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IMMIGRATION

Democrats Bow to the Left’s Demands to Abolish ICE Is law enforcement against illegal immigrants really an act of terrorism? Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270622/democrats-bow-lefts-demands-abolish-ice-joseph-klein

Left wing open borders activists are demanding the dismantling or defunding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which was established in 2003 under the Department of Homeland Security to enforce federal laws governing border control, customs, trade and immigration. The whole purpose for establishing ICE was to promote a more coordinated approach to homeland security and public safety than had existed prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The leftist base of the Democratic Party could not care less about Americans’ safety, however. They are pushing a radical anti-law enforcement agenda on immigration, mirroring the Black Lives Matter movement that reviled the police. The left’s rallying cry is “Abolish ICE.” It is reminiscent of the call by a Black Lives Matter activist during a Fox News interview two years ago to “abolish the police, period.”

The left’s rhetoric is becoming increasingly insane, as they live in a world where up is down and down is up. For example, according to Cynthia Nixon, the Sex and the City actress who is challenging Governor Andrew Cuomo in the New York gubernatorial primary this year, ICE, which was granted civil and criminal authority to better protect national security and public safety in response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, is itself a “terrorist organization.” She launched her very own “Abolish ICE” petition.

A protestor in Los Angeles from a “woman’s peace organization” felt that simply calling ICE a terrorist organization did not go far enough. She told MSNBC on Saturday, as protests against President Trump’s zero-tolerance law enforcement policies took place across the country, that ICE is “beyond a terrorist organization.” Then she blamed the whole immigration problem on U.S. economic and foreign policies. “We’re a woman’s peace organization,” she exclaimed, “and it is the violence of the United States government, and it is the 60% of the tax dollars that’s spent on the weapons and war that creates the immigration and refugees and our, you know, economic policies. So we have to be responsible. We have to bring them in and hold them and, not violate them farther than our policies have violated them.” Under this “reasoning,” the vicious animals of MS-13 who have illegally infiltrated our country became that way because of the U.S. government’s policies. Therefore, we are asked to make sure we do “not violate them farther than our policies have violated them.” Such is the thinking of the looney left.

America Is Not the Common Property of All Mankind By Michael Anton *****

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/02/america-is-not-the-common-

Sometimes fate tosses you a softball.

Recently, I drafted an op-ed asking whether the United States actually needs more people. Is 320 million—give or take, given the birthrates of those already here—enough? If not, why not? If we need more people, why? What do we need them to do? The editorial process being what it is, it took a few days for the piece to appear.

And it just so happens that, when it did, Bret Stephens published a column in the New York Times purporting to answer precisely the question I had asked. The United States needs more immigrants, he claims. A lot more.

Much of what Stephens wrote, I had already “pre-butted,” as it were. Open borders arguments are all so old and stale that they’re easy to anticipate. Still, to give Stephens some credit, he did come up with some new ones. Or rather, he stated more openly than I am used to seeing certain implicit arguments that the open borders crowd until recently used to be more cagey about expressing.

I don’t know what explains their greater boldness now. It could be that they think they are on the cusp of victory, so caution is no longer necessary. I doubt this, however, given the 2016 election and moving of the Overton Window on the topic. A more likely explanation is that the open borders crowd is panicking. Before Trump’s stunning victory, mass amnesty coupled with even laxer border enforcement (if such were even possible) seemed likely to tip the country blue permanently. Now they sense that may be slipping away—or, at a minimum, may be delayed.

The populace is roused. For the first time in a generation, it actually has political leaders trying to act in their interest. That is intolerable to the open borders crowd, which is reacting with fury and hysteria. Witness the disgraceful Red Guard heckling of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen out of a public restaurant—and the restaurant’s management doing nothing about it. Another restaurant’s owner kicked out the president’s press secretary. And there is the far more disgraceful—downright evil—doxing of federal immigration agents by a university professor, to encourage left-wing brownshirts to harm civil servants and their families.

Who Should Go?
It is fair to ask what role the increasingly extreme rhetoric of Bret Stephens (and of others who share his views) has contributed to this. For instance, one of Stephens’ previous columns recommended expelling native-born American citizens to make room for more immigrants. He declined to say exactly which American citizens need to go; presumably not himself nor any of his friends and associates.

Who then? In a grotesque-yet-clever bit of sophistry, Stephens unfavorably compares the native-born to immigrants across a range of pathologies and finds us wanting. For instance, the native-born “are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of illegal immigrants.” What accounts for that? Stephens doesn’t specify, but surely knows, that crime rates vary widely by race. The rate among blacks, for instance, is eight or nine times the rate among whites, depending on the offense. The white rate is much lower than the illegal immigrant rate (and the Asian rate is lower still). Hence that “nearly twice the rate” that Stephens cites is very largely driven by black Americans. Who, whatever one may say about the tragic problems afflicting their communities, are unquestionably Americans, whose roots in this land stretch back to 1619 and whose experience includes, in Lincoln’s poignant phrase, “two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.”

ICE + Local Police Cooperation A winning formula. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270613/ice-local-police-cooperation-michael-cutler
On June 21, 2018 ICE posted a news release, Honduran man pleads guilty to transporting illegal aliens. This successful prosecution was only possible because of the able assistance provided to ICE by a Fairfax County police officer.

Here is an excerpt from this news release:

According to court documents, Danny Josue Zelaya-Ortiz, aka “Jose Castro”, 29, was part of a conspiracy to charge illegal aliens in the United States a fee for transporting them from Texas to other states across the country. In April 2018, Zelaya-Ortiz picked up at least six alien passengers, all of whom had been smuggled into the United States from the Mexico border. Zelaya was driving the passengers towards Maryland and the New York area when his vehicle was stopped in Virginia by Fairfax County Police on April 25, 2018. He was cited for an improper vehicle tag display and driving without an operator’s license. Homeland Security Investigations special agents responded to the scene after it was determined Zelaya-Ortiz and the passengers had no lawful status in the United States. Zelaya-Ortiz admitted he knew the passengers were illegal aliens and that he received payments for his role in the scheme. At the time of the crime, Zelaya-Ortiz had been in the country illegally after having been twice removed by immigration officials.

Before criminals can be successfully prosecuted for their crimes, these law violators obviously must first be identified and evidence of their crimes must be accumulated.

The above-noted case illustrates the importance of routine and effective cooperation between local police and ICE to facilitating federal investigations into immigration law violations. In this instant case Danny Josue Zelaya-Ortiz, aka “Jose Castro,” an illegal alien from Honduras who had been arrested and deported on at least three previous occasions was taken into custody by ICE, along with several illegal aliens he was caught transporting. from the U.S./Mexican border to Maryland and ultimately to New York City.

This illustrates that illegal immigration impacts every state of the United States, from border to border and coast to coast.

They’re coming to America By Victor Sharpe

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/180629

Neil Diamond’s acclaimed hit song, “They’re Coming to America,” was his patriotic interpretation of historic and legal immigration into the United States. The powerful melody ends with an interpolation of the traditional and patriotic song, “My Country, Tis of Thee.”

But now we have illegal aliens infiltrating our 1,989-mile-long southern border, and many are coming to the sound of a very different and horribly discordant melody, one often tinged with Islamic and Arabic overtones.

According to released data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency as far back as 2014, an estimated 5,063 individuals from nations that harbor Islamic terrorists were arrested in that year alone trying to cross into America from Mexico. None of these were Mexicans, Guatemalans, or Hondurans; they were citizens from far-away nations consumed by militant Islam. It has been going on for many years and here are some of the figures from five years ago:

Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are still battling the Taliban, was the home of 70 people arrested at the southern frontier in 2013 alone.

Syria, birthplace of ISIS and a civil war ravaged nation, with some 400,000 dead, saw 72 of its nationals captured at our southern border.

Sudan, designated by the State Department as an official “state sponsor of terrorism,” where Christians in the south have been the subject of massive genocide by the Arab Muslim north, was the starting point for 168 individuals who were stopped heading to the U.S.A.

First Democratic Senator Calls for Abolishing ICE By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kirsten-gillibrand-abolish-ice-first-democratic-senator-call/

Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand on Thursday became the first current member of the Senate to endorse the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, claiming that the agency has become a “deportation force.”

“I don’t think ICE today is working as intended,” New York’s junior senator told CNN host Chris Cuomo. “I think you should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues. I think you should reimagine ICE under a new agency with a very different mission and take those two missions out.”

“We believe that we should protect families that need our help, and that is not what ICE is doing today, and that’s why I believe you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it, and build something that actually works,” Gillibrand concluded.

Gillibrand’s positions are an almost-180-degree pivot from the hawkish stance on immigration that she took as a House member representing a conservative district in upstate New York.

“Congresswoman Gillibrand has been a firm opponent of any proposal that would give amnesty to illegal aliens,” the platform on her old campaign website reads. “The federal government must provide the necessary resources to secure our borders, which is critical for America’s economic and national security.”

The campaign platform goes on to express support for increasing the number of border-patrol agents and installing technology along the border to catch human and drug smugglers.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Immigration Policy The falsehoods that protect a political interest. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270571/lies-damned-lies-and-immigration-policy-bruce-thornton

No policy debate is more filled with dishonesty and duplicity than immigration. The whine of political axes being ground is continually drowned out by Emma Lazarus sentimentalism, “we’re a nation of immigrants” clichés, promiscuous virtue-signaling, and the current weepy melodramas of children “ripped from their mother’s arms.” The whole sordid business exists, of course, to perfume some simple truths: Leviathan Dems want more voters and more dependents of the entitlement-industrial complex; Wall Street Republicans want plentiful cheap labor. The only thing missing are the facts about the reality of immigration both illegal and legal.

Start with imprecise numbers. We are told that there are currently 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S. Others say it’s closer to 20 to 25 million. The point is, nobody knows. We do know that close to a third of federal inmates are illegals. But we don’t know much about the rest, except for those illegal alien “dreamers” on television lamenting how they have to “live in the shadows.” We don’t know the extent of the costs to taxpayers of illegal immigration, even as we are told by amnesty supporters that they are net contributors to the economy through payroll and sales taxes. But they don’t tell us if that sum subtracts the $26 billion sent back to Mexico. We do know that taxpayers spend $2 billion a year to provide medical services to illegal aliens just in emergency room visits. According to Christopher Conover, state and local circumventions of federal prohibitions against health care for illegals are indirectly costing taxpayers $17 billion a year in care for illegal aliens. And that’s just health care. Some estimates put the total cost of illegal aliens at $89 billion, while others go as high $135 billion.

Hundreds of Women’s March Protesters Arrested in Senate Office Building By Bridget Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/hundreds-of-womens-march-protesters-arrested-in-senate-office-building/

Capitol Police arrested nearly 600 Women’s March protesters who filled the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill today in opposition to the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” border enforcement policies.

The women and a few men chanted “Abolish ICE” and donned foil blankets like those given to child detainees in photos of Texas border processing facilities recently released by Customs and Border Protection.

Protesters at the sit-in also chanted “We care!” in a likely nod to the olive-green jacket worn by first lady Melania Trump on the flight to visit children at the border last week, which said on the back “I really don’t care, do u?” She returned to the border again today for a second visit, jacket-less.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) was arrested along with about 575 others.

Capitol Police said the protesters were charged with the D.C. Code violation of crowding, obstructing or incommoding. They were processed on the scene and released.

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) also appeared to cheer on the protesters.Demonstrators are planning a Saturday “Day of Action” with #FamiliesBelongTogether protests across the country.

Trump Administration Combats Discrimination Against American Workers ICE investigation uncovers company that defrauded Americans out of jobs. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270570/trump-administration-combats-discrimination-michael-cutler
Immigration fraud has been identified as a key method of entry and embedding for international terrorists, and fugitives from justice and for transnational gang members. This was the underlying premise for my booklet, Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill.

However immigration fraud may also be committed by companies who seek to create the illusion of complying with our nation’s immigration laws while, in reality, discriminating against American workers by hiring foreign workers for whom they apply for temporary work visas such as the H-2B visa.

It is important to remember that prior to World War II the primary authority for the enforcement and administration of our nation’s immigration laws was primarily vested in the Labor Department to protect American workers from unfair competition from foreign workers. This was of particular importance back then as America was attempting to dig out of the Great Depression.

Our immigration laws were enacted to protect national security, American lives and the livelihoods of Americans.

Nevertheless, wacky candidates for political office such as television actress Cynthia Nixon, who is seeking to unseat New York Governor’s Andrew Cuomo, has called for dismantling ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) as reported in the June 22, 2018 New York Post article, Cynthia Nixon labels ICE a ‘terrorist organization’

Who’s Really to Blame at the Border? The current distress and hysteria is the fault of illegal aliens and their enablers in the courts. Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/html/whos-really-blame-border-15986.html

So it was a ruse. The hysteria over the separation of illegal-alien asylum-seekers from their children (or their purported children) was in large part pretextual. The real target of rage was the Trump administration’s policy of prosecuting all illegal border-crossers for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry.

In April, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy for illegal entry. Henceforth, virtually all aliens caught entering the country illegally would be held for prosecution, rather than being released on their own recognizance for a later noncriminal deportation proceeding, to which few ever showed up. (This new enforcement policy would have come as a surprise to anyone who had fallen for the advocates’ decades-long lie that illegal entry is not a crime.) Under the new policy, even if the adult had brought a child with him across the border—the usual accoutrement of an asylum-seeker, for reasons explained below—the adult would still be prosecuted. The adult would be held in a U.S. marshal’s facility pending trial, while the child would be placed in a dormitory run by the U.S. Health and Human Services department, since children cannot be held in criminal lockups.

Images of child border-crossers, separated from their adult companion and crying or looking upset—and the experience would undoubtedly be traumatic for most young children—triggered nonstop coverage of Trump administration cruelty. MSNBC and CNN set up border encampments from which reporters and pundits pontificated on the child-separation crisis. Nazi and Holocaust analogies flew around the Internet; faculty petitions invoked the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Mexico and four other Latin American countries filed a human rights complaint against the U.S. Politicians and religious leaders lined up to denounce White House racism and anti-immigrant hatred.

The Asylum Crisis Is a Security Challenge, Not a Legal Problem By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/asylum-immigration-crisis-security-challenge-not-legal-problem/

Our government’s first duty is to secure the border.

This weekend, Washington mourned the iconic Charles Krauthammer’s passing. It seemed a pause in the bedlam on the border, about which he would surely have had something wise to say. As someone who knew Dr. K mainly through his scintillating columns and television commentary, I suspect his thoughts on the refugee tide would be shorn of hubris about what Washington’s laws can accomplish.

The futility of dictating to the tide, rather than shoring up against it, was an occasional Krauthammer theme. He was wont to invoke an apocryphal tale about Canute the Great (see, e.g., here), who ruled a North Sea empire a millennium ago. In this, as in innumerable other ways, Charles was singular among commentators because he got the story right. His throne moved to the coastline, Canute audaciously orders the incoming tide to halt. But this is not a cautionary tale about the delusional arrogance of power. It is about humility: The king was showing his sycophantic courtiers that the law — in this instance, the writ of a purportedly omnipotent monarch — is limited, sometimes impotent, against such phenomena as the forces of nature.

The “rule of law” is not a magic wand. It is possible only in a community that has agreed to live under its provisions. Even within such a community, it must enforced by the power of the state. Law enforcement is manageable as long its resources are commensurate with the reasonably expected degree of law-breaking.