round of forced buyouts for nearly 250 staff writers and editors at the paper. “The Washington Post had done so well — was so profitable in the years of Trump, of Covid, and was owned by one of the richest people in the world … We’re talking about a ‘baby and the bath water,’ sort of ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach that left people really confused.”
Shorter version:Life was pretty great at the Post when we could run non-stop hysterical coverage of Donald Trump and an uncontrollable virus that scared everyone just in time for the election! Plus, we had a billionaire backer who gave it all his blessing! Those were the days…
To be sure, nobody should celebrate when a person loses their income. And that’s why I’m just as sorry for all of them as they would be for me if I lost my job. (It’s okay to laugh.)
It turns out that fomenting racial divisions, hyping up a worrisome pandemic, and perpetuating the Russia-collusion fake out was just a short-term business strategy. Who could’ve known?!
Now the Post is trying to recapture the magic with ridiculous stories like the one this week headlined, “Trump reprises dehumanizing language on undocumented immigrants, warns of ‘invasion.’” It had all the greatest hits.
Think of the children!: “During a campaign event in Reno, Nev.,” the article said, “the clear polling leader in the Republican race blamed President Biden for what he portrayed as a dangerous incursion on the homeland — although many migrants detained at the southern border are parents and children seeking protection, and studies show that undocumented immigrants are less likely than U.S. citizens to commit crimes.”
That’s a classic. Rather than acknowledge that, at minimum, Americans say in large majorities that the open Southern border is a serious problem that Biden and Democrats refuse to address, the Post, just as before, is fixated on reminding its readers that ackshully, many of the world’s destitute dumping themselves into our care are women and children, so have a heart, will ya?
Trump is Hitler!: Trump “accused them in a speech and in a social media post of ‘poisoning the blood’ of the country,” the story continued. “That language has caused alarm among some civil rights advocates and immigrant groups, who have compared it to the writings of Adolf Hitler.”
If at first you don’t succeed, heil, heil again. Perhaps there’s still some mileage in the Nazi charge. Biden’s campaign instructions for the media suggest there is.
The tried and true “claimed without evidence”!:“He is the first former U.S. president to be indicted on criminal charges and has been indicted in four cases,” the Post said. “Trump has denied wrongdoing and alleged without evidence that his four indictments and 91 charges are politically motivated.”
What made the Trump-era “claimed without evidence” so annoying before is that it was always used in reference to an expression of opinion, for which evidence isn’t needed to hold. That’s why it’s an opinion. But to use the grating, childish line in reference to a matter literally involving a political opposition’s prosecution of a former president for the supposed crimes of exercising his First Amendment rights and retaining government documents — which every president before him has done — is truly a work of art. Trump doesn’t need “evidence.” There’s extensively documented proof that it’s politically motivated. It’s on video!
It seems The Washington Post doesn’t have the income coming in anymore. Maybe a few more articles like that will do the trick.
For the last seven months, many wondered why the Covenant School shooter’s manifesto remained hidden. On March 27, a trans shooter massacred six people at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, including three 9-year-old children.
After several pages from the manifesto were leaked on Monday, those who suggested that politics were at play are feeling vindicated. The shooter ranted and raved about the “white privilege” of the students and referred to them as “crackers,” a racist term used to describe whites. It would be a miraculous coincidence if these details were unrelated to the Herculean effort to hide the manifesto from the public.
Although we only have a few pages, it doesn’t really matter what else the shooter wrote. Even if the shooter went on a racist rant against another demographic, she ultimately targeted white children for execution and did so based on their skin color.
War on ‘Whiteness’
This is yet another example of violence originating from the demonization of what the left calls “whiteness.” The Democratic Party suffers from a case of tunnel vision that causes them to deduce all the world’s problems from a single premise: “Whiteness” is evil. What was once an obscure social theory has proliferated into a belief system that has consumed all positions of authority on the left, including in politics, media, corporate America, and the academy. Everyone who voted for President Joe Biden doesn’t hate white people, obviously, but attacks on so-called “whiteness” are working well with a growing percentage of the left’s voters.
Hatred of “whiteness” has helped Democrats form unlikely alliances among their constituents. Consider the recent anti-Israel protests that were well attended by trans and abortion activists. By supporting abortion, transgenderism, and Palestine, they are embracing diametrically opposed worldviews. The left’s cultural agenda is deeply unpopular in the Muslim world.
Trans activists aren’t going to cozy up with militant Muslims because of shared views on the capital gains tax rate, and the left knows this. Uniting what should be warring political sects requires a powerful narrative. The left found the common enemy it needed in “whiteness.” Israel is considered whiter than Palestine, and Israelis are “colonizers.” Therefore, Israel is bad, and Palestine is good. It’s that simple for these people.
Some will suggest that anti-capitalist attitudes, radical gender ideology, abortion, or perhaps climate change are the issues that unite the left today. But that’s true only on the surface. Those issues are now inextricably linked to the supposed oppression of nonwhites at the behest of whites. To illustrate, let’s consider a handful of issues that galvanize the left.
Abortion and White Supremacy
According to the ACLU, pro-life attitudes are “rooted in white supremacy.” Media outlets allege that pro-life policies are racist because of the high rate of abortion among black women. They claim, therefore, that white men wish to exert control over black women through abortion restrictions. It never occurred to the legacy press that perhaps actual racists might instead prefer to limit the size of the black population through abortion.
Climate Racism
This issue is now discussed almost exclusively in terms of “climate justice,” “climate reparations” and “climate racism.” Not much else needs to be said here other than giving due consideration to the breakneck speed with which the left racialized this issue.
Capitalism and White Oppressors
Overthrowing meritocratic systems of “whiteness,” especially capitalism, is the linchpin of critical race theory and other offshoots of Marxism. Having failed to topple capitalism through class warfare, the left has intertwined its anti-capitalist attitude with its hatred of whites. Racial groups are innately more tribal than income brackets. Socioeconomic status is often transient, but skin color is not. The temptation to engage in race-based resentment is more alluring than class-based resentment. By combining the two, the left stands to gain at the expense of our social fabric as race relations rapidly deteriorate.
In discussing the state of black Americans under capitalism, Vox expresses a widely held belief on the left. It claims that “no amount of money can insulate them from marginalization or the everyday exhaustion of navigating America as a Black person.” This claim amounts to an unfalsifiable theory more absurd than any conspiracy ever embraced by anyone on the right.
Even black billionaires are “victims” who are “marginalized” through the vast conspiracy perpetrated by their “white oppressors.” The left ultimately uses these arguments as justification for ditching merit-based market economies in exchange for race-based transfers of wealth and other centrally planned economic hierarchies. In the new economic system, fashionable in-groups are rewarded through punitive taxes levied on unfashionable out-groups.
Replacing Whites Through Immigration
The intent behind the left’s policies on illegal and legal immigration is to dilute the power of undesirable voters who are most likely to elect Republicans, especially white men and married white women. This is so obvious it’s stunning that anyone could question it. For decades, the left has openly bragged about using demographic change as an electoral strategy. For some strange reason, however, the Southern Poverty Law Center thinks you’re racist if you’ve noticed their explicitly stated goal.
White Racism in Health Care
Virtually all differences in health outcomes are now blamed on white racism. The CDC echoes this sentiment on its website with long-winded and incoherent diatribes about “racism and health.” Cringeworthy banalities such as “health equity” represent the left’s latest rehashing of tired buzz phrases as they blame everyone’s health issues on white Americans and “structural racism.” The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is on board with this initiative, as you might imagine.
Gender Ideology and Oppressive Whites
Do a search for any variation of “transphobia and white supremacy.” You’ll lose a few IQ points by reading the articles, but the results speak for themselves. The male-female binary is being attributed not to one of the most basic facts of human biology but to “oppressive structures created by whites.”
Transwomen become angry and wish D_eath on Transphobic people. They need to up the dose of hormones on this one. 😱 🔉 pic.twitter.com/Uos14nLgHc
These sophomoric theories masquerading as insights might be amusing if only the attitudes weren’t incredibly dangerous. The left now uses “white supremacy,” a term once used to describe the ideology of small neo-Nazi groups, to describe what it sees as a vast network of oppressive systems in which all white people are complicit.
Laying the world’s problems at the feet of one group of people is how genocidal urges originate. For anyone suggesting that this is hyperbole, consider that climate change is described as an existential threat to the very existence of human beings. We are told that our physical and mental health are subject to the racist structures built by whites. In other words, according to the left, your survival, and the very survival of humanity itself, is largely dependent on “correcting whiteness.” There could be no characterization of a race more damning than this.
Historically Unparalleled Racism
The scope of this anti-white sentiment surpasses that of previous theories that gave rise to wholesale discrimination and violence throughout history. After all, has any race of people ever been blamed for making Earth uninhabitable? Has any race of people ever been blamed for everything from heat waves to heart attacks?
There’s another strange characteristic that sets this movement apart. Whites are participating in their own indictment in proportions previously unseen. In fact, whites themselves are largely responsible for creating these attitudes — both because self-loathing personalities are prevalent on the left and because white Democrats believe this strategy will secure the nonwhite vote in perpetuity. Suffice it to say that they haven’t given much thought to the long-term consequences.
Escalating Toward Violence
The left claims all of this is a “racist conspiracy theory.” They’ll continue to blame white Americans for every problem under the sun, then cry foul when you notice. If this environment is not a catalyst for future violence, then please tell me what is. There are no problems left to blame on whites — the left cannot escalate the accusations. Future escalations can come only by way of penalties for these imaginary misdeeds, and we know how that story goes.
Rank-and-file voters of the Democratic Party will determine whether this anti-white sentiment continues to thrive. If they continue to reward politicians for this repulsive and incendiary behavior, widespread violence is inevitable. It’s just a matter of time.
B.L Hahn is a freelance writer covering topics including culture, politics and economics.
On Oct. 18, the intrepid Daily Wire reporter Luke Rosiak outed a former Palestinian spokeswoman and open Hamas supporter as an employee of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security tasked with “vetting” immigrants and asylum seekers. He followed up to report Nejwa Ali is now on administrative leave — no word on whether that includes full pay and benefits.
UPDATE: DHS/USCIS says the former PLO spox has been placed on administrative leave from her job vetting immigrants.
PLUS NEW AUDIO: She reaffirmed her allegiance to Hamas THIS AFTERNOON, saying of hang-gliders: "I abso-fucking-lutely celebrate them, asshole, fuck you!" https://t.co/BJry1EisZepic.twitter.com/FPrQbjAPak
Of course, it’s a no-brainer that someone who supports terrorism should not be employed by any national security agency, let alone given the power to determine who enters the U.S. At the same time, suspending Ali while probably still paying her is just a symbol, while the underlying policy of ushering across our border people who hate America remains firm. It’s tokenism.
Just consider the fact that Ali’s fellow DHS employees donated 70 percent of their 2020 political contributions to Democrats. If she does end up out of this job, the odds are another person who hates America will replace her. Democrats as a party now openly state their hatred for America by constantly smearing it as “racist” and “oppressive.” Their immigration policies admit similarly-minded people, starting with the reality that anyone who enters this country illegally thereby demonstrates contempt for the United States and its people.
Ali’s own history is more proof. Rosiak writes that Ali “is from Dearborn, Michigan, a hotbed of unassimilated immigrants where thousands reportedly took to the streets in support of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.” Dearborn’s mayor immediately responded to Hamas’s barbaric attacks on unarmed women and children by blaming…Israel.
Dearborn is approximately half comprised of immigrants from majority-Muslim countries. Their immigration poses obvious national security concerns given the propensity of these groups to favor and excuse terrorism, as Mayor Abdullah Hammoud did. Not surprisingly, to anyone who knows politics, Dearborn is considered a “Democrat stronghold” in Michigan, a presidential election swing state.
Hamas is committed to eradicating Jews. It’s rational to suspect they would send members to the United States to perpetrate atrocities here. With immigration and asylum vetters like Ali, they wouldn’t even have to avoid getting caught crossing our open southern border, as millions of border crossers have since Joe Biden took office. They can turn themselves in, get released inside the United States, and stay indefinitely. Eventually, they can even get citizenship!
This isn’t speculation. Border authorities are aware terrorists have gained access to the United States, and an open border only makes their goals easier to achieve. Terrorists here have already formed sleeper cells, and not only against Jewish targets.
As Todd Bensman reported in 2020, “Iranian avengers, in the form of Quds Force-supported Hezbollah operatives of the clandestine ‘Unit 910,’ are stationed in cities across America, set to activate pending distant command on target lists they have painstakingly developed over time. Hezbollah operatives also are positioned throughout Latin America, where American officials and economic interests are ubiquitous.”
A September DHS report notes that, due to historic increases in illegal U.S. entrances during Biden’s presidency, U.S. officials have “encountered a growing number of individuals in the Terrorist Screening Data Set (TSDS), also known as the ‘watchlist.’” Obviously, those are the potential terrorists border officials encounter. Since Biden took office, they’ve watched an estimated 1.2 million enter they haven’t been able to apprehend. Exactly who was in that group, and what were their motives? We have no idea.
HOW ABOUT ALL THE “GOT AWAYS”??????? How many of them could be these Hamas plants determined to continue their quest for America’s destruction?
Of course, we also don’t know how many people U.S. officials haven’t detected who entered the United States across its completely unenforced border. Democrats’ open border is a national security disaster, and it’s far more dangerous than one open terrorist supporter vetting immigrants.
This same tokenism dynamic also applies to Biden himself. Getting rid of him, whether through internal Democrat struggle sessions or the publicly decaying man’s nearing natural death, will not solve America’s problems. It will be merely a symbol change instead of an underlying reality change if he’s replaced with someone who runs similar policies.
The policies that have led to our nation’s failure on multiple fronts are the problem, not the figureheads representing them. Our national security is in danger not through random accidents but because of failing to enforce our immigration laws and politicizing the U.S. military. Those are policy choices. So are engaging in noncritical foreign wars, trying to inflate away our bankrupt welfare state’s increasing piles of debt, and setting up moral hierarchies between Americans based on their skin color and sexual activities.
The policies are the problem, no matter who fronts them. Although it’s the right thing to do, merely getting rid of Ali and replacing her with another college-educated America-hater solves no underlying problems. Neither does getting rid of Biden and replacing him with another leftist like Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom.
The underlying problem is the systemic America hatred that fuels people like Ali and Biden and places their ideology in positions of power. Their threat to us all begins to end with prioritizing America’s legitimate interests over the left’s nihilistic self-hatred.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” 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 several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
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
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
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.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is sending Texas National Guard troops to the southern border to hold off what he declared in a letter to President Joe Biden to be an “invasion” of illegal migrants.
“I officially declared an invasion at our border because of Biden’s policies,” Abbott said in a post on the social media site X on Wednesday. “We deployed the Texas National Guard, Department of Public Safety, and local law enforcement. We are building a border wall, razor wire, and marine barriers. We are also repelling migrants.”
Abbott also accused federal border agents of cutting state installations of razor wire in Eagle Pass on Wednesday, allowing the illegal migrants access to the U.S. side of the border.
“Texas installed razor wire in Eagle Pass to stop illegal crossings. Today the Biden Admin CUT that wire, opening the floodgates to illegal immigrants,” Abbott wrote in a separate post Wednesday. “I immediately deployed more Texas National Guard to repel illegal crossings and install more razor wire.”
“Your inaction has led to catastrophic consequences,” the letter said. “Under your watch, America is suffering the highest volume of illegal immigration in the history of our country. This past year, more than 2 million immigrants tried to enter the country illegally, coming from more than 100 countries across the globe.”
Abbott said in the letter that due to Biden’s failures, the United Nations named the U.S.-Mexico border the “deadliest land crossing” in the world.
“Texans are paying the price for your failure,” the letter reads. “Ranches are being ripped apart, and homes are vulnerable to intrusion. Our border communities are regularly disrupted by human traffickers and bailouts. Deadly fentanyl is crossing the porous border to such a degree that it is now the leading cause of death for citizens between the ages of 18 and 45.”
Abbott’s move comes after installing razor wire and buoys in the Rio Grande River, which the Biden administration challenged in court as a violation of the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act, the Washington Examiner reported.
Democrat state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who is running against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for his Senate seat, posted Wednesday that the citizens in the area were “fighting back” against Abbott’s “inhumane” actions.
“The citizens and community of Eagle Pass are fighting back against the inhumane treatment of migrants under Operation Lone Star,” the post read. “Texans want real solutions to address border security and reform our broken immigration system. The days of Cruz’s negligence must come to an end.”
Unveiling his 2024 presidential campaign border policy Monday in Eagle Pass, Texas, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed to “turn the screws on sanctuary jurisdictions” and “kneecap the cartels.”
“We’re gonna turn the screws on sanctuary jurisdictions,” DeSantis said at a campaign event, which aired live on Newsmax. “They get a lot of money. All these localities and states get a lot of money from the feds. They get grants. They get all that.
“You know, we’ll make sure to turn the screws so that it pays to follow the law, and it doesn’t pay to violate the law.”
It is not just about money with the Democrat-run cities and states that are “virtue signaling” with their open immigration policies in violation of U.S. law — and in defiance of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — it is also about public safety, according to DeSantis.
“What will happen is you’ll have somebody who’s in the country illegally, they’ll commit a serious crime, they’ll serve a prison sentence; when they’re done with their prison sentence, a state or a locality, that sanctuary will not notify ICE that they’re getting out of prison, because if they do ICE can take them and send them back,” DeSantis lamented.
“Instead they release them back into the community. How is that something that’s acceptable? It’s not.”
President Joe Biden has taken the “virtue signaling” that started by anti-Trump forces during the Trump administration to whole new depths and the open borders must be closed, DeSantis vowed.
“Joe Biden’s dereliction of duty has made our southern border a disaster zone,” DeSantis said. “The Biden administration is the critical link in an illegal transnational human smuggling syndicate.
“For decades, leaders from both parties have produced empty promises on border security, and now it is time to act to stop the invasion once and for all.
“As president, I will declare a national emergency on day one and will not rest until we build the wall, shut down illegal entry, and win the war against the drug cartels. No excuses. We will get it done.”
A key piece of DeSantis’ plan is declaring the Mexico drug and human trafficking cartels Transnational Criminal Organizations in a federal order-led effort to “kneecap the cartels.”
“We’re going to be leaning in against these drug cartels,” DeSantis said. “I think that they are killing a lot of Americans. They are effectively in control of this border to begin with, and part of the reason it’s gotten this way is they don’t get any pushback.
“They’re able to just do this with impunity, and so we will designate them either Transnational Criminal organization or foreign terrorist organization. Chip and I are talking about that.
“The bottom line is we’re going to give them a designation so that we can unleash more federal power to be able to kneecap the cartels.”
Chip refers to his early endorser Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who once helped run the presidential campaign for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and is currently active among the House conservatives pushing back against Biden’s open border policies.
“Washington’s status quo approach to border security is one of the biggest failures of our generation,” Roy, speaking before DeSantis, said. “This crisis has decimated ranchers, killed Americans with dangerous narcotics, placed migrants in horrific situations from sex trafficking to death, and placed American national security at risk to China and cartels.
“Texans and our courageous DPS Troopers deserve credit for standing in the breach created by Joe Biden. We need a president in the White House who is not afraid to use the full weight of his office to build the wall, stop the flow, and force Congress to send a bill to sign to fix the laws once and for all.
“Ron DeSantis not only has a strong plan to secure the border — in line with our Texas plan — he has the courage to finally deliver results.”
Notably, DeSantis has been one of the leading men in America in forcing sanctuary cities and states to take on the border crisis in their own backyards, having sent migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and California.
There is little evidence that the founders advocated for a free-for-all, open-door immigration policy.
From the very beginning, even in the absence of immigration law, the founders knew America had to set boundaries. Their top three concerns were the qualifications, assimilation, and allegiance of newcomers. The founders emphasized the moral character and contributions newcomers would bring.
Not only should new migrants have good moral character, but they should also place “high importance to the respectability and character of the American name” and do their best to “preserve its good fame from injury,” as Rep. James Jackson, a Democratic-Republican from Georgia, said in 1790. The founding generation didn’t want convicts and criminals as new immigrants.
George Washington preferred skilled new immigrants, such as “useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions.” James Madison wanted the “worthy part of mankind to come and settle amongst us,” so they can “increase the wealth and strength of the community; and those who acquire the rights of citizenship, without adding to the strength or wealth of the community are not the people we are in want of.”
How can a new immigrant increase the wealth and strength of a community? Rep. John Laurance clarified:
Every person who comes among us must do one or the other; if he brings money, or other property with him, he evidently increases the general mass of wealth, and if he brings an able body, his labor will be productive of national wealth, and an addition to our domestic strength. Consequently, every person, rich or poor, must add to our wealth and strength, in a greater or less degree.
Assimilation Strengthens and Protects
The United States was founded upon specific ideas and moral principles, as expressed by the eloquent words of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson believed that “it is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible in matters which they must of necessity transact together.”
He feared that if new immigrants believed different ideas, then “with their language, they will transmit [them] to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”
Benjamin Franklin shared Jefferson’s concerns. Some people today accuse Benjamin Franklin of being anti-immigration because of the disparaging words he said about German immigrants. In fact, Franklin was anything but opposed to immigration. He published the first German newspaper in America, the Philadelphische Zeitung, in 1732. Franklin was not against immigration; he was concerned that a lack of assimilation would be harmful to immigrants’ happiness and damning to the unity and longevity of the republic.
George Washington expressed a similar concern: that immigration does not benefit America when immigrants congregate and “retain their language, habits and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them.”
Instead, he firmly believed that new immigrants or their descendants should, “by an intermixture with our people … get assimilated to our customs, measures and laws: in a word, soon become one people.”
Immigrants Must Pledge Allegiance
No matter what drives them to America, some immigrants retain residual loyalty to their countries and cultures of birth. To become Americans, the founders believed immigrants needed to give up prior allegiances and pledge an oath of fidelity to the U.S. In Alexander Hamilton’s words:
The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.
John Quincy Adams, in an 1819 letter to Moritz von Furstenwarther, a German citizen who was considering moving to the U.S. and had asked Adams for a job, stated that the U.S. is a land “not of privileges, but of equal rights.” Thus, Adams warned Furstenwarther that new immigrants like him:
Must cast off the European skin, never to resume it. They must look forward to their posterity, rather than backward to their ancestors; they must be sure that whatever their own feelings may be, those of their children will cling to the prejudices of this country, and will partake of that proud spirit.
Citizenship Isn’t Cheap
While some founders believed an oath of allegiance and a declaration to stay in America were sufficient for citizenship, others did not want to give out citizenship too cheaply.
They pointed out that some foreign sailors had voted in Philadelphia’s assembly elections after taking oaths of allegiance and then left America, having never intended to stay. This kind of practice not only results in election fraud but also threatens the “safety of a republic” because a foreigner who rejects American principles and ideas would vote against them.
Therefore, some founders thought “some security for their [immigrants’] fidelity and allegiance was requisite besides the bare oath.”The additional security the founders sought was property ownership or residency.
Property ownership has been used to distinguish citizens from aliens since the Roman Empire. Some founders wanted to “see the title of a citizen of America as highly venerated and respected as was that of a citizen of old Rome.”
During the House of Representatives debate on immigration law in Philadelphia in 1790, the majority of the founders regarded it as essential that an individual have a period of residency in the U.S. prior to gaining citizenship. Residency achieved two purposes, according to Rep. Michael Stone:
First, that he should have an opportunity of knowing the circumstances of our Government, and in consequence thereof, shall have admitted the truth of the principles we hold. Second, that he shall have acquired a taste for this kind of Government. And in order that both these things may take place, in such a full manner as to make him worthy of admission into our society.
Founders extensively debated how long residency should be. Some suggested two years, while others suggested five years or even longer. But all agreed the residency requirement should be long enough to “give a man an opportunity of esteeming the Government from knowing its intrinsic value,” which “was essentially necessary to assure us of a man’s becoming a good citizen.”
Hamilton, the most famous immigrant to America, opposed limiting any congressional office to either native-born Americans or immigrants who met the residency requirement. People suspected later that he was trying to make himself eligible for the U.S. presidency.
Hamilton’s actual argument at the Constitutional Convention showed he was more concerned about ordinary immigrants. He pointed out, “Persons in Europe of moderate fortunes will be fond of coming here, where they will be on a level with the first citizens. I move that the section be so altered as to require merely citizenship and inhabitancy.”
The majority overruled Hamilton’s proposal by requiring future U.S. House Representatives to meet a seven-year residency requirement, U.S. senators a nine-year residency, and presidents a 14-year residency.
Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy confronted the Biden administration on Tuesday over its claim that illegal immigration has decreased by more than 90%.
On Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that under President Joe Biden’s leadership, illegal immigration has declined sharply — by “more than 90%.”
“When it comes to illegal migration, you’ve seen it come down by more than 90%, and that’s because of the actions that this president has taken,” she claimed.
The “more than 90%” claim received a lot of attention, but no follow-up at Monday’s press briefing. So on Tuesday, Doocy took it upon himself to ask Jean-Pierre exactly from where she derived that figure.
“Where did that number come from?” he asked, noting that Customs and Border Protection says that illegal migration has increasedcompared to last year.
Jean-Pierre began speaking over Doocy, then chided him, saying, “If the dramatics could come down a little bit.”
“What’s dramatic about asking a question about —” Doocy shot back, when Jean-Pierre interrupted him again.
“I was speaking to the parolee program,” she said. “As you know, the president put in place a parolee program to deal with certain countries on ways that we can limit illegal migration. And the data has shown us that it has gone down by more than 90%. That was what I was speaking to.”
When Doocy attempted to respond, Jean-Pierre refused to let him speak and moved to a different reporter.
DOOCY: "You said yesterday that when it comes to illegal migration, you've seen it come down by more than 90%. Where did that number come from?"
JEAN-PIERRE: "If the dramatics could come down a little bit…"
It’s true, according to Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin, that immigration numbers from countries in the parolee program improved — but that improvement was offset by increasing migration from countries not in the program.
“There was a window of time earlier this year where encounters with Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans did temporarily dip 90% after a policy change, but other countries, like China, shot up over 800%. Illegal crossings, including Venezuelans, back at peak highs now,” Melugin explained.
In fact, when Biden announced the parolee program about four months ago, Melugin predicted the Biden administration would use the program control the optics of the border crisis while simultaneously exacerbating it.
“This new policy will almost certainly reduce *recorded* monthly border crossing numbers because these nationalities are crossing in massive numbers,” he explained in January. “However, migrants not eligible for parole will have no incentive to turn themselves in now, & will evade as ‘gotaways’.”
Indeed, on the same day that Jean-Pierre claimed immigration had improved, the Border Patrol announced that more than 22,000 migrants had been apprehended in the previous 72 hours.
05/02/23: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre www.youtube.com
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TUCSON, Ariz. — Kevin McCarthy began to build the case for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment this week with the California lawmaker’s first trip to the border as House speaker. Talking to reporters, with the southeast Arizona border wall serving as his backdrop, McCarthy outlined the myriad crises plaguing the nation due to unchecked migration and charged the DHS secretary with lying to the public.
“Our border, we don’t even have operational control of it anymore,” McCarthy said. “This is why I will continue to investigate what has gone wrong here and we will hold people accountable. And that includes Secretary Mayorkas.”
In an exclusive interview with The Federalist after the press conference, McCarthy offered no timeline for a potential impeachment inquiry and maintained that the process depends on what lawmakers find over the coming weeks.
“You never do impeachment for political purposes,” McCarthy said. “If something rises to that level,” he explained, “we will follow it wherever it goes.”
McCarthy led the congressional delegation with four GOP freshman, kicking off what will be a top priority for the new Republican majority under the second half of President Joe Biden’s term. Every House committee is expected to visit the southwest border in the ensuing months. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., already introduced an article of impeachment against the DHS chief on Feb. 1.
In November, McCarthy demanded that Mayorkas resign over the border crisis or face impeachment in the lower chamber once Republicans took over. Mayorkas has remained defiant while the cartels run rampant. A coalition of 21 attorneys general sent a letter to the Biden administration last week demanding that Mexican drug cartels be designated as terrorist organizations.
Days before the speaker’s border trip this week, DHS staffed up to face House impeachment proceedings, entering a multimillion-dollar contract with a liberal law firm that has a history of left-wing donations.
“You cannot tell us this is secure when more than 42 percent of gottaways come through here,” McCarthy said on Thursday. “You cannot tell us this border’s secure when now there is enough fentanyl in this country to kill every single American more than 20 times over.”
“This has got to stop,” the speaker added. “And it starts with the secretary of Homeland. Stop lying to the American public. Tell them the truth [about] what’s happening and change back the regulation that we had before so our border can be secure.”
The White House hit McCarthy’s border trip as a partisan publicity stunt with a Wednesday statement. “Solutions are what President Biden is focused on, and his is plan working,”said Ian Sams, a White House spokesman. “House Republicans would be wise to join him to work together to strengthen our immigration system and fund border security.”
Biden’s first border visit was a sanitized tour in January, with officials clearing the camps in El Paso before the president’s arrival. Biden proceeded to call on Congress to pass immigration reform at his annual State of the Union last week and claimed his border measures were working.
“We’ve launched a new border plan last month. Unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97 percent as a consequence of that,” Biden said. “But American border problems won’t be fixed until Congress acts.”
ACTS ON WHAT????????? Fund what???????? The Wall has been funded since Clinton. Finish the Wall. We’ve got the materials. Put it up.
Contrary to his claims the border is secure, data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shows otherwise.
Law enforcement reported more than 156,000 migrant encounters in January. While lower than the record of nearly 252,000 encounters in December, 156,000 is still higher than the almost 155,000 in January last year and the 78,000 the same month in 2021 — and way higher than the less than 37,000 in FY 2020. In fact, it’s an all-time high for the coldest month of the year. Even bundled-up reporters shivered under cloudless skies in the high desert winds when lawmakers ran late on Thursday.
A Deadly Crisis
While the Biden administration tries to argue there’s nothing to see on the southern border, Alex Espinosa, the director of a funeral home 15 miles east of McCarthy’s press conference, says otherwise.
“During Trump’s administration, I picked up four border crossers,” Espinosa told The Federalist in his conference room overlooking the border wall. “Right now, I can’t even tell you how many. There’s more deaths. Way more deaths.”
Most, Espinosa said, die from exposure to the elements or fentanyl. He explained the numbers picked up “right after Biden won.”
“Never, never, never, ever have I seen it this bad,” Espinosa told The Federalist. “I’ve probably buried 40 kids.”
A reformed ex-convict himself, Espinosa, 61, served time behind bars for drug smuggling 30 years ago. He now hands out free Narcan, a medication known to save lives in the case of opioid overdose, at services, saying it has become a hot commodity. The local health department replenished his stockpile after it ran out during a single funeral for a recent 23-year-old who overdosed. His own son has also struggled with opioid addiction.
In Naco, a town on the border five miles south of Espinosa’s funeral home, locals were shy about the crisis. A ranch hand working in a field with a pair of day laborers from across the border offered only his first name, Greg, and said he often sees helicopter activity but described the overall area as tame. Another pair of women operating a local nonprofit in the community denied the area even faced issues.
Espinosa, however, who conducts the funerals for the border crisis victims, said locals often feel too intimidated to speak openly about the dangers their neighborhoods face. Despite his Mexican heritage, Espinosa has been tarred as a racist, and his truck was burned after he challenged the mayor of Douglas over the leader’s plans to declare the border town a sanctuary city.
“They need to finish the wall,” Espinosa said frankly, warning that until then, the area would not be safe to walk around at night.
McCarthy told The Federalist on Thursday at the conclusion of his congressional tour that DHS needs to complete the wall with modern technology as originally planned.
“You gotta finish this,” McCarthy said, pointing at the wall. “Finish the technology you haven’t hooked up — the lights, the sensors. There’s places in the wall that’s not done yet.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Republicans convened the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Tuesday to evaluate the “front lines of the border crisis” but Democrats were less than cooperative in the GOP’s efforts to hear from two chief patrol agents.
“President Biden and his administration have created the worst border crisis in American history,” committee chairman Republican Rep. James Comer said in his opening remarks.
Comer and several other GOP members on the committee pointed to President Joe Biden as the reason millions of migrants, including suspected terrorists, illegally cross the border. Witnesses — CBP Chief Patrol Agent of the Tucson sector John Modlin and Chief Patrol Agent of the Rio Grande Valley sector Gloria Chavez — confirmed this in their testimonies.
“In the Tucson sector, interviewing people post-arrest, what became the most common response [from migrants] was that they believed that when the administration changed that the law changed and policy changed and that there was an open border,” Modlin said.
The chiefs agreed that border security measures like the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (often referred to as the “Remain in Mexico” policy), which Biden eliminated with the stroke of a pen at the beginning of his term, were “effective” at combatting the staggering number of illegal migrants flooding the border.
And staggering those numbers are.
“We went from what I would describe as unprecedented to a point where I don’t have the correct adjective to describe what’s going on,” Modlin said.
Democrats Opt for Smears over Accountability
House Democrats, who had two years to give Biden’s disastrous border the oversight it required but failed to do so, were less interested in asking the CBP officials questions and far more interested in criticizing Republicans for suggesting that Democrats’ lax border policies are responsible for the worst migrant influx in U.S. history.
Before the hearing, the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security tried to obstruct oversight by Republicans by keeping CBP officials from testifying. Democrats joined in their attempts to taint the GOP’s investigation into the border crisis with smears that Republicans wanted “to amplify white nationalist conspiracy theories instead of a comprehensive solution to protect our borders and strengthen our immigration system.”
The “QAnon caucus” and “anti-immigrant” name-calling continued in the hearing after ranking Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin launched another round of politically motivated attacks in his opening remarks.
The same Democrats who bought into and promoted the border patrol whipping lie claimed that Republicans “demonize migrants” and refuse to fund the border through Democrats’ omnibus wish list. Washington D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton even went so far as to blame the GOP for the El Paso Walmart shooting.
Despite Democrats’ attempts to turn the hearing into a political circus painting the border crisis as a funding problem, instead of a policy problem, the witnesses confirmed that the U.S. southern border is comprised in a way it’s never been in the past.
Cartels ‘Leveraging Chaos’
A large part of the Republicans’ border inquiry centered on the Biden administration’s failure to secure the border against cartels, which Chavez said have become “more active” in trafficking humans and drugs into the U.S. in “recent years.”
“Cartels are leveraging chaos at the border. They are using their human smuggling operations to overwhelm U.S. Border Patrol agents with large migrant groups, often placing migrants in peril,” Comer said. “They create these diversions at the expense of human life to traffic dangerous narcotics like fentanyl, across our southern border. These deadly drugs then make their way into communities across the United States and poison our neighbors and our children.”
“No one crosses the border in Tucson sector without going through the cartels,” Modlin confirmed in his testimony. Chavez testified the same about her district.
“[Migrants are] pretty much confined to whatever those cartels require to be able to see their family member again,” she said.
Democrats tried to claim that the problems at the border are a “humanitarian crisis, not a criminal one.” Yet, none of them mentioned the connection between cartels’ illegal activities and migrants, including the criminals’ lack of care for the men, women, and children who have to bribe them for passage to the U.S.
“What my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are failing to recognize is in order to get here, [migrants] have to deal with a group of people that is not interested in human rights. They place no value on humanity. If they can make money on it, they will exploit it,” Republican Rep. Kelly Armstrong said. “I think one of the mistakes we make quite often is we talk about [cartels] like they’re drug cartels. They’re in the business of making money and whatever the path of least resistance is, is how they make money.”
Cartels’ billion-dollar migrant smuggling business, Modlin and Chavez said, deliberately puts illegal border crossers in danger so Border Patrol agents will leave their posts to conduct rescue missions.
“There are a lot of migrants out there that are out there requiring rescue. So, a lot of times, our agents are out there rescuing people, being task-saturated in rescues, abetting frontline operations, so therefore cartels take advantage of that,” Chavez said.
Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the proliferation of fentanyl in the U.S. is a serious issue that needs addressing. What the representatives did not agree on is that it’s Biden’s policies that embolden the cartels to manufacture and smuggle fentanyl into the states.
Multiple Democrat representatives tried to blame the proliferation of fentanyl on U.S. citizens who are often selected to bring the drugs to the United States. Rep. Katie Porter even had the audacity to argue that because CBP is seizing more fentanyl now than it was before 2020, border security under Biden is a “success.”
“Regardless of who’s bringing it across the border, U.S. citizens, ports of entry, between ports of entry, not ports of entry, the drugs that are killing people in my communities are being made by the cartels,” Armstrong pointed out.
Modlin and Chavez both said their agents are overworked and overwhelmed by the crisis. Unless there’s a national policy shift on the border, the historic crisis is only going to get worse.
“What happens on the border affects the entirety of the country,” Modlin said.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Such a smash success has Joe Biden’s presidency been so far that even the Chinese are sending up balloons. That’s more or less what Biden will say, over and over, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. The economy is humming. Inflation is cooling. Electric vehicle sales are raging. There has never been a more orderly southern border.
It will all sound very scary to viewers who will rightly begin to question their own sanity. Or perhaps it will make you feel like everyone else is getting ahead while you’re inexplicably falling behind.
Don’t panic. When confronted with these anxieties, there are steps you can take to re-ground yourself in reality. For instance, when Biden says something confusing — something like, “Folks! Energy costs are down, folks!” — remember to yourself that this is a lie. As of Monday, national gas prices averaged higher per gallon than a year before. It’s more than a dollar per gallon higher than it was in January 2021, the month Biden was inaugurated.
Biden will likely also mention “steps” he has taken to control the unabated flow of hundreds of thousands of destitute migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In that stupefying moment, take a deep breath and refer to this chart maintained by Biden’s own administration, showing that December had the highest number of illegal aliens encountered by border agents — ever. That month, there were more than 250,000 migrants who unlawfully crossed into the U.S. The month before, almost 235,000. That’s nearly half a million migrants throwing themselves into the care of the American taxpayer in just two months’ time. They openly say they’re here because of Biden.
Democrat congressmen will leap to their feet and clap with ferocity when Biden says inflation is down. (Or even that higher prices are actually a great thing!) He might even say costs increased less than 6 percent from this time last year. If you feel a spinning sensation, close your eyes, count to 10, then look at this data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The less-than-6 stat is if you exclude food and energy prices.
In other words, if you don’t account for the things you depend on to survive, inflation really isn’t that bad! By itself, food cost is actually up more than 10 percent. It’s probably close to 12 — and maybe much more. Energy is up more than 7 percent. Mind you, this has been a year of rising costs, where each month it’s been more expensive to simply live than it was the same time a year before.
Biden’s vertigo-inducing speech will surely go on for what feels like an eternity, earning applause for assertions that are the exact opposite of reality. But remember, this too shall pass.
FIRST ON FOX: A coalition of 20 states and a top conservative legal group is suing the Biden administration over its recently-expanded humanitarian parole program that allows tens of thousands of migrants from designated countries a month into the U.S. — arguing that the program is unlawful. The lawsuit, filed by Texas and America First Legal in the Southern District of Texas, is joined by 19 additional states who are seeking to block the Biden administration’s parole program which allow up to 30,000 migrants from Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela into the U.S. each month.
The Biden administration announced the program for Venezuelans in October, which allowed a limited number to fly directly into the U.S. as long as they had not entered illegally, had a sponsor in the U.S. already and passed certain checks.
Earlier this month, President Biden announced that the program would be expanding to include Haitians, Nicaraguans and Cubans, and that the program would allow up to 30,000 a month into the U.S. It was announced alongside an expansion of Title 42 expulsions to include those nationalities.
Around 60 recently arrived Venezuelan migrants are seen entering a shelter at Bellevue early Wednesday morning, Oct. 12, 2022, in Manhattan, New York. ((Luiz C. Ribeiro/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images))
“We anticipate this action is going to substantially reduce the number of people attempting to cross our southwest border without going through a legal process,” he said.
In the lawsuit, led by Texas and America First Legal and joined onto by 19 additional Republican-led states, plaintiffs argue that the program is illegal given the “exceptionally limited” parole power available to the federal government. The lawsuit notes that parole is limited by Congress to be used on a “case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit” — a standard which the lawsuit says the program fails to meet.
“The parole program established by the Department fails each of the law’s three limiting factors. It is not case-by-case, is not for urgent humanitarian reasons, and advances no significant public benefit. Instead, it amounts to the creation of a new visa program that allows hundreds of thousands of aliens to enter the United States who otherwise have no basis for doing so. This flouts, rather than follows, the clear limits imposed by Congress.”
The Biden administration has said the program is one of a number of ways it is expanding lawful migration pathways as a way to combat the ongoing migrant surge at the border that has seen historic numbers hit the border each month –and is calling on Congress to pass a broader immigration reform bill. Separately, it has used humanitarian parole to allow Afghans and Ukrainians into the U.S. in the last year. But conservative critics have said the latest program is illegal, and facilitates rather than stops the migrant surge.
The lawsuit says that the program is also unlawful as it did not engage in the notice-and-comment rulemaking required by the Administrative Procedure Act — by which a number of immigration policies have been at least temporarily struck down in recent years. It also argues that the states “face substantial irreparable harms from the Department’s abuse of its parole authority, which allow potentially hundreds of thousands of additional aliens to enter each of their already overwhelmed territories.”
“Every state in America, especially border states like Texas, is being crushed by the impacts of illegal immigration,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “The Biden open borders agenda has created a humanitarian crisis that is increasing crime and violence in our streets, overwhelming local communities, and worsening the opioid crisis. This unlawful amnesty program, which will invite hundreds of thousands of aliens into the U.S. every year, will only make this immigration crisis drastically worse.”
The lawsuit also marks the latest in a flurry of legal challenges to the Biden administration’s policies by America First Legal — a conservative legal group launched by former Trump White House official Stephen Miller, who he described as being “at the forefront of the legal battle to save America’s borders from complete annihilation at the hands of this lawless administration.”
Miller labeled the Biden program as “pre-amnesty for what would be illegal aliens before they even arrive at our border.” He also compared it to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which granted protection from deportation to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors.
“This is a dramatic escalation in the open borders crusade – not only is Biden freely admitting illegal aliens who arrive at our borders, but he is now going to foreign countries to pre-approve innumerable illegal aliens to flood into our country without any legal basis whatsoever. It is illegal, unconstitutional, and contemptible,” he said.
The states joining onto the lawsuit with Texas are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The new parole program came after more than 250,000 migrants were encountered at the southern border in December, a new record. However, the Biden administration has said it believes that the new measures are already having an effect and that there has been a drop in migrant encounters at the border from those nationalities.
“The December update shows our new border enforcement measures are working. Even as overall encounters rose because of smugglers spreading misinformation around the court-ordered lifting of the Title 42 public health order, we continued to see a sharp decline in the number of Venezuelans unlawfully crossing our southwest border, down 82% from September 2022,” acting Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Troy Miller said in a statement last week. “Early data suggests the expanded measures for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans are having a similar impact, and we look forward to sharing the additional data in the next update.“
Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security. He can be reached at adam.shaw2@fox.com or on Twitter.
Despite a general lack of concern among Democrats and corporate media, the U.S.-Mexico border continues to spiral out of control, setting new records for illegal border crossings nearly every month now. In October, more than 230,000 illegal immigrants were arrested along the southwest border, the third-highest monthly total in U.S. history, according to new data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Only May and April of this year have been worse than October, with 235,785 and 241,136 arrests, respectively.
Prior to the Biden administration, monthly arrests at the border rarely exceeded 100,000. In October 2020, for example, roughly 45,000 illegal border-crossers were arrested by CBP. But now it has become commonplace. Every month since March, arrests have surpassed 200,000.
For some historical perspective on the October 2022 numbers, consider that in all of 2017 there were only about 303,000 border arrests, total. And just 46,000 in October of that year.
Since President Joe Biden has taken office, more than 5 million illegal immigrants, including so-called “gotaways” whom Border Patrol wasn’t able to arrest, have crossed the southern border. And unlike previous years, there is no sign of a seasonal ebb and flow at the border. At a time of year when crossings are typically slow, we are now seeing a massive surge.
Apologists for President Biden’s border crisis in the corporate press tend to dismiss these shocking figures and attempt to explain them away by claiming the high monthly totals represent the same people crossing illegally, being expelled under Title 42, and attempting to cross again.
What they don’t mention is that border data has always reflected this phenomenon. Of the 230,000 arrests last month, about 19 percent “had at least one prior encounter in the previous 12 months,” according to CBP. This is only a 5 percent rise compared to the average 14 percent reencounter rate from 2014 to 2019.
Despite these outrageous statistics, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has doubled down on his claim that the border is “secure.”
Asked recently whether he “continue[s] to maintain that the border is secure” by Rep. Dan Bishop, R- North Carolina, Mayorkas responded, “Yes, and we are working day in and day out to enhance its security.”
Sophia is an intern at The Federalist and a student at Le Moyne College. She majors in English and intends to pursue a career in journalism.
In April, a government watchdog reported that Border Patrol didn’t gather and record “complete data on migrant deaths.”
Jennie Taer//Daily Caller News Foundation
“Smuggling organizations are abandoning migrants in remote and dangerous areas, leading to a rise in the number of rescues but also tragically a rise in the number of deaths,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman Cecilia Barreda told CBS. “The terrain along the border is extreme, the summer heat is severe, and the miles of desert migrants must hike after crossing the border in many areas are unforgiving.”
The problem has become so dire that morgues in towns along the border have run out of space.
“It’s gotten to the point where the state has to provide a refrigerator trailer where we’re having to take the deceased to and they’re there for maybe between about 24-72 hours where we try to get an identification on the person and at that point another sad thing that’s happening is our justices of the peace, they’re ordering autopsies on these unfortunate persons and the medical examiners that we use in Webb County…they’re starting to kind of turn us away because of the high volume of the deceased that they’re having,” Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber told the Daily Caller in September.
CBP attributes the issue to transnational criminal organizations who “continue to recklessly endanger the lives of individuals they smuggle for their own financial gain with no regard for human life,” the agency told the DCNF.
“Smuggling organizations are abandoning migrants in remote and dangerous areas, leading to a rise in the number of rescues but also tragically a rise in the number of deaths. The terrain along the border is extreme, the summer heat is severe, and the miles of desert migrants must hike after crossing the border in many areas are unforgiving. Despite these inherent dangers, smugglers continue to lie to migrants claiming the borders are open. The borders are not open, and people should not attempt to make the dangerous journey,” CBP added.
This story has been updated with comment from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said that the Biden administration’s announcement of its decision to end Title 42, which never came to fruition, unleashed a wave of migrants bound for the U.S., in a sit-down interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation in his presidential palace.
Guatemala has recently seen large waves of illegal migrants because of Biden administration policies in the U.S., including its announcement to scrap Title 42, the public health order used to expel certain migrants to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, Giammattei told the DCNF. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on April 1 that Title 42 would end on May 23, but the move was blocked in a lawsuit led by Republican states. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Guatemalan President Says Biden Admin Refused To Help Him Deport Illegal Migrants Bound For The US Border)
“We have recently seen a very serious increase in the number of migrants seeking to cross our border,” Giammattei said. “When Title 42 was eliminated, we see an even greater increase in the crossings through Guatemala, illegal crossings through Guatemala to reach the United States illegally as well.”
WATCH:
The Biden administration also instituted a new rule to expel illegal migrants from Venezuela, while granting legal entry to 24,000 other Venezuelans that meet certain qualifications. Giammattei said that the program is also leading to problems for his country as Venezuelans continue to pass through with a new uncertain fate.
“And now that the Venezuelans we understand that have the possibility of obtaining a visa, that means another problem for Guatemala. We have no relationships with Venezuela, we do not have diplomatic exchanges, we don’t have an embassy here or there,” Giammattei said.
“Therefore, we cannot issue passports or any kind of identification for Venezuelan nationals here in Guatemala and that means a huge amount of a floating population that is going to become a serious problem for this country. While we remain stopping them here,” he added.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said the Biden administration refused to provide Guatemala with the tools to deport illegal migrants heading to the U.S., in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation from his presidential palace.
Giammattei told the DCNF that he’d requested that the Biden administration move its deportation planes and buses to Guatemala for the country to use in returning illegal migrants to their home countries before they reach the U.S. He said it would save the Biden administration hefty costs of such large migration waves and allow migrants from far away places to go home immediately. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: What Happens To Illegal Migrants After They’ve Been Deported? We Went South Of The Border To Find Out.)
Guatemala hopes to deter such action by working with the Biden administration to deport them as soon as they can.
“Having all of these people in the United States costs the U.S. government millions and millions of dollars. We have suggested that they should keep the airplanes here, so that we ourselves can deport them back to their countries of origin, be it Haiti or be it whatever the country. If they keep their airplanes here, we can send them back. Otherwise, why wait until the people reach U.S. soil to then spend millions and millions of dollars to then send them back?” Giammattei said.
Currently, Guatemala expels non-Central American illegal migrants to Honduras. Several illegal migrants from Afghanistan who were expelled to Honduras recently crossed back into Guatemala and reached Mexico in a matter of days, they told the DCNF.
“We have also stated that we could use the buses to return these people to their countries of origin,” Giammattei said. “And they have told us that they cannot do that because their laws don’t allow it.”
The U.S. has invested a total of over $109 million in programs in Guatemala in 2022.
On Oct. 13, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala announced that it gave 95 vehicles, including Toyota Hilux vehicles, Hino 5 and 12 ton trucks, Toyota Land Cruisers and Suzuki ATVs to the Guatemalan military to support border security efforts. The donation is meant to support Guatemala’s efforts in combating transnational crime and drug trafficking.
Despite the large amounts of aid for programs that support humanitarian, governance and health needs, as a few examples, Giammattei says there’s been little aid given to actually send illegal migrants back to their countries of origin. The Biden administration has emphasized that while giving aid, it’s working to crack down on corruption in Guatemala.
“We have requested assistance from the United States. And in this sense, we have received very little assistance,” Giammattei said.
Daily Caller News Foundation
Giammattei also mentioned the United Nations Office of International Migration (OIM or IOM) is aiding in the movement of illegal migrants. The U.S. government partially funds the agency.
“And as far as the IOM, they will take action only when a person becomes a voluntary returnee, they will say, ‘Oh, no, he doesn’t want to go back.’ So they just let them go through. And this is something we cannot allow,” Giammattei said.
The White House, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and IOM didn’t respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
CNN’s Dana Bash is trying to make the number of dangerous criminals pouring over the southern U.S. border sound far lower than it really is.
“Less than 1 percent of migrants encountered at the border have a criminal record,” Bash said while interviewing Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake on Sunday, claiming to cite Department of Homeland Security figures.
“I’m going to have to disagree with you on that figure you just put out,” Lake countered. “We don’t know what their background is. There’s a reason they’re trying to get in unnoticed; it’s because they have a criminal background.”
“We know that [DHS has] tracked down terrorists, they have tracked down people wanted for murder,” Lake continued. “We’ve got people with rape records, you name it, we’ve got hardened criminals.”
“Let me just tell you that this stat that I just cited comes from the Department of Homeland Security, less than 1 percent of migrants,” Bash doubled down.
DANA BASH: DHS says less than 1 percent of migrants encountered at the border have a criminal record
KARI LAKE: I have to disagree with you on that figure … we have murders coming in, we have people with rape records
To the half-listening viewer, “less than 1 percent” sounds like a small figure. But when you consider that border enforcement officials have encountered more than 2 million illegal aliens pouring over our southern border so far during fiscal year 2022 — with another month to go before the year concludes — that figure begins to tell a fuller story.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 2,150,639 apprehensions on the U.S.-Mexico border between October 2021 and August 2022, the most on record and more than four times the total apprehensions recorded in 2020.
DHS is up to 2,000,000 migrant encounters in 2022. Their numbers show hundreds of violent criminals crossing every year and thousands of criminals overall. https://t.co/LRm7G8yZr3pic.twitter.com/TRu8dUnLGO
CBP’s Office of Field Operations, which operates at ports of entry, reported 15,558 encounters of noncitizens “who have been convicted of crime, whether in the United States or abroad, so long as the conviction is for conduct which is deemed criminal by the United States,” during fiscal year 2022 so far. Border Patrol, which operates along the border between entry ports, reported 10,778. Combined, that’s more than 25,000 convicted criminals — a whopping figure, far more alarming and newsworthy than the “less than 1 percent” talking point parroted by CNN. For Americans, who count immigration among their top three concerns headed into the midterm elections, tens of thousands of criminals pouring over the border is no small figure.
Of the more than 10,000 criminals apprehended by Border Patrol this fiscal year, more than 1,000 had prior convictions for “assault, battery, [or] domestic violence,” 60 had been convicted of homicide or manslaughter, and more than 2,000 were convicted of “illegal drug possession [or] trafficking.” More than 300 had been convicted of “sexual offenses” and nearly 800 of “burglary, robbery, larceny, theft, [or] fraud.”
Just two weeks ago, a Guatemalan national in the U.S. illegally was arrestedfor stabbing eight people on the Las Vegas Strip. An illegal immigrant from Mexico is accused of fatally shooting his partner, two of her children, and two neighbors last month in McGregor, Texas. Earlier last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced it had arrested an Ecuadorian man who had repeatedly entered the U.S. illegally and is accused of raping a 13-year-old girl in Ecuador. When a 10-year-old girl in Ohio made headlines for seeking an abortion after she was raped, her alleged rapist was revealed to be an illegal alien.
The significance of 25,000 convicted criminals crossing the southern border notwithstanding, merely looking at criminal records vastly undercounts the number of likely criminals the Biden administration is inviting to the border. Impunity rates in Mexico and Central American countries are ludicrously high, meaning the vast majority of people who commit crimes are never convicted.
As NBC News reported a year ago, “the think tank México Evalúa found that 94.8 percent of the cases reported in Mexico go unpunished.” Another group suggested that number was even higher, with only 1.3 percent of crimes in the country ever solved. The Associated Press cited one estimation that “as of 2020, almost nine of every 10 homicides in Mexico go unpunished.” Another group found that “Over a period of four years, prosecutors’ offices managed just 35 convictions nationally in a universe of more than 82,000 investigations of forced disappearance in Mexico.”
In Guatemala, the next most common country of citizenship among illegal immigrants encountered by Border Patrol, impunity rates are comparably high. Despite the efforts of a UN-backed commission targeting corruption and impunity, “94 percent of crimes went unpunished on average over the last decade in Guatemala,” according to the think tank InSight Crime. “In 2018 alone, the impunity rate was almost 98 percent.”
Those sky-high impunity rates suggest that the number of people arriving at the southern U.S. border who have committed crimes — which were likely never prosecuted by corrupt, backlogged law enforcement in their home countries — is far, far higher than the nice-sounding “less than 1 percent” figure rolling off of Bash’s tongue. Furthermore, any person who breaks into the United States illegally is automatically committing a crime by violating our immigration laws.
No matter how hard CNN and the rest of the corporate press try to spin the facts into a different story, they can’t deny this one: More criminals are illegally entering our country than ever before because illegal immigration is at an all-time high as a direct result of the Biden administration’s policies.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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.
It had been more than a year since Hashmatullah Niazy, a U.S. citizen, last saw his wife, Freshta, and four young children when they finally reunited in Austin, Texas this month.
While thousands of illegal immigrants pour across the southwest U.S. border daily, Afghan refugees abandoned by the Biden administration during the Afghanistan withdrawal are still struggling to gain legal entry to the United States.
It had been more than a year since Hashmatullah Niazy, a U.S. citizen who emigrated from Afghanistan, last saw his wife, Freshta, and four young children when they finally reunited in Austin, Texas this month. Niazy became a U.S. citizen in 2020 through the Special Immigrant Visa program after working as a translator for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. He began translating and training recruits at the Kabul Military Training Center in 2007 after his older brother died in combat while working with special forces. When Niazy obtained his U.S. visa in 2014, he resigned from his job and flew to the states.
Niazy told me he wanted to bring his family over with him, but every time he tried to initiate the immigration process, his wife was pregnant and wanted to avoid strenuous travel. Freshta and the children eventually joined the backlogged SIV immigration process before the Taliban took over the country, but their quest for permanent U.S. residency was derailed when President Joe Biden initiated the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan last fall.
I first reported on Niazy’s family situation in September 2021 when his brother, wife, and kids were all stranded in a Taliban-infested Kabul. At the time, Niazy was already in the United States, working nights and eagerly building a life for his family in Texas. But his excitement for his family’s new life in America was blunted when he realized they might not make it past the crowds at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul to get on an evacuation flight out of Afghanistan.
“Suddenly the Taliban took over the country and now we were like lost,” Niazy told me.
That’s when “angels from the sky” came in.
The Escape
After weeks of chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where some translators and their families were among the more than 200 people killed by a suicide bomber on August 26, Freshta and the kids, ranging in age from 3 to 12 years old, finally escaped Kabul at the end of September with the help of a large group of former U.S. soldiers, some trained in special operations.
Jim Young, Dan Fickel, Keye Perry, Joe Penkala, and another man named “Tom,” who is still in active government service and declined to give his last name, all graduated from West Point in 1994. When they saw the crisis in Afghanistan, they banded together to do everything they could to rescue Americans and Afghan allies the Biden administration had left behind. They enlisted the aid of several other former service members including Ryan Timoney, West Point class of 1993 graduate Dave Abrahams, retired Special Forces officer Matt Coburn, former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, and Helen Jbeily of California Republican Rep. David Valadao’s office to actively shepherd Freshta, her brother-in-law, and her kids to the overcrowded, dangerous airport for evacuation while avoiding the Taliban as much as possible.
I talked to Penkala, a retired U.S. Army officer, about the rescue efforts after the Niazy family’s first attempt to seek evacuation at the airport.
“We had sort of an up and down type of situation, even after we had taken over his case, and had managed to get the family back to [the airport]. And it was through no small effort on the part of some folks from the Special Operations community, one individual in particular who was retired,” Penkala told me over the phone. “We actually got them to the North Gate [of the airport] so this is the second time they had made it to the airport. And even though there was an obvious way to bring them in, frankly, they were still left stranded. Nobody would open the gate for them even though at one point we only had about 25 people in front of the North Gate.”
At one point, Penkala told me that, “the Taliban began beating some of the local Afghans,” forcing the on-the-ground rescuers to adapt as the Niazy clan retreated to their apartment.
During that time, Niazy said his wife “never lost her courage.”
“There was the time that I lost my hope. That was the time when my wife said ‘It’s okay. Whatever it takes me to get my kids to their dad, I will do that,’” Niazy said. “So that was a time when she gave me the courage, she gave me the hope and I needed it.”
Efforts to orchestrate the evacuation of the Niazys and hundreds of others from the clutches of the Taliban were largely funded by one of Young’s business partners, Zekelman Industries out of Texas, which donated $1 million out of the $1.1 million required to reunite the Niazy family and other refugees after another sponsor backed out.
After days of chaos, the Niazy family and 528 other American citizens, legal permanent residents, their spouses, and their children were finally able to flee Afghanistan unharmed.
“We’re so thankful for all these great humans. From God first and then from all these humans that helped me and came into my life, me and my wife,” Niazy said.
Evacuation Was Only The Beginning
Even though the Niazy family applied to permanently rejoin the head of their household in the United States, it was a long and difficult process between September of last year and early April this year, when they were finally permitted to set foot on American soil.
“This was a family who was already in the process and had paperwork prepared. And, frankly, the wife was married to a U.S. citizen. This is the immediate family of a United States citizen and it took private efforts,” Penkala said. “And once we got them out of harm’s way, it took an additional five months to come into the country.”
During that time, Freshta and her children were at a refugee camp in the United Arab Emirates. While the family was safe from the dangers the Taliban posed to them, they were stuck in limbo and at the mercy of the American bureaucracy.
Penkala said “there were some folks who were kind enough to work through their connections to get them some additional food and supplies and that type of thing” but that didn’t help reunite the family.
Niazy admitted that the experience induced many “sleepless nights” for him as he anxiously waited for the green light. In total, it took more than five months for Niazy, an American citizen who served with U.S. forces in combat, to legally relocate his wife and kids to Texas.
The American Dream
The Niazy family may have had to jump through multiple hoops that illegal immigrants at the Southern border don’t, but a lack of help from the U.S. government hasn’t hampered their enthusiasm for the American Dream.
While Niazy works as an engineering technician, Freshta and the children are acclimating to their new lives along with Niazy’s parents, who also emigrated to the United States. Once the family moves to a new apartment, three of the four children will start attending school.
In just a couple of weeks, Freshta and the Niazy children are expected to receive their Social Security numbers. But for now he is thankful that his immediate family made it to a free country where his daughters can attend school.
“It’s the teaching of our parents that wherever you live, treat it as your home, keep it clean, and keep the environment clean and also treat your neighbors good,” Niazy said. “With this [Taliban] regime, no one is happy and everybody lost the hope that [Afghanistan] will ever be a free country.”
When I video chatted with the family last week, Niazy had just woken up after working a night shift at his engineering job and Freshta was preparing food in the family’s apartment kitchen. The children were happily chattering with each other as they played with toys. The youngest one gave me a shy wave.
“This is a beautiful life,” Niazy said as he bounced his daughter on his lap. “I’m very excited and very happy. And I am praying for those who helped me, these beautiful humans in my life.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
AUSTIN, Texas – During a recent trip to a Reynosa, Mexico migrant camp, I took photos of a United Nations-supported International Organization for Migration (IOM) operation to hand out cash debit cards to intending and repeat border crossers. One of two workers at a plastic folding table inside the Reynosa camp, which was filled to capacity with at least 1,200 mostly U.S.-expelled Central Americans, said they were distributing the cards for IOM to help migrants waiting until they cross the Rio Grande at greater leisure to claim asylum, for which most will be declared ineligible years later. Many parents, for instance, got about $400 every 15 days, I was told, or $800 a month if they were still there to collect it, although the support level varied.
My photos of this posted to Twitter and related dispatch for the Center for Immigration Studies drew outrage among some Republican lawmakers. They saw the images as evidence that the U.S. taxpayer-funded IOM was providing material support to an ongoing mass migration harmful to America’s national interest.
A couple of weeks later, Texas Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, and 11 other House Republican co-sponsors introduced the “No Tax Dollars for the United Nations Immigration Invasion Act” bill. It would prohibit the $3.8 billion in contributions currently proposed in the White House 2022 budget to the IOM and other UN-supported organizations. A Daily Caller story that broke news of the bill’s introduction quoted Gooden citing my Reynosa photos.
When I took the photos, I wasn’t exactly sure of exactly what I was seeing in Reynosa. But here’s what I have learned since: The money card is confirmed beyond doubt, but also “hard cash in envelopes” and “movement assistance”; and an online IOM “Emergency Manual” describes what I saw as part of a program it terms “Cash-Based Interventions,” or CBIs.
A plastic IOM cash card given to an aspiring border-crossing migrant in Reynosa, Mexico on November 20. Photo by Todd Bensman.
Paying People Who Illegally Enter the United States
So, for starters, country-specific IOM “Cash Working Groups” are indeed coordinating the handouts of the cash-holding plastic cards I saw (referred to as prepaid debit cards, e-wallets and e-cards) to intending U.S. border crossers in Reynosa, Mexico. But it turns out that is just an iceberg tip. The IOM is handing out cash and other material support to intending illegal border crossers in as many as 100 other shelters it helped build, expand, or supports from Central America north. Some form of this has been around for years, but starting with a mass-migration event and Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy in 2019, the IOM supercharged the program and “institutionalized” it. This doubled the countries where it is used in 2020 and increased by 77 percent the number of recipients to 1.6 million worldwide, according to an annual 2020 IOM report. That would include Mexico.
The IOM Emergency Manual document says this cash assistance also includes less-seeable bank transfers, mobile transfers, and e-vouchers that go to intending illegal border crossers en route or at least temporarily blocked like many of those I saw and interviewed in Reynosa. In addition to those and the pre-paid plastic cards, the IOM says in its Emergency Manual that it also sometimes hands out “cash in envelopes (hard cash).” No details are offered on that. Many payments are given as “unconditional; unrestricted cash transfers” for “multi-purpose use,” the manual says. Still other handouts subsidize the lodging, rent, and utilities of intending border crossers for “safe tenure, to reduce the risk of forced eviction.”
Start Tapping U.S. Taxpayers Before You Get There
Then there is “movement assistance” in the form of conditional or unrestricted cash transfers. The IOM describes this money as providing transportation access after, say a camp is closed, but also simply “to sites and other situations related to onward movement of population.”
To border hawks, all of this looks, feels, and acts like an agency providing the means for illegal border crossings. The IOM’s own stated purpose for cash-based interventions would only reinforce the perception: the money is intended to “restore feelings of choice and empowerment for beneficiaries.”
Migrant advocates defend cash support to aspiring illegal border crossers as a means to prevent death and suffering among populations they believe have no choice but to migrate and would whether or not any UN agency helps out. But the legitimate flip side of that claim is that cash in envelopes or in e-wallets—filled in part by U.S. taxpayer money—can also be said to enable, sustain, or even entice many driven not by urgent dangers but by a desire for better jobs amid reports that Americans would let them in.
Spending U.S. Money to Encourage ‘Invasion’
An aggravating irony among the fast-expanding coterie of Republican congressional critics of the UN largesse is that U.S. taxpayer money is being spent in contravention of American immigration law and national interest in controlling the border against economic migration.
“All of this sounds like they’re using U.S. tax dollars to encourage this invasion into the nation, and it seems strange to me that we would support an organization that encourages and funds this,” Gooden told me. “It’s totally crazy. I am baffled that there’s not more outrage, but I think the lack of outrage is due to the lack of knowledge.”
While it may be true that IOM money relieves the suffering of intending border crossers, it is just as arguably true that it creates financial breathing room they need to prepare for more opportune crossing moments. The money enables that highly desired payoff, rather than a forced trip home for lack of funds after, say, an expensive smuggling journey that ended with U.S. expulsion. Those ones arrive in villages with a deterring don’t-try-this message to friends and neighbors.
Regarding the importance of such messaging in the development of mass migration crises, I’ve never met one who didn’t carry a cell phone connected to Internet social media. In interviews with perhaps hundreds of migrants in Mexico and beyond, I learned that this live-time social media grapevine constantly sings with news from the trail upstream that directly informs decisions downstream as to whether to launch north or remain in place. So when word of these IOM cash, lodging, and transportation benefits spreads via social media to hometowns, friends and relatives undoubtedly feel more emboldened to invest smuggling money for their own journeys to UN waystations. Because of all this, monthly IOM cash for food, lodging, and “movement” assistance amounts to material support for illegal immigration. It influences decisions to cross.
Increasing U.S. Cash Support for Illegal Immigration
It’s unclear just how much the United States gives IOM to sustain intending border crossers until they succeed, or how many got some during 2021. But the cash giveaways have been on a steep skyward trajectory since 2019 and only show signs of continuing upward.
The public reporting as to how much the United States, through the State Department, gives IOM and how many got it is opaque at best. President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget calls for $10 billion in humanitarian assistance “to support vulnerable people abroad.” But there’s no detailed breakout.
A Fiscal Year 2019 summary (starting page 37) by the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), which provides U.S. funding to the IOM and many other United Nations agencies, offers one clue of the pre-expansion levels. IOM spent more than $60 million in 2019 for activities in the northern part of South America, Central America, and Mexico during the so-called “caravan migrant crisis” earlier that year, the fiscal year report said.
State Department-funneled money helped IOM provide 29,000 people in the Western Hemisphere with cash and voucher assistance and supported 75 shelter waystations, the State Department report states on page 42, much like the one I visited in Reynosa. Along the northern border of Mexico in July 2019, at the height of a “caravan” crisis, the IOM provided 600 beds and essential items to the Mexican government and helped it expand existing shelters and build new ones to accommodate the “asylum seekers.”
This came as a response to the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” turn-back policy. That deported economic migrants trying to abuse the asylum system, while others chose to wait for Democrats to take the White House in November 2020—a sound bet, it turned out.
The IOM decided to increase the size and scope of the program after 2019, even after President Biden took office and ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. The extent is unclear, but the IOM institutionalized cash handout programs in Panama, El Salvador, and Mexico in 2020. Ambiguously, the IOM’s annual 2020 report on the program showed only that it gave cash to somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people in Mexico that year.
Whatever the recipient numbers since 2019, the IOM clearly intends an upward trajectory for the cash giveaways. The IOM’s Emergency Manual stated several times it would do so in alignment with a fairly recent pact among an international consortium of organizations known as The Grand Bargain, of which the IOM is a signatory. The Grand Bargain pact dates to 2016.
An Inter-Agency Standing Committee Grand Bargain website reports that number 3 on the objectives list is “Increase the use and coordination of cash-based programming.” A November 26, 2021 Grand Bargain caucus on cash coordination had all principals agree to increase the use of cash “beyond current low levels” through the use of even more means of delivery.
The section’s first line starts out using familiar language seen in the IOM’s Emergency Manual: “Using cash helps deliver greater choice and empowerment to affected people…”
Here’s the problem: with the greater choice and empowerment that IOM money can buy, aspiring migrants are able to remain within striking distance of the southern border to choose the time of their inevitable illegal border crossings. No one should wonder why border hawks hate this system and open borders advocates love it.
Todd Bensman is a Texas-based senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies and a writing fellow for the Middle East Forum. For nearly a decade, Bensman led counterterrorism-related intelligence efforts for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. Follow him on Twitter @BensmanTodd. Bensman also worked for The Dallas Morning News, CBS, and Hearst Newspapers. He reported extensively on national security and border issues after 9/11 and worked from more than 25 countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
A new video shows up to 1,000 illegal immigrants were held for processing outdoors under a bridge near the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday as the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector in Texas continues to experience a surge of people crossing the border.
Fox News reporter Bill Melugin tweeted, “This is the largest group of migrants we’ve ever seen being held by Border Patrol under Anzalduas Bridge in Mission, TX. Looks like it could be up to 1,000 people. We can only get a look at the area with our drone. There’s a popular Rio Grande crossing area nearby.”
NEW: This is the largest group of migrants we’ve ever seen being held by Border Patrol under Anzalduas Bridge in Mission, TX. Looks like it could be up to 1,000 people. We can only get a look at the area with our drone. There’s a popular Rio Grande crossing area nearby. @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/AsAygsO966
Townhall.com reporter Julio Rosas also shared photos of the scene on Twitter, saying, “I’ve seen Border Patrol’s processing site underneath the Anzalduas International Bridge in Mission, TX off and on since March.
“I can say this is the most illegal immigrants I’ve seen at the site at one time. It’s close to 100 degrees out right now.”
Rosas also shared a video from Sunday night of another group, saying, “Another night in La Joya, TX another large group of illegal immigrants turning themselves over to Border Patrol. There are well over 150 people here. There is also a lot of sneezing and coughing among the group.”
Another night in La Joya, TX another large group of illegal immigrants turning themselves over to Border Patrol. There are well over 150 people here. There is also a lot of sneezing and coughing among the group. pic.twitter.com/cFkwdD8qnT
“Can’t stress enough that I’ve never seen such a large group at one time who have as many individuals who appear/sound to be sick,” he said.
The report comes as the delta variant of the coronavirus has led to a spike in new cases in recent weeks while President Joe Biden’s administration welcomes illegal immigrants into the country. Last week, authorities said a charity in the border town of La Joya had rented an entire hotel to house illegal immigrants who have tested positive for COVID-19, giving no notification to the local community.
“Police in La Joya, TX, a Border town, announce a charity has rented an entire hotel here for COVID-positive migrants,” Fox News State Department Correspondent Rich Edson tweeted Wednesday night. “They say they only found out when a family, showing symptoms and staying there, ate at a restaurant next door. A customer flagged down a police officer.”
A later post added, “They’re advising La Joya to mask up and distance.”
“The La Joya Police Department said a patrol officer was waved down Monday by someone concerned about a group that appeared to be sick at a Whataburger fast food restaurant,”Fox News reported late Wednesday night.
“The officer found a family inside who were coughing and sneezing and not adhering to health guidelines, including the wearing of masks, authorities said during a news conference,” the report said.
La Joya Police Sgt. Manuel Casas said his department and the city had not been notified of the situation.
“We did not know this,” he said. “No one told the city of La Joya. No one told the police department that these people were here, and no one told us that these people were possibly ill.”
The reported individuals were staying at Texas Inn & Suites after being released by Border Patrol.
Gov. Doug Ducey, the Arizona Republican, didn’t mince words Wednesday shortly after he learned that President Biden was tapping Vice President Harris to oversee the effort to resolve the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Ducey, who was in Tucson, told reporters that Harris is “the worst possible choice”for the job. He also said that Harris’ selection is evidence that Biden has trivialized the situation. He said Harris just “flat out”doesn’t care.
He pointed to Harris’ career as a senator from California. He said she has made it clear that she does not consider the border “a problem or a serious threat.” Harris was recently criticized after she laughed when asked by a reporter if she would be visiting the border. She joked, “Not today.”
“If President Biden’s intent was to show that he’s taking this seriously, he’s really done the exact opposite,”Ducey said.
Harris called the situation at the border “challenging,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Former Harris advisors told the paper that they believe that she is up for the challenge but called the job “high risk, very low reward.”
Biden made the announcement as a delegation of White House officials and members of Congress traveled to the southern border to tour a facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, where more than 750 migrant teenagers are being held. The Biden administration has in recent weeks moved to open more than 10,000 new beds across the Southwest in convention centers and former oilfield camps.
It notified Congress on Wednesday that it will open a new 3,000-person facility in San Antonio and a 1,400-person site at the San Diego convention center. HHS is also opening a second site in Carrizo Springs and received approval from the Defense Department Wednesday to begin housing teenagers at military bases in San Antonio and El Paso, Texas.
GOP lawmakers say Biden administration’s decision to reverse Trump-era immigration policies prompted the latest surge in migrants. The White House has argued that Biden inherited a chaotic situation and is working to stabilize the border.
Political observers say that this is the first major task for Harris as vice president and could have a lasting impact on her own future as a presidential candidate.
Biden called Harris “the most qualified person”to take charge of the situation and interact with countries like Mexico and Honduras.
“It’s not her full-responsibility job, but she is leading the effort because I think the best thing to do is to put someone who, when he or she speaks, they don’t have to wonder about, is that where the president is,”Biden said, according to the Washington Post. “When she speaks, she speaks for me.”
TOPSHOT – US Customs and Border Protection agents check documents of a small group of migrants, who crossed the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico, on May 16, 2019, in El Paso, Texas. – About 1,100 migrants from Central America and other countries are crossing into the El Paso border sector … PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images
The United States should reopen itself to migration, amnesties, refugee inflows, asylum seekers, and more temporary contract workers, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States said Tuesday.
The U.S. immigration system “has to be based on facts and realities,” Ambassador Martha Bárcena Coqui told a forum arranged by the National Immigration Forum (NIF). She continued: ‘The facts and realities is the need to protect the most vulnerable, the need to keep open the generosity towards refugees, the need to recognize the complementarity of labor markets and demographic profiles, the need for temporary workers in the United States.”
The United States should not view migration as a security threat, she said, adding, “If you conceptualize migration as a national security issue, if you [push for] securitization of migration, and what is even worse, if you criminalize migration, then your approach always be policing, contentious [and] reduction of migration. So what we need is really to conceptualize migration … as an economic and social and political phenomena.”
“With all due respect to Madam Ambassador, she should mind her own country’s business, not ours,” responded Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“The Mexican ambassador is going to tell us what is in the best interest of Mexico,” responded Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA. “But that doesn’t mean we have to do it — we have to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. of American, of Americans and legal immigrants,” she told Breitbart News, adding:
You know we have the pandemic still raging, we have economic lockdowns still going on, we have unemployment way too high. We have underemployment way too high. We have American citizens hurting. We absolutely do not need to reopen mass immigration — and certainly don’t need to give amnesty and taxpayer benefits to people who came here illegally. If Mexico thinks its plan is to just open up its own southern borders in the hopes that America will open our southern borders, that’s just going to reignite the caravans. I hope that the Biden administration is planning for that because that’s not going to go well, and 2022 is not going to go well for Democrats.
More migrants are coming, the ambassador said, even though the coronavirus crash has blocked the northward flow for the moment:
The root causes of these migrations have [not] disappeared. On the contrary, we are seeing pent up, building pressure. People cannot move now because of the restrictions on movement because of the pandemic. But the root causes are still there, [for example], the drought in Central America … a hurricane in Nicaragua and Honduras that have totally flooded Honduras.
The United States should amnesty many illegal migrants from all over the world, she said, and also import more migrants by accepting asylum applications at U.S. embassies, so the world’s migrants will not have to travel through Mexico. “What we would like to see, of course, is that the U.S. embassies in Central America could process even more of these requests for asylum, instead of having people crossing through Mexico and asking for asylum at the border.”
The ambassador was invited to speak by the NIF, which is a business-funded activist group that promotes cheap labor migration into jobs needed by lower-skilled Americans and by legal immigrants, and also into jobs that can be automated.
Roughly three million migrants have flooded over the southern border since the rules were loosened by Congress in 2008 and by President Barack Obama’s deputies in 2011. Trump stopped the flow in 2020, but few of the migrants — or of roughly 300,000 younger “Unaccompanied Alien Children” — have been sent home because they are being protected by pro-migrant immigration lawyers, by pro-diversity progressives, and cheap labor employers in sanctuary cities.
The large U.S. population of illegal immigrants helps to push down wages for Americans, push disadvantaged workers out of the labor force, reduce corporate investment in technology and training, and spike corporate sales and profits. The large population also shifts the U.S. politics from a focus on Americans’ jobs and wages, and then towards a politics focused on business demands and the 1950’s claim by elites that the United States is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” not a cooperative nation for all Americans.
The flood of cheap labor that is being promoted by the ambassador would be a disaster for Americans, Jenks said. “They would absolutely destroy the employment opportunities for lower-skilled Americans, particularly for minorities and legal immigrants. It would reduce wages among the people who can least afford reduced wages and put downward pressure on everyone else’s wages. The people who would benefit from it, of course, would be the elites who can hire nannies, maids, and housekeepers, and who go stay at resorts and so on, while the rest of us suffer.”
The ambassador’s statement, Krikorian told Breitbart News, “suggests that the [President Donald] Trump really was getting Mexico to change its behavior [after 2018] and that once Trump is gone, the Mexican approach these issues will revert to form, and they will again usher large numbers of third-country illegal aliens into our country.”
But if Mexico is concerned about the migrants coming up from the South, it can take its own defense measures, said Krikorian.
“As far as refugees and asylees go, Mexico is a signatory to the U.N. Convention on these issues. Mexico is about half the population, maybe a little less, of the United States. It doesn’t take a nearly proportionate number of asylum seekers or refugees [as the United States. So, “Physician, heal thyself,” would be my first response.”
Also, Krikorian added, the ambassador may be overstating the view of the Mexican government. “Whatever the ambassador said, it is an open question whether Mexico will truly open the floodgates again. The country has its own interest in limiting this transit migration because Mexican citizens are getting sick of the migrations. And many of these people end up staying anyway, applying for asylum in Mexico, or just hanging around illegally, and that undermines the job prospects of Mexicans in the same way that it can undermine Americans’ job prospects.”
“The United States is a sovereign nation that should and can have complete control over its borders,” said Jenks. “Regardless of what our neighbors may think, our government owes it to the American people to have an immigration system that benefits America. Period. Full stop.”
Overall, open-ended migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants help transfer massive wealth from American wage-earners to stockholders.
One of the big changes we should expect under a Joe Biden administration is an explosion of illegal immigration and a renewed crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. The reason for this is simple: the immigration and border policies the Trump administration has put into place over the past four years have succeeded in driving down illegal immigration, and Biden has promised to reverse nearly all of them.
Throughout the campaign, Biden was forthright about his plans to dismantle Trump’s immigration and border security agenda. His team is now planning to carry out those plans, including a 100-day moratorium on deportations, directives to curtail arrests of illegal immigrants, and a full restoration of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
These actions will almost certainly trigger a wave of illegal immigration up and down the southwest border. Why? Because Trump’s policies helped bring illegal immigration under control. Undoing them will be interpreted, rightly, as an invitation to would-be migrants in Mexico and Central America, who will respond accordingly, especially as those countries continue to suffer from worsening conditions under the pandemic.
Although pandemic restrictions and border security policies in the United States and Mexico helped decrease the number of apprehensions at the southwest border over the summer and fall, illegal immigration was steadily declining long before the outbreak, largely because of programs and policies implemented by the Trump administration in response to a dramatic rise in illegal border crossings and apprehensions in 2019.
The Migrant Protection Protocols, or the “remain in Mexico” program, which requires most asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their cases to be heard by a U.S. immigration judge, has been one of the most prominent—and controversial—Trump administration policies aimed at curbing illegal immigration. In cooperation with the Mexican government, it has also been successful at deterring illegal immigration and reducing specious asylum claims.
Since the program’s inception in late 2018, some 67,000 people have been returned to Mexico after having been caught crossing the border illegally. Many of these migrants have opted to return to their countries of origin, citing dangerous conditions in Mexico and the likelihood they will lose their asylum cases in court. Biden has said he will end the program.
Another major action taken by the Trump administration was the termination of the Flores Decree, a 1997 court decision that prevented U.S. officials from detaining migrant families and unaccompanied minors for more than 20 days. Because Flores all but guaranteed that an adult who crossed the border with a child would, upon claiming asylum, be quickly released into the United States, it created a powerful incentive for families to cross the border illegally and make questionable asylum claims.
It also fueled a lucrative and exploitative human smuggling industry stretching from Central America to the Rio Grande. Flores meant children were used as “passports” into the United States—not just by families but also by unscrupulous smugglers and cartels that profit handsomely from illegal immigration. U.S. officials discovered thousands of “fake families” at the border in recent years, with adults posing as parents of unrelated children, and even cases where children were “recycled,” crossing the border multiple times with unrelated adults.
By ending Flores, the Trump administration was able to more or less end this practice, since it removed the promise of a quick release if you had a child with you and claimed asylum. Biden has said he will effectively reinstate Flores, releasing asylum-seekers who arrive with children before their court dates and funding various case-management programs in hopes that they don’t simply disappear into the immigration underground once they are released.
Biden has also said he will restore DACA, the Obama-era program that allowed illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as minors a reprieve from deportation and renewable, two-year work permits. The promise of minors being allowed to stay in the United States helped fuel a surge of unaccompanied children and teenagers to the border beginning in 2014, with smugglers promising parents that they and their children would be granted “permits” to remain in the United States.
It didn’t matter that DACA didn’t actually apply to these minors. Unscrupulous smugglers, known as “coyotes,” sold families on the line to pocket their passage fees, with cartels taking their cut at the Rio Grande.
The Trump administration announced it was ending DACA in 2017, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the administration hadn’t followed the proper procedures for ending the program, leaving it for the time being in administrative limbo. Even so, as the case has been wending its way through the courts the past few years, the message has gotten back to sending communities in Mexico and Central America that unaccompanied minors don’t have a guaranteed way to stay in the United States through DACA. Once Biden restores it, they will.
Another Border Crisis Is Already Brewing
All of these changes promised by the Biden administration will not go unnoticed by would-be migrants seeking entrance to the United States, or by the smugglers and cartels who profit off getting them here. Messaging and sometimes even minor U.S. policy changes have a ripple effect on the migration pipeline that runs from South Texas all the way to Guatemala City and Tegucigalpa.
What’s more, Biden need not have the cooperation of Congress to do these things. Indeed, Trump didn’t have congressional support for most of his immigration and border policies, and neither did President Obama. Most Americans don’t realize it, but U.S. immigration law gives wide latitude to executive branch agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to create and implement policies at the border, from the detention and processing of migrants caught crossing illegally to the procedures and requirements for asylum adjudication.
That’s partly by design: Congress has long abdicated its responsibility for immigration, instead delegating authority and policy-making to an ever-growing executive bureaucracy.
That means every time the White House changes hands, U.S. immigration and border policy goes through a massive upheaval. All along, Biden has been candid about his plans for the border, and if he follows through on them—like Trump, mostly via executive order—it will trigger a wave of migration from Central America and Mexico that U.S. border officials will be largely powerless to stop.
To suppose otherwise is not only to ignore recent history, but to assume that the people of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador have no agency. Already in late September, at least one large caravan was reportedly forming in Honduras, headed for Mexico and the U.S. border.
Others will follow under a Biden administration, their ranks filled with people drawn by the resurrection of Obama-era policies that will grant them, by various mechanisms, entry to the United States. They will be making a rational and reasonably informed choice. And on understanding just how drastically U.S. immigration policy can shift with a presidential election, and how much easier it will be to get in under Biden, they won’t be wrong.
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
President Donald Trump slashed the inflow of southern migrants from 400,000 in 2019 to just 14,000 in 2020, according to acting homeland security chief Chad Wolf.
The coronavirus crash is creating a new surge of migrants up to the U.S. border, Wolf warned in his October 21 speech. “Should our critics be successful and repeal the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] CDC order, we would face an unimaginable public health crisis,” Wolf said in a Phoenix, Arizona, speech, adding:
The only reason today’s crossings have not reached a crisis level is because of the policies and procedures the Department has put in place during the past four years. If these critical tools are removed or overturned, then the Department—and you, our frontline partners—would be imperiled by another immigration crisis.
Wolf described the administration’s huge and successful efforts to curb the southern migration into U.S. blue-collar workplaces. Prior Presidents did little or nothing, but Trump’s hard-fought upgrades have helped push up wages and opportunities for tens of millions of Americans — including blue-collar blacks and Latinos. Trump’s effort also protected many millions of Americans from losing their jobs amid relentless Wall Street pressure for corporate cost-cutting.
“In perhaps no area did the Washington special interests try harder to stop us than on my policy of pro-American immigration,” Trump said in his August 28 acceptance speech.
Wolf also touted the agency’s efforts to start shielding all Americans from the trillion-dollar economic threat caused by the legal and illegal migration of white-collar workers. Wolf used his speech to describe the administration’s pro-American actions:
1. Border agencies have stopped the catch-and-release of migrants, said Wolf. CBP and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency caught and released 400,000 migrants in 2019, but just 15,000 in 2020, mostly for humanitarian reasons, Wolf said.
We have effectively ended the practice known as “catch and release,” which refers to releasing illegal aliens into the United States while they awaited hearings in immigration court—rather than holding them in detention. Thanks to our actions, illegal aliens will no longer be released into our country. They will no longer be able to abscond without consequence. And they will be quickly returned to their country of origin.
2. Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols ensured that “more than 65,000 aliens have been returned to Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings,” Wolf said. Because they are returned to Mexico, the migrants cannot get the U.S. jobs they need to pay their debts to the coyotes, preventing the coyotes from making a profit and helping to break the profitable business of transporting migrants into Americans’ jobs.
3. The administration has reformed asylum rules to exclude ineligible economic-migrants, according to Wolf. “We want to encourage meritorious asylum claims, adjudicate them expeditiously, and root out fraudulent claims,” he said, by:
Tightening up standards for asylum applicant employment authorization;
Elevating legal standards of proof for asylum and statutory withholding of removal screening; and
Instituting new mandatory bars to asylum.
DHS also suspended asylum for individuals who traverse through a safe country where they could seek asylum but decided not to. DHS is also currently finalizing regulations to prevent criminal aliens from obtaining asylum to remain in the United States.
4. The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency “is returning approximately 90 percent of individuals who would otherwise be kept in CBP facilities back to Mexico within two hours,” said Wolf. That is a huge shift from prior years because the quick deportations prevent migrant from using lawyers, asylum claims, and jobs to extend their stay in the United States.
5. Border agencies can now prosecute and penalize migrants because Trump ended “prosecutorial discretion,” Wolf said:
Obama’s administration adopted a “prosecutorial discretion” policy … This devastating policy hamstrung ICE’s ability to identify, locate, arrest, and deport criminal aliens. Today, ICE no longer exempts any removable aliens from having our laws enforced on them. If you break our laws, you will be arrested and removed from our country.
…
The results bear out the success of this policy shift. Between 2017 and 2019, the Trump Administration removed from the United States more than 574,000 illegal aliens, including 16,000 gang members … [and] ICE has removed over 182,000 aliens in the first 50 weeks of 2020.
6. DHS has begun using a deportation power granted by Congress in 1996 and long ignored by prior administrations. “The Department has also ensured that certain aliens encountered anywhere in the country within two years of unlawful entry will be removed quickly—referred to as “expedited removal,” Wolf said.
7. The administration has built the border wall to curb migration and drug-smuggling, Wolf said:
Today, we have completed almost 400 miles of the new border wall system in high priority locations like San Diego, El Centro, Yuma, Tucson, El Paso, and the Rio Grande Valley Sectors. And we have another 221 miles currently under construction and 157 miles in a pre-construction phase.
Each and every mile of border wall construction is new—whether we are constructing in a place where previously no barriers existed or replacing a 5-foot steel vehicle barrier with an 18- or 30-foot steel bollard wall complemented with roads, enforcement cameras, and other related technology. In fact, wherever effective border wall systems have been constructed, the number of illegal crossings—and crime—has gone down.
8. Protecting Americans from abuse of the legal immigration system is “equally important,” said Wolf:
this administration has had a laser focus on protecting the American worker. But amazingly, the immigration rules on the books seemed to always put foreign workers first in line for American jobs. In a major historical shift, the Trump Administration has put America First. Our results show the Department’s commitment and success in this area.
…
To that end, DHS announced an interim final rule that strengthens the H-1B nonimmigrant visa program to protect U.S. workers, restores integrity to the H-1B program, and better guarantees that H-1B petitions are approved only for qualified beneficiaries and petitioners. This rule will combat the abuse of H-1B workers to serve as low-cost replacements for otherwise-qualified American workers. It will also deter companies from gaming the immigration system to fill their own coffers.
Supporting this action is President Trump’s philosophy that we must take care of Americans first.
Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular — but quite limited — pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers. In many speeches, for example, Trump ignores the economic impact of blue-collar and white-collar migration on Americans while stressing issues about crime, outsiders, diseases, or welfare, even though his low-immigration policies have been a popular boon to Americans.
Joe Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to end migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony, and to dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year. This policy has helped Biden to win huge donations from investors on Wall Street.
Open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrival helps to transfer wealth from wage-earners to investors and stockholders.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden landed himself in a factually sticky situation Thursday night, arguing former President Barack Obama had never taken part in the policy of family separation carried out at the outset of the Trump administration.
The false claim came late in the second and final debate of the 2020 presidential election cycle, as he faced off with incumbent Republican President Donald Trump on the issue of illegal immigration.
“These 500-plus kids came with parents. They separated them at the border to make it a disincentive to come to begin with,” Biden said. “They got separated from their parents and it makes us a laughingstock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”
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“Kristen, they did it,” Trump said, addressing debate moderator Kristen Welker. “We changed the policy. They did it. We changed — they built the cages.”
“We did not separate — they,” Biden trailed off, changing course.
“Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. What happened? Kids were ripped from their arms and separated.”
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The narrative was not original, having already been fact-checked on numerous occasions by independent sources in the establishment media.
The Associated Press, for its part, checked former first lady Michelle Obama for making similar claims in an address to the 2020 Democratic National Convention this past August.
“Michelle Obama assailed President Donald Trump on Monday for allegedly ripping migrant children from their parents and throwing them into cages, picking up on a frequent and distorted point made widely by Democrats,” The AP wrote. “She’s……………………………..READ THE REST OF THIS REPORT AT https://www.westernjournal.com/fact-check-biden-tells-biggest-lie-night-maybe-entire-election/
Andrew J. Sciascia is an associate staff reporter with The Western Journal, having joined the outlet as a regular contributor of opinion in 2018. He regularly co-hosts the outlet’s video podcast, “WJ Live.”
President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with U.S. tech workers, before signing an Executive Order on hiring American workers, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Monday, Aug. 3, 2020, in Washington.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday which curbs the H-1B outsourcing of jobs at government agencies, including the government-controlled Tennessee Valley Authority.
“We believe jobs must be offered to American workers first,” Trump told attendees at a signing event in the White House.
Staffing companies have used the H-1B program to fill roughly 18,000 jobs in government agencies with foreign contract-workers.
A White House statement said:
President Trump is signing an Executive Order to create a policy where Federal agencies will focus on United States labor in lucrative Federal contracts. It would be unfair for Federal employers to replace perfectly qualified Americans with workers from other countries. The Executive Order will require all Federal agencies to complete an internal audit and assess whether they are in compliance with the requirement that only United States citizens and nationals are appointed to the competitive service.
The Department of Labor will also finalize guidance to prevent H-1B employers from moving H-1B workers to other employers’ job sites to displace American workers.
“Outsourcing hundreds of workers is especially detrimental in the middle of a pandemic, which has already cost millions of Americans their jobs,” the statement said. “President Trump’s actions will help combat employers’ misuse of H-1B visas, which were never intended to replace qualified American workers with low-cost foreign labor.”
The top management at the TVA has been trying to outsource 200 jobs to three companies that import many H-1B workers: Paris-based Capgemini, Canada-based CGI, and Accenture, a former U.S. company that relocated to Ireland.
Many polls show that American voters want to welcome immigrants — but strongly prefer that companies hire Americans before asking to import foreign contract workers.
Trump signed the E.O. after learning about the outsourcing from an online ad paid funded by U.S. Tech Workers. Trump initially dismissed the advertisement:
The invitees included Sara Blackwell, founder of Protect US Workers, and Kevin Lynn, the founder, U.S. Tech Workers. The invite list included several TVA workers: Gay Henson, President of the TVA’s Engineering Association, plus Chuck Charnawskas, Jonathan Hicks, David Littlejohn, Linda McDonald, Renae McKenzie, Wendy Turner, and Stacy Whetzell.
“This is a really significant date for U.S. tech workers,” said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, a grassroots group of U.S. college-graduate professionals. U.S. graduates know “what decades of outsourcing and offshoring of these valuable jobs have done to themselves personally and collectively, to the country,” he said, adding:
“We’ve been very much involved for the last three years to protect and preserve tech worker jobs here in the U.S. and in particular, fighting outsourcing schemes. So this is a great opportunity for us, it’s really a culmination of a lot of hard work … [We’re] really, really overjoyed as of this time that the president of the United States has chosen to act on behalf of American workers.”
Fortune 500 companies and their networks of U.S. and Indian-owned subcontractors and sub-subcontractor have used the H-1B program to outsource millions of college-graduate jobs over the last 20 years.
Currently, Fortune 500 companies keep at least 1.3 million foreign contract-workers in jobs needed by U.S. graduates, including at least 600,000 H-1B workers. This personnel policy is not an “abuse” of the law because the law was carefully drafted to help companies sideline American workers.
Some of the contract workers are hired by prestigious firms at U.S. wages. But many visa workers are employed by subcontractors at below-market wages, and many are hired as gig-worker for minimal wages. For example, the universities help get “Practical Training” work permits for 500,000 foreign graduates each year. These workers do not have to be paid minimum wages, and they are widely used by Fortune 500 subcontractors.
Many executives prefer hiring contract workers because they are compliant and quiet compared to U.S. professionals who can argue with executives and switch jobs. Many of the contract workers are imported for about a year, so they can learn how to do the job from an office in India.
Many foreign workers accept low wages for work in the United States because the U.S. work is preferable to work in India, China, or elsewhere. Also, U.S. employers keep their foreign workers on the job by dangling the promise of green cards and citizenship. For example, at least 300,000 Indian visa workers are working while they wait for promised green cards.
In his 2017 inauguration address, Trump promised a policy of “Buy American and hire American.” Trump said in March 2016, “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.” On June 22, Trump announced a temporary halt to the H-1B inflow and directed his deputies to rewrite regulations on the Fortune 500’s use of foreign contract-workers.
President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the BOK Center, Saturday, June 20, 2020, in Tulsa, Okla. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
President Trump will expand an executive order on Monday, halting a series of visa programs that bring hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to the United States to take American jobs. The order will halt the inflow of foreign worker pipelines until at least December 31. The visa programs suspended include:
H-1B visas, who take white-collar U.S. jobs
H-4 visas, who are the spouses of H-1B visa holders
H-2B visas, who take blue-collar nonagricultural U.S. jobs
L visas, who take white-collar U.S. jobs
J-1 visas, who take a variety of blue-collar and white-collar U.S. jobs
“Obviously American workers have been hurt, and it’s nobody’s fault that the coronavirus hit, but it did do a blow to the economy and to businesses who were furloughing and laying people off, and we want to make sure that Americans get hired into those spots,” said Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli.
Altogether, the order is expected to free up about 600,000 American jobs for the more than 30,000,000 Americans who are jobless mostly due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis. That includes about 287,000 U.S. jobs freed up for Americans that would have otherwise been taken by H-1B, H-2B, and L-1 visa workers, according to Cuccinelli.
Halting the J-1 visa program through the end of the year is set to free up about 97,000 U.S. jobs that would have otherwise gone to foreign workers. The order will be up for expansion within 30 days and reviewed every 60 days after that date. Those reviews include evaluating all regulations relating to visa programs. Cuccinelli credited the April order’s 60-day review process for giving the administration time to consider Monday’s expansion.
The order includes a handful of exemptions, such as an exemption for foreign au pairs who arrive on J-1 visas to do low-wage nanny work for mostly wealthy American households. Also exempted are H-2B visa workers taking U.S. jobs in the food industry, J-1 visa workers taking U.S. jobs in coronavirus-related medical research or treatment, and the Optional Practical Training (OPT) visa program, which delivers foreign graduates to multinational corporations at discounted wage rates.
DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are given authority to exempt visa workers from the order if they are deemed “necessary to facilitate the immediate and continued economic recovery of the United States.”
A DHS official told Breitbart News the exemption is for specific foreign visa workers who are vital to putting Americans back to work.
“The president is confident this is going to be very popular with the American people,” Cuccinelli said. “It’s proven popular thus far — to start clearing this space … and it is the kind of thing that, frankly, some people on the other side of the aisle have supported in the past.”
Indeed, reductions to overall immigration in the middle of mass unemployment are hugely popular with Americans.
In April, nearly 80 percent of Americans said they wanted immigration halted to the U.S. during the crisis and amid mass unemployment. This month, majorities of 55 to 85 percent of voters in ten swing states said they want less immigration at the moment.
Every year, the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants on green cards to permanently resettle in the country. In addition, another 1.4 million foreign workers are admitted every year to take American jobs. Often, Americans are fired and replaced by visa workers. Many are forced to train their foreign replacements.
This is the first time in American history that a president has used this particular executive order authority to reduce annual legal immigration levels, one administration official said. Trump’s authority over immigration, like all other presidents, is vast and broad.
In June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the president’s control over legal immigration. In Trump v. Hawaii, the court stated that presidents have extraordinarily broad discretion to admit or exclude foreign nationals from the U.S. when they believe doing so is in the national interest.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
The Harvard/Harris Poll found that 5 out of 6 voters want immigration from Mexico to end. As you can tell by the number of people who approve of the plan, it cuts across all age groups and all political persuasions.
The plan is approved by 75 percent of Hispanic Americans and 77 percent of black Americans. Another 73 percent of Democrat voters said they support ending immigration from Mexico, while 84 percent of swing voters and 93 percent of Republican voters support such a measure.
It is popular even with liberal voters, who approve of the plan by nearly 70% and among Hillary voters by 74%.
At the same time that Americans want immigration from Mexico ended, the Dee State at the State Department is handing out H-2B and H-2A visas like they were candy. With unemployment expected to reach as high as 32% the extra competition for those jobs will not be welcomed.
While the overwhelming majority of Americans want to see an end to immigration from Mexico, the State Department has issued waivers that will more quickly fast-track many Mexican workers into the U.S. through the H-2B and H-2A visa programs.
The directive effectively allows agricultural and nonagricultural businesses to quickly import foreign workers on H-2A and H-2B visas without standard interview and application procedures.
As Breitbart News has reported, immigration moratoriums are not uncommon in American history. Currently, there are about 45 million foreign-born residents living in the U.S., a 108-year record high.
The country’s last immigration boom — between 1900 and 1920 — was eventually met with a near immigration moratorium. Between 1925 and 1966, the U.S. legal immigration level did not exceed 327,000 annual admissions.
Since major changes were enacted in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson (D) and in the 1990s by President George H.W. Bush (R) — changes that allow foreign nationals to bring as many foreign relatives to the country as they want — legal immigration levels have continued booming for about five decades.
Today, about 1.2 million legal immigrants are admitted to the U.S. every year.
US President Donald Trump arrives for a “Keep America Great” campaign rally at The Crown Arena in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on September 9, 2019. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP) (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump can claim credit for pushing poverty among black American adults to record lows, according to data in the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 economic report.
The good news is hidden deep in the 77-page report, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2018, which was released Tuesday, September 10. Table B5 on page 65 shows that poverty among married black families dropped to 18.8 percent, down from 20.2 percent in 2015 and 23.8 percent in 2007, which was the peak of the housing boom and bubble inflated by Congress and President George W. Bush’s terms.
Poverty among black female-headed families also dropped to 31.7 percent, down from 35.7 percent in 2015 and 39.7 percent in 2007.
Poverty among all black Americans dropped to 20.8 percent, down from 24.1 percent in 2015 and 24.5 percent in 2007
For comparison, black poverty is still somewhat higher than the poverty rate for all Americans, which is at 11.8 percent, and at 9.7 percent for all intact families and 26.8 percent for female-headed households.
The report does not suggest why the poverty rate is falling. But other data — including comments from industry CEOs — show that wages are gently rising as employers reluctantly begin to compete for employees in a low-immigration, tight labor economy.
Trump’s unprecedented combination of “Hire American” and economic growth policies is helping create those wage gains nationwide. The growth policies pressure companies to hire more workers.
The “Hire American” policy suppresses the inflow of legal and illegal migrants and also blocks demands from businesses for special infusions of cheap foreign labor, such as extra refugees, asylum-seekers, visa workers, and legal immigrants. Trump’s low-immigration policies have prompted many progressives and Democrats to claim he is racist. But his growth and “Hire American” combination is pressuring companies to compete for Americans workers — including blacks and Latinos — by offering higher wages and better benefits.
One expected impact of the shortage is a growing number of non-white Americans who are being hired and are getting wage increases. The Washington Postreported September 9:
Economists say the minority hiring boom is explained mainly by a tight labor market that is forcing employers to look beyond their normal pool of candidates …
“Now there are more job opportunities, I think. I look for jobs that want English and Spanish speakers,” said [Milagros] Tasayco, who spends her mornings at the community center and her afternoons at a private day care. “My children say, ‘Wow, Mommy, you have two jobs!’ My husband is proud, too.”
The Census Bureau said men who work full time and year-round got an average earnings boost of 3.4 percent in 2018, pushing their median salaries up to $55,291, a 3.4 percent gain after adjusting for inflation. Women gained 3.3 percent in wages, to bring their median salaries to $45,097 for full time, year-round work.
Trump’s wage gains may mark a historic shift in the nation’s economy.
This growth is already visible as a rising line at the end of a Census Bureau chart, which shows the flat-lined wages between 1973 and 2018. The flat wages followed 25 years of rapid wage growth in a low-immigration economy between 1959 and 1973,
Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of about 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers and spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, it tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and it does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, reduces marriage rates, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, undermines suburbia, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
Central American migrants wait for food in El Paso, Texas, on Wednesday in a pen erected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to process a surge of migrant families and unaccompanied minors. (Cedar Attanasio/The Associated Press)
Since September 2018, nearly 900 migrants arriving at the United States-Mexico border have been confirmed or suspected to have mumps, a federal report reveals.
A report by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) details how the contagious mumps disease has spread across 19 states in 57 detention facilities among migrants — those illegally crossing the southern border and those seeking asylum.
Between September 2018 and August 2019, about 898 cases of migrants who had arrived to the U.S. and were in federal detention were reported to have mumps. Another 33 cases of mumps were reported among staff members at the various detention facilities.
Roughly 44 percent of the cases reported occurred in detention facilities located in Texas while the average age of a migrant with mumps was 25 years-old and 94 percent were male migrants.
CDC officials state that the disease has largely spread to other migrants while in detention with 84 percent of cases reported having been likely contracted while in federal custody and five percent having been likely contracted before the migrant was apprehended by federal officials.
As of August 2019, CDC officials say there are ongoing mumps outbreaks among migrants at 15 detention facilities in seven states.
In June, Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kevin McAleenan admitted that border crossers and illegal aliens are being released into the interior of the U.S. without undergoing basic medical exams or disease tests, Breitbart News reported.
A report issued by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 2017 outlined urged the Trump administration to enact a slew of policies to prevent a disease outbreak in the U.S. caused by mass immigration.
“Most illnesses are spread by contact with infected people, livestock or agricultural produce,” the FAIR report states. “As a result, researchers have concluded that the international movement of people is a significant factor in disease outbreaks: ‘Mobile populations can link zones of disease emergence to low prevalence or non-endemic areas through rapid or high-volume international movements, or both.’”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Give Me Your Ebola, Your Tuberculosis, Your Mumps-Ridden Masses | Ep 386
Here are three facts that the most hysterical voices attacking the Trump administration’s proposal to radically reduce or freeze refugee admissions don’t want you to know:
1) They make billions of dollars off the federal refugee resettlement racket;
2) They are protected by the Open Borders Inc. media, which routinely whitewashes the gobsmacking financial self-interest of the “Let Them All In” leeches; and
3) They are never held accountable when untold numbers of the world’s most wretchedly violent and aggrieved refugees come here to sabotage the American Dream.
While left-wing religious groups, tax-exempt non-profits tied or allied to George Soros, and the amnesty-shilling Catholic Church scream “No hate, no fear, everyone is welcome here!” at the top of their lungs, American neighborhoods are being overrun by dangerous foreign criminals and jihad plotters. David Miliband, president and CEO of International Rescue Committee, attacked the White House plan to slash refugee numbers from an Obama-era high of 100,000 to less than the current historic low of 30,000 as “inhumane.” Is it because cutting the numbers would cut in to Miliband’s first-class travel and business lunch tabs? Malkin Truth-O-Meter: mostly likely true!
What Miliband neglects to mention in his diatribe against President Trump that his organization is one of 9 behemoth government contractors that works with the hostile United Nations and encrusted State Department social justice warriors to import thousands of new refugees every year with little input from the communities in which they are dumped. Miliband earns nearly a million-dollar salary and by one estimate, IRC has raked in nearly $900 million in refugee resettlement profits over the last decade. When you cut through the Statue of Liberty smokescreen of the open borders “charities,” the math is clear:
Reduced refugees means reduced cash flow.
Zero refugees means zero cash flow.
Why should taxpayers continue to see their hard-earned money siphoned away to feed the Trump Resistance Machine and Democrat Party’s Permanent Ruling Majority Project?
There are even more compelling reasons to throttle the refugee flow. According to the logic-twisting, ICE-doxxing cheerleaders at the New York Times, refugee reductions are the real threat to our nation because if we don’t keep importing hordes of Muslim translators from Iraq or Afghanistan, it would “undermine” our national security.
This is just plain ass-backwards.
The Trump-bashers and border-phobes equate any and all criticism of the refugee program as racist, xenophobic hatred. But it’s not all sweetness and light. They’re not all “yearning to breathe free.” Some of them just want free stuff. Some of them want to kill us. Many of them have absolutely no interest in assimilating themselves into our customs, measures, and laws. And many of them have outright contempt for Western civilization. They’re not here to strengthen our nation with their “diversity.” They’re here to destroy it. That’s fact, not “hate.”
In Open Borders Inc, I have profiled 60 of the planet’s most maleficent refujihadis nabbed over the past dozen years. Here are their names (you can learn their full stories in Appendix G of the book) . And remember: these are only the ones we’ve caught.
Nuradin Abdi
Dritan Duka
Shain Duka
Eljvir Duka
Mohanad Shareef Hammad
Waad Ramadan Alwan
Abdow Munye Abdow
Farah Mohamed Beledi
Cabdulaahi Ahmed Faarax
Shirwa Ahmed
Mahamud Said Omar
Abdiweli Yassin Isse
Kamal Hassan
Salah Osman Ahmed
Adarus Abdulle Ali
Ahmed Ali Omar
Khalid Mohamud Abshir
Zakaria Maruf
Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan
Mustafa Ali Salat
Tamerlan Tsarnaev
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Issa Doreh
Basaaly Saeed Moalin
Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud
Ahmed Nasiri Taalil Mohamud
Ramiz Hodzic
Sedina Hodzic
Mediha Medy Salkicevic
Armin Harcevic
Jasminka Ramic
Nihad Rosic
Abdullah Ramo Pazara
Fazliddin Kurbanov
Liban Haji Mohamed
Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan
Abdinassir Mohamud Ibrahim
Mohamud Ali Yusuf
Nima Yusuf
Zacharia Yusuf Abdurahman
Adnan Farah
Hanad Mustafe Musse
Guled Ali Omar
Abdirahman Yasin Daud
Mohamed Abdihamid Farah
Abdirizak Warsame
Hamza Ahmed
Abdullahi Yusuf
Ahmed Ali Omar
Amina Farah Ali
Hawo Mohamed Hassan
Abdul Razak Ali Artan
Dahir Ahmed Adan
Omar Abdulsattar Ameen
Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan
Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab
Abdullatif Ali Aldosary
Bilal Abood
Jamshid Muhtorov
Mahad Abdiaziz Adbiraham
More than half of these foreign menaces came from Somalia. The 60 refujihadis include a Muslim translator for the U.S. Army, cab drivers, gangsters, money transfer agents, janitors, and college students. They include convicted weapons felons, confessed aiders and abettors of terrorism, stabbing spree vigilantes, and bombers all sworn to wage war against infidels in the name of Allah – and fraudulently posing undercover as victims of political and religious persecution. Here’s just a small taste of what our blind “welcoming” culture has wrought:
Abdul Razak Ali Artan was a Somali refugee who left his homeland with his family in 2007 for Pakistan and landed in Dallas before resettling in Ohio. In 2014, he became a legal permanent resident. At Ohio State University, where he was a student, Artan raged against America and invoked radical Muslim cleric and spiritual adviser to jihadists Anwar al-Awlaki. In 2016, he plowed his car into a group of students and then broke out a knife and stabbed innocent bystanders. Eleven were injured before police shot Artan dead.
Somali refugee Dahir Ahmed Adan went on a stabbing spree at a St. Cloud, Minnesota, mall in 2016, injuring ten people before an off-duty police officer shot him dead. Police told local media Adan quizzed at least one person on whether the individual was Muslim and made references to Allah while carrying out the stabbings. A local chapter leader of the unindicted terror co-conspirators of CAIR-Hamas disseminated an obligatory condemnation of Adan’s jihad before wailing about “the potential backlash to this community.”
Mahad Abdiaziz Adbiraham pleaded guilty to stabbing two people at the Mall of America in Minnesota in January 2018. Initially, the crime was reported as an “interrupted theft” in which two men had spotted Adbiraham attempting to steal merchandise at a Macy’s. But Adbiraham made his intent clear in the courtroom when he entered his plea. His attack was a “call for jihad by the Chief of Believer, Abu-bakr Al-baghdadi, may Allah protect him, and by the Mujahiden of the Islamic State,” he wrote in a statement. “I understand that the two men I stabbed know and have explained the reason for my attack, and I am here reaffirming that it was indeed an act of Jihad in the way of Allah.” Motive: known. Adbiraham entered the U.S. with “derivative status,” meaning he came here with a relative legally (most likely a refugee or green card recipient).
Mohanad Shareef Hammadi was an Iraqi refugee who landed in Las Vegas before resettling in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 2009. He was not being hunted or oppressed by anyone. He was, in fact, a bomb-maker insurgent for Al Qaeda in Iraq who had targeted American soldiers on the battlefield and sought to amass high-powered weapons and ship them from his adopted home back to the front lines to assist his terrorist brethren. In 2013, he was sentenced to life in prison for providing material support to terrorists and “conspiring to transfer, possess, and export Stinger missiles,” not to mention making a false statement in an immigration application.
In 2015, a ring of Bosnian Muslim refugees and naturalized Bosnian-American citizens were indicted on criminal charges for sending money and supplies to terrorists in Syria and Iraq. Ramiz and Sedina Hodzic, refugees who had resettled in St. Louis, were charged in a criminal conspiracy involving fellow Bosnian immigrants Mediha Medy Salkicevic, Armin Harcevic, Jasminka Ramic, and Nihad Rosic. They raised money and purchased U.S. military uniforms, combat boots, tactical gear, and rifle scopes, which they sent to Abdullah Ramo Pazara–a Bosnian Muslim refugee who had lived in St. Louis and became a U.S. citizen just days before traveling to Syria in 2013 to fight for Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Pazara rose up the ranks of ISIS; he was reportedly killed on the Turkey-Syria border. Ramiz Hodzic, Harcevic, Salkicevic, and Ramic pleaded guilty to their charges in 2019. In May 2019, Sedina Hodzic pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism and is awaiting sentencing.
Open Borders Inc. propagandists and profiteers will do what they always do when confronted with criminal nightmares that don’t fit the Emma Lazarus fantasy narrative: Whitewash them. The vast majority of refugees are law-abiding, they’ll sputter. Only xenophobes dwell on the negative impacts, they’ll seethe. But an untold number of refugees are not just committing ordinary civilian crimes. They are Islamic oppressors masquerading as the oppressed. Never forget: Ramzi Yousef faked an asylum claim to plot the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Never forget: Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian bomb-builder who entered the U.S. illegally through Canada, claimed political asylum based on phony persecution by Israelis. Never forget: Palestinian jihadist Mir Aimal Kansi, convicted in 1997 of capital murder for the January 1993 shooting spree outside CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., claimed bogus political asylum based on his ethnic minority status in Pakistan. The 9/11 jihad attacks, which every feckless politician will commemorate during next week’s 18th anniversary events with “Never Again” platitudes, should have taught us that all it takes is a teeny-tiny minority of foreign menaces to wreak massive havoc on our safety and civil order.
How many more horrifying reasons do we need to shut off the refujihadi spigot, stop underwriting the U.N.’s sovereignty-eroding agenda, and get our house in order?
CLAIM: President Donald Trump is ending “a policy that allows migrants to not be deported while they or their family members receive life-saving medical treatments.”
VERDICT: False. There was never any such policy, and all the Trump administration is doing is moving discretion over individual cases from USCIS to ICE.
The media were abuzz Wednesday and Thursday with claims, such as the one quoted from The Hill, above, that Trump is so hell-bent on deporting people that he is even “deporting kids with cancer,” as Vanity Fair put it (adding that Trump was once again living down to comparisons to Adolf Hitler).
Former vice president Joe Biden seized on the news, and added it to his stump speech. He declared, for example, on Thursday night in Greenville, South Carolina:
In just the last few days, we’ve learned his newest target is children. I thought we’d hit the bottom. No! … He decided to take away automatic citizenship from the children of our military serving overseas. … Like every bully in history, he’s trying to make himself seem stronger by picking on the most vulnerable … I thought even he would understand that kids suffering from cancer, cystic fibrosis, and other diseases they can’t get treatment for in their countries were off limits. But like so many other things he’s said, cruelty seems to be the point. … They all have to be unplugged and gone. Ladies and gentlemen — Neuroblastoma! — I can’t imagine, if I had been an immigrant, my son Beau, when he came home from the war, and he ended up having stage 4 glioblastoma … and them telling me, “No, unplug him, send him home.” That’s what it is! That’s what he’s doing! And it’s immoral, and it’s wrong!
Everything about that statement is false.
Trump is not taking away birthright citizenship “from the children of our military serving overseas.”An NBC reporter had to issue a correction: “Experts who have looked at new USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigrant Services] policy say it applies if a service member adopts a child overseas, but children born to service members on deployment would still automatically get citizenship.” (Evidently Joe Biden did not get that particular memo.)
Second, there is no existing policy of “special status”for medical deferment, according to sources who spoke to Breitbart News on background.
What has happened in the past is that illegal aliens — not legal “immigrants,” as Biden suggested — were able to apply to an adjudicator at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for deferment from deportation. The majority of “deferred action” requests were denied by USCIS. Now they will be considered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is an enforcement agency (as USCIS is not).
The Associated Press cited letters sent to some Boston-area families ordering them to leave the country within 33 days. The letters apparently did not mention the shift in agency responsibilities. It is not yet clear what is happening in those cases, or why those individuals were not told about the shift from USCIS to ICE.
Nevertheless, what is happening to those individuals does not appear to be the result of a change in “special status”by Trump. Notably, the Associated Press refers to “immigrants”— not “illegal immigrants,”or even “undocumented” immigrants, obscuring the status of those affected (and perhaps frightening some legal immigrants).
People who want to travel to the U.S. for specialized care can still do so, legally, by applying via normal channels.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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