After he died last month in federal custody, Democrats are rallying around the death of an illegal alien who was convicted of murder more than two decades ago. Charles Leo Daniel, a Trinidad and Tobago citizen who illegally overstayed his U.S. visa, died due to unknown circumstances on March 7 in the Northwest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington.
Daniel was first jailed after he was convicted in 2003 of the brutal murder of his landlord roommate with a “bloody butcher knife.” Court documents say police arrived on the scene to find Daniel “covered in blood.”
Daniel claimed self-defense but the court determined that “testimony to be lacking in credibility” and “found the forensic evidence inconsistent with Daniel’s account of how he had stabbed” the victim, Raymond Lindsay. The court initially sentenced Daniel to “220 months prison and 24 to 48 months of community custody.” A per curiam decision issued in 2007 affirmed that sentence after concluding that “the court did not misapply the law of self-defense.”
After an immigration judge ruled in favor of expelling Daniel from the country in 2020, Daniel was transferred into the custody of the Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations, where he died.
Shortly after his death, researchers at the University of Washington quickly alleged that the circumstances of Daniel’s detention, which included “the second-longest stretch in solitary confinement of any person in ICE custody since 2018,” caused him suffering and may have played a role in his death. The UW activists demand that Congress send “written information requests of the agency’s Congressional liaison.”
“If members of Washington’s Congressional delegation have chosen not to make use of this tool to date, now is the time to start, in the interests of transparency, accountability, and supporting the leadership of Washington communities who are using every tool at our disposal in our effort to stop the abuse of our neighbors,” the “research update” concludes.
A few weeks later, a dozen Democrat Senators sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Patrick J. Lechleitner, the ICE official performing the duties of the director, on March 29 demanding an end to the “misuse of solitary confinement in immigration detention.”
Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin, two of the signees, also spoke out against solitary confinement for those convicted of crimes connected to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. They did not, however, ever send a formal letter demanding better treatment for detained Americans than for illegal border crossers.
Democrats’ letter to ICE does not mention Daniel’s name. It does, however, use the same language as UW to pressure ICE into reducing punishments for foreigners who break U.S. law and murder Americans.
On March 21, Rep. Pramila Jayapal also released a statement scolding ICE for “overreliance on detention” and even suggested that “nearly 67 percent of people detained in ICE custody have no criminal record and many more only have minor offenses such as traffic violations.” While mentioning Daniel by name, she did not mention Daniel’s criminal record atop his violation of U.S. immigration law. Instead, she offered sympathy to his family for the “unacceptable tragedy.”
“First and foremost, my heart goes out to Mr. Daniel’s family and loved ones. His death is an unacceptable tragedy and there must be accountability and a full investigation to understand exactly what happened at the Northwest Detention Center,” she said.
Democrats’ attention to Daniel’s death received amplification from The News Tribune. The pro-illegal migration group La Resistencia also saw their fact-free claims of “harassment” and “intimidation” amid protests outside of the Tacoma detention facility published in a positive light.
Neither article mentioned Daniel’s criminal history.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
MIDLAND, Texas —Alex Wise Jr. would have turned 11 years old in May, but he won’t be at his birthday party this year. Instead of celebrating another trip around the sun for Wise, his extended family will gather without him to honor his 10 short years on Earth.
“I wish he was here. I really do wish I had him here. But unfortunately, his life was taken way too early by someone who wasn’t even supposed to be in the country,” Sykia Benson, Wise’s mom, told The Federalist.
Wise became one of the many victims of the ongoing border invasion in February, shortly after he was struck and killed by an illegal border crosser as he headed home from school. The elementary school student used to ride the bus, but after his family moved apartments, he was asked to walk.
Thursday, February 8 was Wise’s first and last day to walk his new after-school route. Before the 10-year-old could even make it to the stop sign where someone was waiting to meet him, Wise was hit by a truck driven by an illegal border crosser.
“Everybody else let [Wise] cross the street but this car was so impatient that it went around. And he was almost on the grass, like a step away from being on the grass when he got hit,” Benson said.
Rogelio Ortiz Olivas, a 50-year-old Mexico native who re-crossed President Joe Biden’s open border after facing deportation at least five times previously, was registered as intoxicated at the time of the crash. He fled the scene but was later arrested after an officer at a traffic stop noticed his damaged truck hood bearing an “impression of a skull.”
Ortiz Olivas faces a third-degree felony of “hit and run, accident causing death” charge for “driver negligence” and failing to stop and render aid. Local arrest records confirm that, to this day, the Midland County Sheriff’s Office is holding Ortiz for “collision involving serious bodily injury,” “driving while intoxicated,” and an immigration detainer.
Benson says police told her Ortiz Olivas had a New Mexico driver’s license and the vehicle he drove was in his name.
“Somebody helped him get identification,” Benson said. “Somebody helped him in New Mexico get an ID.”
The Midland Police Department did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s questions about this alleged driver’s license and whether it was still valid at the time of the incident. It wouldn’t be impossible, however, for an illegal border crosser like Ortiz Olivas to have obtained a standard license at some point under New Mexico’s lax ID laws.
‘The Sweetest Kid’
Benson received the devastating call that her son was injured and would be life-flighted to the nearby city of Lubbock for medical care as she was picking up her father from the local airport. By the next day, Benson’s “sweet,” “helpful,” and “friendly” boy was gone.
“He was a kid. He got into things,” Benson recalled. “But he was still just a sweet, sweet person.”
Wise wasn’t just sweet, he was also smart, making mostly A’s and B’s in school. When he wasn’t learning math, his favorite subject, Wise was playing sports with friends
“He loved football, basketball, soccer. He loved it all. He was about to start playing football. He already played basketball and soccer,” Benson said.
Wise also loved playing with his one-year-old sister. Benson said her daughter doesn’t quite understand Wise’s absence but she recognizes it.
“I don’t think she knows too much now but you can definitely see a void where she’s used to running to him, running in his room,” Benson said.
As for Benson, she’s taking things “day by day.”
“I feel like I’m at a standstill because it’s surreal that he’s gone,” Benson said through tears.
A Preventable Death
Since Wise’s passing, Benson and her family have received an outpouring of support from their church, friends, and Wise’s school, which promised to erect a park bench in her son’s name. But not even the most heartfelt gestures can take away the pain she feels when she wakes up early to take her son to school only to remember he’s not there.
“It’s been hard. Trying to get used to him not being here, it’s been really, really difficult,” Benson said.
One of the most unexpected parts of her grieving process, Benson said, is her concern that a tragedy like the one her son endured could happen again. She said her son’s death could have been prevented if the United States had better deportation enforcement and border security.
“There should be laws put in place where if you’re deported one time and you get caught a second time, it should be mandatory automatic jail time. So you keep sending them back and they keep coming over and they’re getting over some kind of way. It’s no control over the border,” Benson said.
Currently, Benson does not know when legal justice against her son’s alleged killer will be served.
“I actually haven’t heard anything from anyone,” Benson. “Nobody’s been informing me about anything. I’ve been going to them, and they still don’t know too much.”
The Midland County District Attorney’s Office confirmed to The Federalist on Wednesday that there are no scheduled court dates for Ortiz Olivas.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
A lot of ink has been spilled in recent days about the Senate’s $118 billion border bill, most of it detailing just how awful the proposed legislation is — awful, that is, if your goal is actually to secure the border. The bill creates a new baseline of admitting 1.8 million illegal immigrants annually, doles out work permits and green cards on the whim of federal bureaucrats, and funnels billions of tax dollars to the same NGOs that have for years facilitated mass illegal border crossings. And that’s just for starters.
But not much has been said about Mexico’s role in the new immigration regime this legislation would create. In fact, Mexico is barely mentioned at all in the 370-page bill. That’s odd considering that no border enforcement mechanism that actually keeps illegal immigrants out of the U.S. will work without some level of Mexican involvement.
Consider that the so-called “bipartisan” legislation, crafted behind closed doors by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, includes a “border emergency authority” to shut down the border if 5,000 illegal immigrants are arrested daily over seven consecutive days or 8,500 are arrested in a single day. Setting aside that this would cement into law nearly 2 million illegal immigrants every year, what would happen to all those illegal immigrants arrested in the U.S. after the border is “shut down” under this emergency authority?
Apparently, they would all be sent back to Mexico. But why would Mexico agree to that? Admitting hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals into northern Mexican border towns after they’ve already crossed into the U.S. would create massive problems for a country already beset by record-breaking violence and crippling levels of corruption.
The answer is that the Senate bill hopes to bribe Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Buried in the bill (on page 85) is a $415 million slush fund “to increase foreign country capacity to accept and integrate returned and removed individuals.” The unnamed foreign country here is almost certainly Mexico, which is where the “removed individuals” would be sent once the border is “shut down.” Another $850 million in the bill is set aside for undefined “International Disaster Assistance” to “address humanitarian needs in the Western Hemisphere.” Again, the likely recipient of the bulk of these funds will be Mexico.
For his part, López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, has been candid about his desire for the United States to pay for Mexico’s cooperation on the border. Last month, following a high-level visit of Biden officials to Mexico City in December, AMLO reportedly demanded $20 billion from the Biden administration to help tackle the “root causes” of illegal immigration, as well as sweeping reforms to U.S.-Cuba policy and 10 million visas for Mexican nationals currently living in the United States.
In this context, it’s hard not to see the hundreds of millions of dollars set aside in the border bill as a down payment on AMLO’s demands. At best, it’s a quid pro quo for cooperation on the border. At worst, it’s a ransom payment to a hostile neighbor with ill intent.
Now, one might argue that Schumer and McConnell and the Biden administration are just doing the practical thing here and securing Mexico’s cooperation. But such a view belies a misunderstanding of the relevant history and Mexico’s malign role in the border crisis.
For many decades now, the default assumption in Washington was that Mexico is our partner, that we can’t solve illegal immigration without Mexico’s help. But that’s only half true. The reality is that Mexico is not a partner, not a friendly neighbor with whom we can cooperate to solve this problem, but an antagonist. Over the last 15 or so years, the merging of Mexico’s most powerful cartels with certain elements of the Mexican state means that much of the border crisis is being directed and facilitated by the cartels in collaboration with Mexico’s National Guard and the National Institute of Migration, the federal agency in charge of migration in Mexico.
On top of that, it’s now a well-established fact that AMLO himself is cooperating with the Sinaloa cartel, the country’s most powerful, and has been for many years. A long and detailed report published by ProPublica last week chronicled Sinaloa’s bankrolling of AMLO’s 2006 presidential campaign, which appears to have been the beginning of a long partnership that has now borne fruit — for both parties. Sinaloa has helped consolidate electoral victories for AMLO’s left-wing Morena party in the last two election cycles, while AMLO has pursued a policy of placating the cartels and disavowing the drug war — “hugs, not bullets,” as he put it on the campaign trail in 2018.
That AMLO’s administration has been compromised by its association with the cartels, or that the cartels have figured out how to monetize illegal immigration, isn’t some conspiracy theory but well-established fact. Given that reality, it stands to reason that if AMLO is going to cooperate with the Biden administration to reduce the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. at the expense of the cartel networks with which he is politically allied, he’s going to want compensation. After all, the illegal immigrant black market was worth an estimated $13 billion a year as of July 2022, and is likely much more than that now, not counting the $56 billion in remittances to Mexico from the U.S. every year.
Put bluntly, that’s what the $415 million slush fund is really for, to make up for lost revenue that would otherwise go to the cartels, smuggling networks, and corrupt elements of Mexican officialdom. And it’s likely just a first installment.
Given all this, what other ways could we secure Mexico’s cooperation on the border crisis? Recent history suggests that sticks work better than carrots. In 2019, amid a much smaller border crisis, President Trump famously threatened to slap a tariff on all Mexican goods coming over the border unless the Mexican government did more to crack down on the caravans wending their way north through the country. If Trump had followed through, it would have collapsed the Mexican economy in short order, and everyone knew it.
Sure enough, the newly elected AMLO got the message. Arrests at the border soon began to plummet. The caravans were dispersed, and most never made it to the border. By the time Trump left office, illegal border-crossings were at historic lows.
That changed the month after Biden took office, and we have more or less been in crisis since then. Under Biden, almost nothing has been asked of Mexico, even as illegal immigration reached historic levels. Yet Biden hasn’t threatened AMLO’s government with a thing, and of course, the lack of consequences has incentivized more bad behavior from a corrupt Mexican state and the cartels that profit off the crisis.
If Senate Republicans were serious about convincing Mexico to accept expelled or deported illegal immigrants under a new U.S. border policy, they would treat our southern neighbor as the antagonist it actually is and threaten massive tariffs or some other economic penalties. As for the cartels, Republicans need to start making a more forceful case for going to war with them. Otherwise, there’s no way to get either the fentanyl or border crises under control.
The last thing you would do with such a neighbor, under these circumstances, is offer a bribe, validating the corruption right at the heart of the border crisis. Yet that’s exactly what the Senate bill does.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
More than 300,000 illegal immigrants were encountered by U.S. border officials in December, marking a record for the highest number recorded for a single month.
REPORT: Migrants are camping in people's yards in San Diego, California as the Biden migrant crisis continues to spin out of control.
It didn't have to be this way.
Migrants are now chopping down San Diego residents' trees and using them for firewood. One land owner says the… pic.twitter.com/z9uW5VfOgy
According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources who spoke with Fox News, “more than 302,000 migrants were documented attempting to cross the U.S. southern border” between Dec. 1-31. Totaling more than 785,000 illegal encounters in the first quarter alone, December’s numbers signify the first time CBP has engaged more than 300,000 illegals in a single month.
While the former figure is larger than the population of Seattle, Washington — which, as of July 2022, hosts roughly 749,000 people — the latter is enough to fill America’s largest football stadium “almost three times,” according to The Daily Signal.
In fiscal year 2023, CBP encountered “more than 2.47 million” illegals, marking an increase from the roughly 2.38 million recorded in 2022 and 1.73 million in 2021. An October report published by House Republicans estimates there have been more than 1.7 million “gotaways” since President Biden took office.
Contrary to the White House’s claims, Biden and his administration have done nothing to stymie the ongoing invasion at America’s southern border. In fact, the administration has actively sought to prevent border states such as Texas from enacting measures designed to halt foreign nationals’ infringement upon their sovereignty.
Last year, for example, Biden’s Department of Justice sued Texas for placing barriers in the Rio Grande River to prevent illegals from streaming onto their land. More recently, the DOJ threatened to file a lawsuit against the Lone Star State if it enacts legislation that would authorize state and local law enforcement to “arrest, jail and prosecute [individuals] suspected of entering the U.S. unlawfully.”
I’m so damn sick and tired of seeing these videos with NOTHING being done.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have failed to use their majority to enact significant border policy changes in spending bills or hold Biden and officials such as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas accountable for their intentional destruction of America’s southern border. In November, for instance, eight GOP representatives voted with Democrats to block a resolution introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to impeach Mayorkas for his allowance of the disaster to continue unaddressed.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
The Biden administration is deporting a Christian family from Germany who legitimately fears persecution and should qualify for asylum, while allowing 99 percent of illegal immigrants to stay in the U.S., most of whom likely do not qualify for asylum.
Uwe and Hannelore Romeike reportedly fled Germany in 2008 because they were threatened with prosecution and $9,000 fines for homeschooling their five children. The couple and their family have lived in Tennessee and filed for asylum. The family has thrived in the U.S., including having two children who are American citizens and two other children who married American citizens. Unfortunately, the U.S. authorities denied their asylum claim in 2013. After the Obama administration intervened, the family had been able to stay in the U.S. under an “indefinite deferred action status.”
But last month the Biden administration told the family they must return to Germany. Since Germany hasn’t changed its law regarding homeschooling, the family has legitimate concerns that if they go back to Germany, they will face the same prosecution that drove them away in the first place.
While the Biden administration is determined to deport this Christian family, it has done next to nothing to remove millions of illegal immigrants who came into the U.S. through our nation’s southern border, according to a new report from House Republicans.
The Biden administration and its Democrat allies have insisted for more than two years that the U.S.-Mexico border wasn’t open, there is no border crisis, and the administration has enforced immigration laws. But the data gathered by the House Judiciary Committee paints a very different picture: that the Biden administration has failed to deport, through immigration court proceedings, more than 99 percent of illegal immigrants between Jan. 20, 2021, and March 31, 2023.
After pressure from the committee to release basic statistics, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported more than 5 million illegal immigrant encounters in that same period (not including unknown numbers of illegal “getaways”). Most of them sought to claim asylum but were disqualified under asylum’s legal definition. Yet fewer than 6,000 illegal immigrants were placed in removal proceedings before an immigration judge and actually removed from the United States during this time.
Meanwhile, nearly half of the 5 million illegal immigrants “had no confirmed departure from the United States.” DHS “released at least 2,148,738 illegal aliens into the United States” during the same period, and only 6 percent of them “were even screened for fear of prosecution for the purpose of asylum.”
An Impeachable Offense?
According to Jeffrey H. Anderson, president of the American Main Street Initiative think tank, U.S. immigration law “requires that those entering the U.S. without proper documentation be continuously detained until their claim can be adjudicated.” The Biden administration has obviously failed to comply with U.S. immigration law, a failure that Anderson regards as President Biden having committed an impeachable offense.
Despite complaints from Democratic mayors, such as New York City’s Eric Adams, about their cities being overwhelmed with illegal immigrants, the Biden administration recently doubled down on its open border policy by granting work permits to close to half a million illegal immigrants from Venezuela without congressional authorization.
The Biden administration’s reluctance to enforce existing laws and its willingness to offer amnesty have created an incentive for even more illegal border crossings. The GOP report estimates 1.2 million illegal migrant encounters between April and September this year. Last month, within 24 hours, more than 10,000 illegal migrants were “encountered” at the U.S.-Mexico border. Unsurprisingly, most came from Venezuela because they regard Biden’s amnesty to Venezuelans as an open invitation to the United States.
Additionally, our nation’s southern border has become a gate for the illicit drug trade, directly contributing to America’s opioid epidemic. The United Nations calls the U.S.-Mexico border “the deadliest land route” for human trafficking, especially the trafficking of children, many of whom have become enslaved workers in the U.S. What’s even more outrageous is that citizen journalists caught U.S. government officials facilitating child trafficking at taxpayers’ expense.
About-Face on Border Wall
In an about-face move, the Biden administration recently announced it would expedite the construction of a border wall, despite calling the wall construction under the Trump administration “just one example of the prior administration’s misplaced priorities and failure to manage migration in a safe, orderly, and humane way.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried to justify the administration’s embarrassing policy reversal by insisting Biden hasn’t changed his opposition to a border wall. Still, his DHS “is complying by the law” to build a border wall because “that appropriation came from fiscal year 2019 under the last administration, Republican leadership.”
The Biden administration’s claim of “complying with the law” is rich. The alarming statistics from the House GOP’s report demonstrate that the Biden administration, starting with President Biden, has surrendered one of the government’s most fundamental responsibilities: to enforce laws and keep America safe. Not to mention that the Biden administration’s approach to immigration laws is so upside down and illogical that it insists on deporting a Christian family facing persecution in their home country while welcoming with open arms illegal migrants who are disqualified for asylum.
President Biden certainly believes he deserves another term. American voters, however, should remember the disastrous results of Biden’s policies and never again elect as president someone who refuses to enforce the laws of the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted in a September report that foreign terrorists are exploiting the Biden-manufactured border crisis to illegally enter the United States.
Released last month by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the “Homeland Threat Assessment” for fiscal year 2024 includes an admission by the agency that international terrorists are looking to capitalize on the Biden administration’s open border policies and the resulting influx of illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border to enter the American homeland. Under the section titled, “Border and Immigration Security,” the report specifically noted how “[t]errorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.”
The agency further acknowledged “individuals with potential terrorism connections” are actively attempting to enter the U.S. thanks to the ongoing crisis. Months before the 2023 fiscal year ended, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had already encountered approximately 160 individuals on the Terrorist Screening Data Set (TSDS), or “watchlist” — more than the 100 or so encountered in the entirety of the 2022 fiscal year. According to the report, “Inclusion in the TSDS ranges from known associates of watchlisted individuals, such as family members, to individuals directly engaged in terrorist activity.”
Despite proclaiming support for a “secure” border, President Joe Biden and his administration have routinely dismantled policies that helped stymie the ongoing crisis. In addition to auctioning off border wall construction materials, Biden moved to gut the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy shortly after taking office. That policy required illegal border crossers seeking asylum to stay in the Latin American country until their court hearing.
It’s estimated that nearly 7 million illegal immigrants have been “encountered” at the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office, according to the New York Post. And that doesn’t even include the potentially millions of “gotaways” who evaded capture by CBP agents.
Last month’s DHS assessment was issued weeks before Hamas — an Iranian-backed terrorist organization operating out of Gaza — launched a series of unprovoked and barbaric attacks against Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The attacks have since prompted concerns that foreign-based terrorist organizations could exploit America’s open border to illegally enter the U.S. and launch similar operations.
In response to possible threats, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the state’s public safety division to coordinate with local and federal law enforcement on “heightened public safety measures,” with a particular focus on raising awareness of possible threats against the state’s Jewish community by Iranian-backed terrorist groups.
In its new threat assessment, DHS specifically highlighted Iran — the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism — and its “intent to plot attacks against current and former US government officials.”
“Iran relies on individuals with pre-existing access to the United States for surveillance and lethal plotting—using dual nationals, members of criminal networks, and private investigators,” the report reads, adding that Tehran has even attempted to carry out plots “that do not require international travel for operatives.”
The report also listed Hezbollah — another Iranian-backed terrorist group operating out of Lebanon — as another source of potential foreign terror threats.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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.
Amid the scrum of news this week about Democrat-led schemes to put former President Donald Trump on trial during the GOP primaries and rig the 2024 election in plain sight, you might have missed a cautionary tale out of New York City, where Democrat millionaires are whining about a migrant crisis they helped create.
A group of more than 120 executives, including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Larry Fink of BlackRock, and Jane Fraser of Citigroup, sent a letter to the Biden administration and congressional leaders asking for more federal aid to New York, to help with what they call “the humanitarian crisis that has resulted from the continued flow of asylum-seekers into our country.”
Credit where credit is due: These wealthy New York executives seem to have figured out the connection between huge numbers of illegal immigrants — sorry, “asylum-seekers” — and the humanitarian crisis that always follows.
It’s a connection many of us made years ago, back when massive waves of illegal immigrants were overrunning Texas border towns and gathering in sprawling makeshift encampments along the north banks of the Rio Grande. Unable to house or even properly process these people, federal border officials resorted to dropping them off at bus stations in places like McAllen and Del Rio, Texas — relatively small towns with few resources to cope with the thousands of illegal immigrants released from federal custody, sometimes on a daily basis.
But so long as the chaos and crisis stayed in south Texas, Democrats in deep-blue enclaves like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles were happy to tut-tut anyone who claimed there was a problem at the border or suggested that maybe we should do something to stop the flow of illegal border-crossers. If you complained or proposed solutions, you were a racist — just like those Border Patrol horsemen with their “whips.” How dare they try to stop foreigners from illegally entering the country right in front of them?
But now that hotels and shelters are filled to overflowing in these cities, now that the crisis has come directly to open-border Democrats’ homes and places of work, wealthy urban elites want the government to do something about it. (A New York Times story this week mentioned that new arrivals are being forced to sleep outside over-capacity shelters, including one at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, “just blocks away from JPMorgan’s offices.”)
The New York letter, whose list of signatories includes people like Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf, ends with a plea to Washington “to take immediate action to better control the border and the process of asylum and provide relief to the cities and states that are bearing the burdens posed by the influx of asylum seekers.”
Of course, to hear White House flack Karine Jean-Pierre tell it, President Biden is controlling the influx of migrants at the border and, in fact, has stopped the flow! She actually said that this week, even though as Bill Melugin of Fox News was quick to point out, it’s completely false.
This is a blatantly false claim from the White House podium. There were more than 7,000 migrants apprehended by Border Patrol on Tuesday alone after they crossed illegally. Following a brief lull in the weeks after the end of T42 in May, illegal crossings are surging once again. https://t.co/POYcaGuFLj
Leaving aside idiotic White House spin, do the wealthy letter-signers of New York realize that one very effective way to “better control the border” is for state and local law enforcement to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ensure illegal immigrants under an order of deportation by an immigration judge are actually deported? Do they know that kind of enforcement is a powerful deterrent to would-be illegal border-crossers abroad, and lack of such enforcement is a powerful pull factor that encourages more illegal immigration?
It would seem they do not. These are the same people, after all, who tacitly supported a 2019 law making it much easier for illegal immigrants to get a driver’s license in New York, thus shielding them from detection, while also prohibiting ICE and CBP from accessing New York DMV records.
Did the current Democratic mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, support this policy when it was introduced four years ago? He was a state senator for years; surely he knew about it. Today, Mayor Adams says that any plan to address the migrant crisis in his city that does not involve stopping the flow of illegal immigration at the border “is a failed plan.”
I hate to be the one to break it to him, but stopping the flow of illegal immigration at the border means taking away the incentives for people to illegally cross the border in the first place. Making it easy for illegal immigrants to get a driver’s license, for example, while helping to shield them from federal immigration authorities, is a recipe for more, not less, illegal immigration.
New York is of course only one state among many that has passed such laws. Indeed, a vast illegal immigrant sanctuary network has sprung up nationwide in recent years among blue cities, states, and counties that have enacted laws, ordinances, regulations, and policies that hinder immigration enforcement and shield criminal aliens from ICE.
Still, even amid the crisis, with migrant families sleeping on the streets of New York and other major cities, blue-state elites don’t quite seem to grasp what’s happening, which is why they aren’t demanding deportation but better processing and expedited work permits for “asylum-seekers” — policies that do nothing but provide more and stronger incentives for migrants to enter the United States illegally.
And make no mistake: Would-be migrants are acutely aware of the incentives and disincentives at work here. As Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies noted in a recent interview, “All U.S.-bound immigrants pay very, very close, almost academic attention, to any and all policy pronouncements uttered or implemented by American leaders about immigration. They also pay close attention to news of all immigration-related court rulings. The reason they are so disciplined is because this or that policy or court ruling either makes illegal entry easier or harder.”
Which means, in turn, that surges in illegal border-crossings of the kind we’ve seen since Biden took office — a record 2.3 million border arrests last year and on track for the same or greater this year — are driven almost entirely by policy decisions coming out of Washington, D.C., and legal rulings from the federal judiciary.
If New York millionaire Democrats paid half as much attention to border policy as illegal immigrants do, maybe they’d grasp what’s going on at the border, and why. Maybe they could then start to make sense of the anger and frustration of working- and middle-class residents of their cities, who increasingly show up at public meetings to express outrage at the migrant crisis. One woman, a Chicago resident speaking at a recent meeting about a migrant shelter in Hyde Park, was blunt about it: “I don’t want them there. Take them someplace else or send them back to Venezuela. I don’t care where they go. This is wrong. You got 73 percent of the people homeless in this city are black people. What have you done for them?”
Maybe, just maybe the wealthy elites who run our blue cities are beginning to wake up and realize that soon that woman’s question will be on the lips of every resident of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and every other place where Democrats have helped create the conditions for this crisis.
Here’s hoping they can connect the dots. If they can’t, they can always go down to the local migrant shelter and have an asylum-seeker explain it to them.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
As the year winds down, the border is about to break wide open. In less than a week, the Biden administration’s last remaining tool to control illegal immigration, left over from the Trump administration, will be taken away.
Title 42, the public-health order invoked by President Trump during the pandemic that allowed immigration officials to quickly expel most migrants caught crossing the border illegally, will end on Dec. 21 by order of a federal judge. Once Title 42 is gone, federal agencies at the border will have no choice but to process and release nearly every illegal border-crosser. It will represent a full return to the Obama-era “catch-and-release” policy. Border Patrol estimates they could see as many as 14,000 arrests per day in the coming weeks, which would totally overwhelm the border.
For migrants, there is now every incentive to do just that. Word of Title 42’s demise has almost certainly reached migrants in Mexico already, who now know that if they cross the Rio Grande, they will be allowed to remain in the United States, with work authorization, for years while they await the outcome of an asylum hearing.
Biden, who repealed or severely curtailed nearly every one of Trump’s border policies upon taking office in January 2021, has no plan for what to do now. Axios reported this week on a vague plan circulating among Biden officials for a temporary (five-month) moratorium on asylum, but the plan hasn’t been approved. It’s unclear how it would even be implemented with less than a week to go before Title 42 ends.
Many of them are from Nicaragua, which means they can’t be deported to Nicaragua (the U.S. has no deportation agreement with the authoritarian dictatorship of Nicaragua’s president-for-life Daniel Ortega), and they can’t be expelled to Mexico, which refuses to take back Nicaraguans. So, the U.S. is just letting them in, giving them a court date for an asylum hearing years from now, and releasing them. Never mind that many of these migrants, by their own admission to reporters, are economic migrants who have no valid asylum claims.
Back in August, my colleague Emily Jashinsky and I reported on the migrant encampments and shelters in the Mexican border towns of Matamoros and Reynosa across the Rio Grande from Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, respectively. Most of those migrants were Haitian, although they had been living in various South American countries for years, with legal status. They came to the border for a chance to get into the U.S. and pursue what one of them told us was “the American dream, a dream for all Haitian people.”
The reason so many had been waiting in Mexican shelters was that they feared being deported back to Haiti, where they hadn’t lived in many years, or because they had already tried to cross and been expelled back to Mexico under Title 42. They could not afford to pay the cartels for multiple river crossings, and so they were waiting, they told us, for U.S. policy to change.
Their wait is almost over. Once the threat of expulsion under Title 42 is gone, there will be little to hold them back. The border will become a chaotic, ungovernable disaster. We will likely see the appearance of tent-like refugee camps on the U.S. side of the border, as we saw in Del Rio, Texas, in the fall of 2021. To put the figure of 14,000 arrests per day into context, three years ago, during the 2019 border surge, President Obama’s DHS Secretary, Jeh Johnson, said that 1,000 apprehensions a day “overwhelms” the system and that he “cannot imagine” what 4,000 arrests per day would look like.
2022 was the worst year for illegal immigration in U.S. history. 2023 will be worse yet. As long as the Biden administration maintains its open-border policies, illegal immigration will increase, the cartels that profit from migrant smuggling will get rich, and the border will descend into chaos.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
One of the most condescending and insulting responses on the left to the Martha’s Vineyard migrant imbroglio last week was the repeated insistence, by blue-check media figures and Democrat politicians alike, that the 50 migrants who voluntarily boarded a plane to Massachusetts were somehow misled or tricked into it. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in this fevered telling, took advantage of these poor people for a political stunt, proving himself to be a cruel and heartless man, willing to exploit the misfortune of desperate migrants — weaponize them! — just to own the libs.
It’s hard to think of a more patronizing attitude toward men and women who successfully navigated a harrowing exodus from Venezuela and Columbia, trekked through Central America and Mexico, dealt with smugglers and cartels and corrupt police the entire way, and finally set foot in the United States.
Contrary to insulting left-wing stereotypes about ignorant and confused migrants, the people who show up at our southern border tend to be tough, determined, and keenly aware of what’s in their own best interest. (I know that firsthand, having interviewed hundreds of migrants over the years, most recently in Reynosa and Matamoros, Mexico. I always come away impressed by their grit and resolve and resourcefulness, which is more than I can say for Twitter blue-checks who are happy to opine about what we should do about “helpless migrants” but can’t be bothered to take a trip to the border to interview them in person.)
Now comes Judd Legum with an unintentionally hilarious story for Popular Information purporting to be a “smoking gun” proving that the Martha’s Vineyard migrants were lied to — and maybe even kidnapped! It’s probably the purest possible distillation of the condescending left-wing notion of confused and helpless migrants being led around by the nose by cynical and evil Republicans.
Legum opens his breathless reportage with this bombshell: “Popular Information has obtained documentary evidence that migrants from Venezuela were provided with false information to convince them to board flights chartered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R). The documents suggest that the flights were not just a callous political stunt but potentially a crime.”
And what is this documentary evidence? A brochure outlining refugee and immigrant benefits and assistance available in Massachusetts, which is a sanctuary state with multiple state programs designed to assist refugees and migrants. Legum says he got the brochure from Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR), a Boston-based legal organization that’s supposedly representing 30 of the migrants, who presumably got it from Florida officials before they boarded the flight to Martha’s Vineyard.
According to Legum, though, the benefits described in the brochure are only available to refugees who have been referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and authorized to live in the U.S. They’re not for illegal immigrants who have claimed asylum, like the Martha’s Vineyard migrants. Therefore, he says, they were misled. Lawyers for LCR are now asking the Massachusetts attorney general to open an investigation. “The allegation that the migrants were misled is legally significant,” writes Legum. “It would mean that the flights were not just heartless, but potentially criminal.”
But no matter how much activist reporters like Legum might wish that DeSantis had somehow committed a crime by offering illegal immigrants a voluntary free flight to Massachusetts, it just isn’t so. The 50 or so migrants who landed in Martha’s Vineyard last week were never promised employment or anything else, they were simply told that sanctuary states like Massachusetts, unlike Florida and Texas, have programs and assistance available to refugees and migrants, which is true.
The brochure in question, for example, contains a list of community services and churches that have migrant assistance programs. The first one listed is a link for the immigration page of a website called First Stop Martha’s Vineyard, which is an online reference guide to the island’s social services and programs. It includes information about the Massachusetts Office for Refugee and Immigrants, among other programs.
The flights themselves were organized and funded as part of Florida’s relocation program to transport Florida-bound illegal immigrants to sanctuary states like Massachusetts, California, and New York. The Florida legislature last year set aside $12 million for the program, which also targets human smugglers and traffickers through a law enforcement strike force. Texas has a similar program under the aegis of Gov. Greg Abbott’s $4 billion ongoing border security initiative, Operation Lone Star.
According to Florida officials, the Martha’s Vineyard migrants were identified in Texas as Florida-bound, but with no resources to travel. Some of them were sleeping in the streets, others in shelters. They were put up in hotels for a night or two and offered voluntary transport to Martha’s Vineyard. Some, after a night in a hotel, changed their minds and opted not to go. One migrant, a man named Eduardo Linares, told the Texas Tribune he declined the offer but that he’s since heard from people who went to Martha’s Vineyard, and now he’s wondering whether he made the right decision. Legum quotes Linares alleging that a mysterious blonde-haired woman named “Perla” promised him and others a job and rent assistance in Martha’s Vineyard, but left out the part about Linares second-guessing his decision to stay behind. Why? Because including that detail would disrupt the preposterous narrative that these migrants are confused and helpless, unable to make their own decisions, and totally at the mercy of duplicitous, scheming politicians like DeSantis and Abbott.
The reality of the situation is more complicated. Often, illegal immigrants who cross the southern border into the U.S. already have a job lined up and a place to stay, usually with family members. They’re bound for points all across the country, from California to Massachusetts. Some might even make their way to Martha’s Vineyard, especially if they’re offered a free ride.
That is to say, most of them have a plan. But you would never know it from the coverage of the Martha’s Vineyard saga, which didn’t just demonstrate the hypocrisy of leftists who welcome illegal immigrants so long as they don’t show up in places like Martha’s Vineyard. It also demonstrated the appalling condescension many in the corporate press have toward the very migrants they pretend to champion.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre in Buffalo, New York, where a deranged white supremacist killed 10 people, elite opinion quickly settled on the real culprit: Republicans. The New York Times spelled it out explicitly in an editorial this week, claiming Republican politicians and conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, “openly espouse versions of a white supremacist conspiracy theory holding that an orchestrated effort is underway to displace white Americans.”
The Times is of course referring to so-called “replacement theory,” the idea that global elites are trying to “replace” white Americans with immigrants and foreigners, which the Times thinks is a common belief among Republicans. Not to be outdone by the Times, the Washington Post’s editors on Monday declared, “what was once on the fringes has now been given currency, thanks to the Republican Party’s tolerance of white nationalists who count themselves as part of its base.”
The notion that “replacement theory” is mainstream on the right, much less in the GOP, is of course abject nonsense. But the accusation serves a purpose. By conflating the conspiracy theories of maniacs like the Buffalo shooter with legitimate calls for, say, border security and controls on illegal immigration, the left can smear all Republicans as white supremacists. Doing so serves a useful purpose for Democrats. If Republicans are the party of people who believe global elites are trying to “replace” white Americans with immigrants and foreigners, then any calls to fix our immigration system or solve the ongoing crisis at the border must be in bad faith, nothing more than rank racism thinly disguised as a respectable-sounding immigration agenda.
It also serves Democrats in another way: it helps mask an electoral agenda they once openly espoused. It’s no secret that Democrats think mass illegal immigration will accrue to their electoral advantage over the long term. For years, they have felt comfortable saying so routinely on national television. Indeed, the notion that “demographics is destiny” has been a long-running belief among Democrats, famously spelled out in John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s widely acclaimed 2004 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” Part of their argument rests on the assumption that immigration, legal and illegal, will swell the ranks of Democrat voters and hasten the inevitable emergence of a permanent Democratic majority. That theory, whatever its merits in 2004, is looking weaker by the year. Under President Trump, the Republican Party made huge inroads among black and Hispanic voters, especially in areas like south Texas and Florida, where Democrats’ theory of demographics would have suggested such GOP gains would be impossible.
It’s not just Republican voters who are getting more diverse, but also Republican officeholders. As Henry Olsen noted after the 2020 election, which saw a record number of Republican women and minorities elected to the House, “every seat Republicans have flipped from blue to red has been captured by a woman or a minority.”
The Virginia statewide elections last year continued this trend, with a black woman, Winsome Sears, elected lieutenant governor, and an Hispanic man, Jason Miyares, elected attorney general. So much for the emerging Democratic majority.
But here’s the thing: Republicans didn’t come up with the “demographics is destiny” idea. Democrats did. For years, they bragged that rising levels of immigration and massive demographic change would usher in profound changes in U.S. politics. The Buffalo shooter went on and on about this in his idiotic manifesto, echoing similar diatribes from other racist mass shooters in recent years. Wonder where they got the idea?
It’s true that the country is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, it’s simply a fact. The problem for Democrats is that this more diverse electorate isn’t voting the way they hoped it would. In part, that’s because Republicans are waking up to the fact that immigration and border security, together with other commonsense policies like not letting rioters burn down neighborhoods and not shutting down the economy because of Covid, are issues that can broaden their base and bring in a more diverse array of voters.
All of which is to say, asinine white supremacist notions about how all the races should live separately have absolutely nothing to do with efforts to control illegal immigration, and most people know it. When Democrats try to smear Republicans as white supremacists for wanting a secure border, understand that they’re not just trying to demonize the right, they’re trying to change the subject. Illegal immigration is just about the last thing any Democrat wants voters thinking about heading into the midterms. Why? Because the border is a complete disaster. According to the latest data, federal authorities arrested more than 234,000 illegal immigrants in April, yet another record-breaking monthly total. So far, this fiscal year, nearly 1.3 million illegal border-crossers have been arrested along the southwest border, also a record.
Ordinary, non-white supremacist Americans of all races and walks of life look at this and think something must be very wrong at the border. They see news stories like the one this week about an industrial-scale drug-smuggling tunnel that federal authorities discovered on the California-Mexico border — six stories deep and the length of six football fields, with reinforced walls, electricity, ventilation and a rail system — and they wonder what’s going on in Mexico. They are smart enough to know that drugs like fentanyl, which is ravaging American communities, come primarily from labs in northern Mexico that are controlled by powerful cartels. They also know that these cartels are in the business of drug and human trafficking, and that they profit off mass illegal immigration.
Voters are not stupid, certainly not stupid enough to believe that the GOP and Tucker Carlson are fomenting white supremacist conspiracy theories. But the editors at The New York Times and the Washington Post, along with every leading Democrat including the president, think they are. At this point, they’re counting on it.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
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.
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