Resident Joe Biden’s administration cannot ignore federal law that says authorities must arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens convicted of certain crimes and/or aliens who are ordered deported, an appeals court has ruled.
Federal law says the attorney general “shall take into custody,” “shall detain,” and “shall remove” illegal aliens convicted of certain crimes and aliens who are ordered deported. But the Biden administration has attempted to prevent the holding and removal of some illegal immigrants convicted of those crimes.
“The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Biden appointee, said in a memorandum in September 2021 outlining new guidance that narrowed immigration enforcement priorities.
Mayorkas also said that immigration agents should not “rely on the fact of conviction … alone” when deciding to take action against an alien.
That has led to a sharp drop in criminal aliens detained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said. The memo and others like it has led to a spike in the rescinding of criminal detainers, or orders to local authorities to detain aliens, court documents show. One hundred and seventy aliens had detainers rescinded in Texas between Jan. 20, 2021, and Feb. 15, 2022, with at least 17 failing to comply with their parole conditions and four committing fresh crimes.
“The data show that the Final Memo ‘increases the number of aliens with criminal convictions and aliens with final orders of removal released into the United States,’ and Texas has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that the cost of that reality has fallen on it and will continue to do so,’” the panel said in a ruling dated July 6.
DHS is trying “to claim it acts within the bounds of federal law while practically disregarding that law,” it added.
The panel upheld an earlier ruling from U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee who said the policy had resulted in criminal aliens “roam[ing] free” and ordered the department not to follow the memo.
The Biden administration had appealed, arguing that the lower court order should be overturned because the states lack standing, because they have not suffered any injury, and because any injury that the speculative injury was not traceable to the Mayorkas memo. The appeals court panel disagreed.
Response
Biden “tried to throw out immigration law, saying DHS didn’t have to detain criminal illegals. The court now says he must,” Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
“Had the administration won its stay, it would have gone on releasing criminal aliens while its appeal of the district court’s ruling wound through the courts,” added Dale Wilcox, executive director of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which filed a brief in the case. “We are pleased that didn’t happen, and applaud the Fifth Circuit for denying the administration the extra time it sought to violate the law and endanger Americans.”
The administration is expected to appeal, which could send the case to the full Fifth Circuit or to the Supreme Court, which recently ruled the administration can end the Trump era “Remain in Mexico” policy while explicitly avoiding weighing in on whether the detention requirement outlined in federal law is “subject to principles of law enforcement discretion” and whether the administration’s current approach to immigration enforcement violates the provision.
The panel consisted of Judges Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee; Edith Clement, a George W. Bush appointee; and Kurt Engelhardt, a Trump appointee.
Its ruling diverged from an opinion from the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in a similar case brought by the states of Arizona, Montana, and Ohio that in April overturned (pdf) a lower court’s nationwide preliminary injunction that blocked the same guidance.
The Fifth Circuit panel said its divergence is explainable by the benefit of bench trial and precedent in other cases brought before the court. “Until there is a contrary ruling from the Supreme Court, we adhere to our precedent and the facts found by the district court,” it said.
“Who was the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Saul Bellow is alleged to have quipped some time in the early ’90s. Deploying what in today’s meme-ified political culture would probably be described as a clap back, the sportswriter and essayist Ralph Wiley responded: “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.”
Bellow would later plead the defense of journalistic misunderstanding and misrepresentation. But let’s—for the sake of argument—stick to the oversimplified, if rather unfair, version of the story: Wiley schools grumpy old reactionary. Viewed from 2022, the interesting thing about the exchange is Wiley’s appeal to universalism. Today, such an approach to culture has become passé in fashionable left-wing circles. To be woke is to espouse the importance of “lived experience,” to indulge in the very “fencing off” that Wiley denounced, and to obsess over the differences, say, between the Zulus and the Russians, rather than claim that a book could transcend them. In other words, to the in crowd of elite progressives, sticking up for a great work of European literature and what it offers to whoever might pick it up—whether they happen to be in St Petersburg or Soweto—is more than a little “problematic.”
What happened? When did the tables turn? And why do those of us who still believe in that universalism suddenly find ourselves out of step with the ideas that seem to dominate public life? More broadly, why is the West beset by a sometimes paralyzing self-loathing? These are some of the questions Douglas Murray answers in The War on the West, a book he describes in its introduction as being “about what happens when one side in a cold war—the side of democracy, reason, rights, and universal principles—prematurely surrenders.”
In his previous works, Murray, a British author now based in America, has tackled questions of cultural and identity politics on both sides of the Atlantic as well as immigration and radical Islam in Europe. The War on the West is designed for readers who, though they may see a great deal of folly in the woke reckoning that has become increasingly hard to ignore in recent years, might see it as an unserious sideshow. Murray urges readers to avoid the temptation to dismiss debates about race, history, and identity as “fringe” or trivial “culture wars.” To do so, he argues, is to “misinterpret the aims of the participants or downplay the role it will have in the lives of future generations.” At stake, he argues, is whether the West will be crippled by self-hatred and kill the goose that lays the golden egg, or whether we appreciate the West’s intellectual and cultural inheritance and use its strengths to our advantage.
The aggressors in Murray’s war come from within, and the battleground is all around us: everywhere from the pre-school classroom to the art gallery. Murray details the woke assault on a series of overlapping fronts—race, religion, history, and culture—and is at his best when picking apart the inconsistencies, fallacies, and hypocrisies in the assailants’ arguments.
Whether its the feted Ibram X. Kendi’s tautological definition of racism or the embarrassing historical ignorance of many of those put forward to argue for a statue to be brought down or a building to be renamed, there is very little there when the woke warriors’ arguments are subjected to a light grilling. As Murray demonstrates, the aggressors are also far more parochial than they think they are. Western history is, in their view, indelibly stained by racism. The rest of the world? Less so. “If other countries do have any racism, it must be because the West exported the vice to them,” says Murray, paraphrasing the argument.
Often, the mindlessness of the cultural and historical vandalism is so self-evident that Murray need do little more than lay out his opponents’ views. One of the dreariest scenes in The War on the West is a discussion at Cambridge University’s Churchill College on the “Racial Consequences of Churchill.” The panel was historian-free, and the participating academics were liberated to make all manner of ridiculous claims, recounted by Murray: The British Empire was “far worse than the Nazis” argued one; another argued that victory over the Nazis wasn’t a big deal given that “all we really did was we shifted from an old version of white supremacy to a new version of white supremacy”; a third snarkily pointed out that, actually, Churchill was at home, not on the front lines, during the Second World War. (The great wartime leader was in his late 60s when he became prime minister and, as Murray points out, saw action on four continents as a young man.)
A panel discussion at a Cambridge college is, of course, a fairly low-stakes affair in the grand scheme of things, but it is illustrative of the offensively ahistorical arguments that are tolerated if they are in keeping with the vogue for wokeness. Elsewhere, a more serious and sustained attack on Churchill and his legacy is underway. Once a universally admired national hero, the great statesman now faces a reckoning. It is an illustrative example for the British author (and this British reviewer), for, as Murray puts it: “If what Churchill did in his life doesn’t count for anything, then it is hard to see how any human action counts for anything. If Churchill’s good points cannot outweigh any bad points, then no one can ever do enough good in their lives.”
But that, of course, is the point. The bold choice of target reveals the scale of the assailants’ ambitions: “Perhaps more than any other single figure, he has been seen as an example of a great man—and a great man produced by the West.” If Churchill can be toppled, “anything might be forced upon a people so subjected and demoralized.”
Many of these arguments will be familiar to readers, but the value of The War on the West is in the shocking effect of the full battle report. Murray successfully conveys just how comprehensive the attack on Western values, culture, and history really is. The effect is energizing: a warning against the complacent eye-roll that is so tempting when faced with the latest woke insanity.
Applying present-day standards to historical figures is a fruitless pursuit no matter the target, but, as Murray identifies, it is the unevenness with which these tests are applied that gives the game away. Karl Marx’s racism and anti-Semitism, for example, has not led to the kind of reassessment that great Western leaders have been subjected to.
The War on the West will leave those who recognize the threat it identifies hungry for more. Murray fights back against the iconoclasts with vigor. But if, as Murray correctly identifies, wokeness resembles a godless religion—filling a need for cosmic meaning and its dogma trotted out unquestioningly—then there will be limits to the success of such appeals to reason. Here, Murray risks falling into the same trap as the New Atheists, who sometimes appeared to think that an especially witty enough debate-hall zinger would be enough to bring thousands of years of monotheism tumbling to the ground.
But where The War on The West is most valuable is in explaining the importance of the clash in question. A culture that finds it hard to say anything nice about itself is not one with a bright future. Does that mean the West is perfect? Of course not. But, as we are discovering, self-loathing is not a foundation on which to build a healthy society.
The War on the West by Douglas Murray Broadside Books, 308 pp., $27.99
Oliver Wiseman is deputy editor of The Spectator World, the U.S. edition of the world’s oldest magazine.
Congress is investigating the Biden administration for reportedly shipping pallets of baby formula to illegal immigrants, according to a copy of the probe obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) is asking the Department of Homeland Security and the Food and Drug Administration to provide information on the steps it is taking to combat the nationwide shortage of baby formula in light of reports that illegal immigrants detained by federal authorities are receiving “pallets” of formula at detention centers.
“As hard-working American parents struggle to find infant formula, a recent news report indicated that illegal immigrants detained by Border Patrol may not be experiencing these difficulties,” Johnson writes in a letter sent Friday to Biden administration leaders. “A member of Congress reportedly obtained photographs from a Border Patrol agent showing that shelves at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention center in McAllen, Texas, are stocked with ‘pallets’ of baby formula.”
While the White House claims it is “working around the clock” to address these shortages, Johnson maintains this rhetoric is empty. He is requesting the total amount of formula the federal government owns and how much was provided to illegal immigrants since August, when supply issues began cropping up.
“The Biden administration is not doing all it can to increase product availability,” Johnson writes. “For instance, the federal government could eliminate tariffs of up to 17.5 percent and tariff rate quotas (TRQs) on imported infant formula.”
DHS and the FDA must now furnish records detailing “the total amount of infant formula the federal government currently owns or is under contract to receive” and “the total amount of infant formula provided to illegal immigrants by [Customs and Border Patrol] since August 1, 2021.”
Rep. Kat Cammack (R., Fla.) earlier this week published photos showing stockpiles of baby formula at a CBP detention facility housing illegal immigrants.
“Biden is sending pallets of baby formula to the border,” Cammack wrote on Facebook. “Meanwhile, store shelves across America are empty and moms are being told they don’t know when more is coming in. Welcome to Biden’s America where American moms and dads are last.”
Cammack said border agents documented the baby formula deliveries to the Texas detention center.
With the formula shortage creating nationwide panic, Johnson says the “Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and United States Trade Representative (USTR) owes the public a detailed explanation about the steps the agencies are taking to ensure parents and their babies have access to infant formula.”
At the end of April, an estimated 40 percent of U.S. baby formula supplies were out of stock, according to figures disclosed by Johnson in his letter.
The White House said it is working to address the issue but has not thoroughly outlined its actions, Johnson adds.
“The assurances made by an untrustworthy administration and the lack of action do little to subdue the frustrations and anxieties of many parents that see a dwindling supply of infant formula for their babies,” Johnson writes. “The American people and parents have a right to be angry.”
Florida’s newly appointed public safety czar says he is frustrated with the Biden administration’s border policies and the fact that hundreds of illegals are being “dumped” onto Florida soil.
Larry Keefe says the illegal aliens are a burden to taxpayers and, if they commit crimes, to state and local law enforcement.
Keefe was appointed in September as Florida’s public safety czar. He told The Epoch Times that the federal government is flouting the law and is “making immigration policies because they couldn’t enact them legislatively.”
He said there is not an “official count”, but more than 70 private charter flights have been reported coming into the Jacksonville airport with at least 36 passengers aboard each flight.
“This is not haphazard that these people are coming here this way,” Keefe said. “This is a precision, military-like operation where they are coming in a covert and clandestine way.”
Keefe said that the flights land “in the middle of the night” and the people are met by “handlers” who escort the unaccompanied minors on to chartered buses and are “dispersed throughout the I-10 and I-95 corridor and go as far down as Miami.”
“This number [70] is what we currently know, not counting what we don’t. It’s very frustrating,” he said. “Because only the feds can take action against immigration.”
Keefe said he is trying very hard not to call this an “investigation”, because immigration is a federal act not a state one, but the federal government leaves the states no choice but to “defend and protect themselves.”
He said that he is “receiving reports” and cannot open an investigation until “you have proof of a crime.”
It is Keefe’s belief that Jacksonville was not randomly chosen, but targeted because of its central location and its close proximity to the two interstate systems.
“These flights are “secret and stealth” and the state of Florida has no warning that they (illegal immigrants) are being resettled here, because private non-profit, sometimes religious agencies, are being utilized—and are paid in grants funded by the federal government—to take the immigrants and resettle them throughout the state of Florida,” he said.
The governor’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, estimated that border patrol agents have encountered approximately 1.7 million illegal aliens this year.
“Border patrol is overwhelmed,” Pushaw told The Epoch Times. “There is no effective vetting as to who these people are coming into our country.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has reacted with an executive order and appointing Keefe.
DeSantis blames the border crisis on the “Biden administration’s failed immigration policies.”
The borders are overwhelmed and “cannot properly vet these immigrants,” he said recently. “They have no identifying papers when they get here, so there is no way to tell who someone is, or how old they are.”
The governor explained that this is how some of the immigrants get past border security, such as in case of the man who told authorities that he was 17 and was processed as an unaccompanied minor.
He later turned out to be 24 years old and is currently facing a murder charge over the death of his benefactor, who was trying to help him build a new life in Florida.
“The federal government is the curator of information where the illegals are concerned,” Keefe continued. “The state of Florida only know what the feds will tell them and what the illegal alien is willing to tell them.”
Keefe said that often illegal immigrants will “stay under the radar” to the point that they become “victims” of other illegal cartels. This puts undue hardship on state and local law enforcement agencies, he said.
“This is only going to be bad for law enforcement morale,” Keefe said. “They can’t deport them, because they have no power to do so, they have to stand down and let it happen.”
DeSantis signed an executive order in September to help combat the wave of illegal immigrants entering the state without warning.
The governor said he initiated the order because the influx of illegals is taking its toll on taxpayer dollars and overwhelming state agencies.
“This executive order makes it clear that Florida resources will not be used to “prop up the failed open border agenda enacted by this administration,” he said in September.
The executive order addresses several things:
It directs the Department of Children and Families to refuse to renew licenses to facilities that house unaccompanied minors;
It asks the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to conduct audits of companiesto verify they do not employ illegal aliens;
It requires the FDLE to “lawfully gather information on the number and identities of illegal aliens being transported from the border to Florida,”;
Encourages state law enforcement to “detain any vehicle transporting illegal aliens if there is reason suspicions it is being used for human or drug trafficking,”;
and it requests information from state officials “on the number of illegal aliens who are pending criminal prosecution or have been convicted of a crime.”
Keefe said: “As a former U.S. Attorney, I saw illegal aliens that would get deported, and come back, and then get deported, and come back, in an endless cycle.
“The states, including Florida, bear the brunt of this cycle. Over the coming weeks and months, our state agencies will be addressing the impacts illegal immigration has had on our state.”
Keefe said if “people are illegally in the state, and they have broken (state) laws” they will be punished.
The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, but phone calls and emails were not returned by press time.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) says that he will not support efforts by Democrats to overrule the Senate’s nonpartisan referee and include wide-ranging immigration in their $1.75 trillion reconciliation bill.
Immigration reform has been a top priority for Democrats since Barack Obama’s presidency—and they see their current reconciliation bill as a once-in-a-decade opportunity to finally act on that priority.
But because they are using the reconciliation process, Democrats are heavily limited in what they can do with the bill; These limitations have plagued the party time and time again as they have sought to include comprehensive immigration reform in their budget.
The budget reconciliation process is appealing to lawmakers because, unlike a normal bill, a reconciliation bill cannot be filibustered in the Senate. However, after its introduction in the 1970s, lawmakers realized that the process, designed to apply strictly to bills on federal spending and revenue, was being used for ends well outside of the process’s original intent.
This led the Senate to adopt the so-called “Byrd rule,” named after the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.).
The rule stipulated that all provisions in a reconciliation bill must be directly related to federal spending and revenues in a way that is not “merely incidental.” It falls to the nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian, who acts as a rule-keeper for the upper chamber, to determine what a party may include in reconciliation under the Byrd rule.
The current parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, has strictly enforced the Byrd rule against the wishes of both parties in recent years.
As Democrats have moved forward with their ambitious budget bill, immigration reform has been a high priority for the party. But MacDonough has twice foiled these plans, ruling that two proposed Democratic measures to give millions of illegal aliens amnesty were outside of the purview of reconciliation.
Now, some Democrats are considering changing the rules of the reconciliation process in order to override what they see as MacDonough’s overly restrictive interpretation of the Byrd rule.
Theoretically, this is possible. The rules of the Senate can be changed by the consent of a simple majority of members. But even in the best of times, senators are hesitant to use this so-called “nuclear option” to change Senate rules, as many rules in the Senate are designed specifically to protect the rights of the minority party.
Democrats currently have the thinnest possible majority in the Senate, and could only resort to the nuclear option if every senator in their caucus is on board.
But Manchin says he will not lend his vote to the effort.
“People might be all excited about something now,” Manchin told Fox News, but cautioned, “It might not even fit in the bill because on our side it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t come within the rules of reconciliation.”
“I’m not going to vote to overrule the parliamentarian,” Manchin emphasized. “I’m not going to do that; they all know that.”
Manchin, a self-described “conservative Democrat,” has harshly criticized other efforts by his party to change the current rules of government, including efforts to abolish or weaken the filibuster and efforts to pack the Supreme Court with justices more amenable to liberal perspectives.
After the 2020 election, Manchin took to Fox News to console conservatives who feared that the Democrat-controlled Congress would make wholesale changes to government rules. Manchin promised then that he would not lend his support to any effort to weaken the filibuster, vowing to fight for the rule in the upper chamber.
When Manchin upheld this promise over the summer, controversy ensued.
As Democrats made a concerted push to federalize elections, they faced insurmountable opposition from Senate Republicans armed with the filibuster. For many in the party, the answer to the conundrum was to abolish the filibuster—or at least to change the rules to allow election bills to be immune from the process.
But Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have both refused to change the filibuster, even as calls persist to weaken it.
More recently, Manchin opposed changing the filibuster to pass a debt ceiling increase, even as other moderates in the party like Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) saw a filibuster change as preferable to a default.
In this newest break from his party, Manchin has effectively neutered Democrats’ effort to include immigration reform in their reconciliation bill. Unless a Republican defects—a highly unlikely situation as they continue to unanimously oppose Democrats’ reconciliation bill in its entirety—Democrats will remain bound to the rulings of the parliamentarian.
The Supreme Court decided Oct. 29 to hear two cases that the Biden administration did not want the court to hear—one, aimed at reviving a rule that screens out potentially government-dependent immigrants, and another that could roll back the reach of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The court decisions came as migrants continue to stream illegally across the increasingly porous southern border and the Biden administration develops a strategy for dealing with the scientifically contentious phenomenon of manmade global warming. The decisions also came as the court prepares to hear high-profile cases in coming days dealing with a Texas law strictly regulating abortions and a New York law that strictly regulates gun use.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear Arizona v. San Francisco, court file 20-1775, which concerns the so-called public charge rule.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, was pleased the high court will hear the case.
“When other federal officials won’t defend the law, I will,” Brnovich said in a statement. “The Public Charge Rule is a commonsense policy based on a real inconvenient truth. Overrunning our welfare programs right now would be like pulling back the last safety net for Americans who need it most.”
In the case, the Republican attorneys general of Arizona and 12 other states asked the high court to be allowed to defend in court a Trump-era rule designed to screen out would-be immigrants unable to support themselves. Enforcing the immigrant self-sufficiency rule could save states billions of dollars each year.
A federal appeals court struck down the public charge rule and the Biden administration refused to defend it in court. Separately, President Joe Biden also rescinded the rule. Among the respondents in the case are the U.S. government and the states of California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
Arizona and the 12 other states accused the governments on the other side of colluding to prevent this important case from being heard by the nation’s highest court.
“Without any prior warning, the existing parties sprung an unprecedented, coordinated, and multi-court gambit,” Arizona and other states said in their petition (pdf).
“Through it, they attempted to execute simultaneous, strategic surrenders in all pending appeals involving the Rule. That included the Second Circuit appeal that this Court had already agreed to hear, as well as the pending petitions for writs of certiorari in this case and the Seventh Circuit case.”
Over vehement opposition, the Trump administration breathed new life into the rule, which had fallen into disuse. Although critics say the extensively litigated pro-taxpayer rule is xenophobic and discriminates against poor aliens, the public-charge principle, the idea that immigrants should have to prove they can survive without becoming wards of the government, has been part of the American experience for centuries.
The Supreme Court also decided to hear West Virginia v. EPA, court file 20-1530, which it consolidated with three other appeals.
Energy-producing states and coal companies accuse the EPA of a power grab, claiming it exceeded its authority to limit carbon emissions, which environmentalists allege contribute to climate change. A ruling last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit gave back to the EPA some of the authority the Trump administration took away from it.
According to petitioners, the appeals court “held that a rarely used, ancillary provision of the Clean Air Act grants an agency unbridled power—functionally ‘no limits’—to decide whether and how to decarbonize almost any sector of the economy,” the petition states (pdf).
Five years ago the EPA “claimed to find similar powers in the same provision—authority to reshape the nation’s utility power sector by mandating standards impossible for coal and natural gas power plants to meet without limiting operations, shutting down, or subsidizing investment in alternate electricity generation that EPA preferred.”
The Supreme Court “took the extraordinary step of staying EPA’s ‘Clean Power Plan’ rule even before the lower court finished its review, strongly signaling that EPA (and by extension the court below) were wrong.”
The agency repealed the rule in 2019 but the appeals court “insisted that EPA had more statutory power than the agency had originally claimed,” and gave it “new and wildly expansive authority.”
The agency now “can set standards on a regional or even national level, forcing dramatic changes in how and where electricity is produced, as well as transforming any other sector of the economy where stationary sources emit greenhouse gases. Power to regulate factories, hospitals, hotels, and even homes would have tremendous costs and consequences for all Americans.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, welcomed the decision to hear the case.
“This is a tremendous victory for West Virginia and our nation,” Morrisey said in a statement. The decision “indicates a significant portion of the court realizes the seriousness of this case and shares our concern that the D.C. Circuit granted EPA too much authority.”
UVALDE, Texas—A trio of small border locales have banded together in a bid to compel the state of Texas to provide the resources they need to secure their citizens against an unprecedented flow of illegal alien traffic.
Officials from Uvalde County, the city of Uvalde, and Kinney County formed a subregional planning commission on Aug. 2 under a unique Texas statute that gives small entities the teeth to force state agencies to the table to solve problems.
Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants pass through the area—via car or train, or on foot—to get from the border cities of Del Rio and Eagle Pass to San Antonio. The counties have declared themselves in a perpetual state of disaster since April.
Two officials from the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) attended the commission’s first meeting on Oct. 21. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, tasked TDEM with providing resources to beleaguered border counties, after issuing a state disaster declaration on May 31.
The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has dedicated more state troopers to the area, but the 391 commission members complained to the two TDEM officials about nonaction and communication issues that have left them feeling ignored and frustrated.
Uvalde County Commissioner John Yeackle said one of his county’s biggest problems is finding jail space for illegal aliens and smugglers.
“We’re getting verbal commitments—as I understand from the sheriff’s office—for DPS to move them to Del Rio, but that’s not happening in reality,” Yeackle said. The facility in Del Rio is a temporary state-run detention center that’s holding illegal alien inmates arrested for trespass and other crimes, but it’s 70 miles from Uvalde.
Uvalde County Commissioner John Yeackle speaks to representatives from the Texas Department of Emergency Management in Uvalde, Texas, on Oct. 21, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe said several formal requests he’s made to TDEM and DPS have gone unanswered or unresolved, including radio communications between his deputies and state troopers while on duty.
“Right now, Kinney County seems to be at the epicenter of all this,” he said. Between Val Verde and Kinney counties, he said, 12 human smuggling loads had been intercepted in the previous 24 hours.
One case involved a 21-year-old U.S. citizen out of Brownsville, Texas, who was transporting three Guatemalans and one Mexican to San Antonio. While deputies were arresting him and the illegal alien passengers, another vehicle drove past that state troopers subsequently stopped. The driver and passenger—U.S. citizens out of Fort Worth, Texas—were transporting three Guatemalans to San Antonio from the border.
“To get to San Antonio, you have to go through Kinney County,” Coe said. While he said DPS has helped arrest 1,100 illegal aliens in Kinney County on trespass and other misdemeanor charges, he estimates that at least another 3,000 have slipped past.
Kinney County also has a jail space problem.
“I’ve got on my desk right now about 100 to 150 [arrest] warrants that I can’t serve because I don’t have a place to put these people. I’ve got a 14-bed facility,” Coe said.
A Border Patrol agent picks up three illegal aliens after Texas state troopers arrested two U.S. citizen smugglers who were transporting them to San Antonio, in Kinney County, Texas, on Oct. 20, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said local schools went into lockdown 48 times in the spring because of high-speed vehicle pursuits and bailouts of illegal aliens. He said some citizens won’t let their children play in their yard unless an armed adult is supervising.
“We’re not getting any help. We’re not geared up for this. They’re doing a great job, but we need help,” he said, referring to DPS and local law enforcement.
“We’re still averaging three to four bailouts every day. And then they spend most of their time trying to round these people up.”
McLaughlin said law enforcement is finding firearms in smuggling vehicles, and some of the illegal aliens are murderers, pedophiles, and sex offenders.
The county reached out to TDEM over the summer to get extra capacity to store bodies after several illegal aliens died.
“We had two that jumped off the train that got killed. We found one in a farm field. We got another one that got run over by a combine,” he said.
Border Patrol agents apprehends 21 illegal aliens from Mexico who had hidden in a grain hopper on a freight train heading to San Antonio, near Uvalde, Texas, on June 21, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Uvalde has the capacity to hold seven bodies, and McLaughlin said sometimes it takes up to six months before someone claims the body of an illegal immigrant.
TDEM Assistant Chief Tony Pena apologized during the commission meeting for the agency’s failure to respond to the request at the time. He said he would seek answers to all the complaints presented and promised better communication.
“This has to be likened to building an aircraft while it’s in the air,” he said.
“We didn’t create this problem as the state. It was created elsewhere and by somebody else, and the answer lies with them,” Pena said, referring to the Biden administration.
“All I can say is, the state of Texas is using the resources that they have available at the moment to at least slow down this invasion.”
Fernando Perez (L) and Tony Pena of the Texas Department of Emergency Management in Uvalde, Texas, on Oct. 21, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
The meeting took place as tens of thousands of illegal immigrants were traveling from southern Mexico on their way to the U.S. border.
“There’s a human tsunami on its way,” Kinney County Judge Tully Shahan said. “We do have a grave concern for Texas and our country.”
Four days after the meeting, McLaughlin told The Epoch Times that he had since talked to TDEM Chief Nim Kidd three times and was positive that things were moving in the right direction. He is submitting a new request for vehicles, extra personnel, and equipment. A temporary detention center is next on the list.
Meanwhile, the White House on Oct. 24 rejected Abbott’s appeal to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to reimburse the state for millions of dollars it has spent on the border crisis.
This might be brutal, but it’s 10000% true – can’t wait for Joe to see it
There’s a hero Republican politician in York County, PA who is putting his money where his mouth is, and he’s doing so by placing some very damning billboards up featuring Joe Biden, all over the county.
ABC 27 News covered the story and said the following: If you’ve driven along Interstate 83 in York County lately, chances are you’ve seen a giant billboard that features President Joe Biden in a military outfit along with the phrase “Making the Taliban Great Again.”
The billboard is operated by advertising company Trone Outdoor Advertising, which provides billboard advertising in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. The company is responsible for operating and organizing advertisements, but it is not responsible for what is included in the advertisements that are displayed.
“The individual that is responsible for the billboard is (former Pennsylvania State Senator) Scott Wagner. He gave us permission to make it known that he was responsible for the billboard,” Vice President of Trone Outdoor Brian Scott said.
Scott Wagner had one term as Pennsylvania State Senator, elected in 2014. He represented the 28th district in the state, which is a large portion of York County. He resigned in June of 2018 to run for Governor as the Republican nominee, a race in which he lost to Governor Tom Wolf.
“I saw the image (of Joe Biden), I got it from a friend a few weeks ago. The picture tells the story. We pulled out of Afghanistan too quickly, and we left so much of American equipment. Joe Biden has made us look like a fool. I feel so bad, words can’t describe what I would say to someone who was wounded or someone’s family who had a soldier pass away in the country after all this happened,” Scott Wagner said when asked for a comment.
Gee, between this and the F Joe Biden stuff, I don’t think ol’ Bumbling Joe is gonna wanna leave the basement ever again.
And truthfully, that’d be a good thing for the entire country.
The Biden Administration has been caught red handed flying illegal immigrants across the country in the dead of night, and should this behavior continue over the next three and half years, it will fundamentally alter the course of this country, as well as what it believes and of course, how it votes. Plus, Meghan McCain is speaking out about the ‘toxic’ behavior she received on the set of the view, but was she a part of the problem? Also, Trump has a new social media platform coming out, but will it be ‘the truth’ – or just another conservative echo chamber that lies to the fanbase?
The Department of Homeland Security will spend nearly a half-million dollars for a Delaware construction company to build a fence around President Joe Biden’s beach house.
The New York Postreported Friday that the department awarded Turnstone Holdings LLC a $456,548 contract to purchase and install security fencing at the president’s Rehoboth home. The Secret Service will be the subagency for the contract.
Construction of Biden’s security fence comes as the president faces a record-high surge of illegal immigrants at the southern border. Border Patrol agents this year detained more than 1.7 million migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border, the highest total ever recorded, according to the Washington Post.
One of Biden’s first actions in office was halting construction of former president Donald Trump’s border wall. Homeland Security this month canceled remaining contracts for building the wall.
Biden, who has not been to the border since he was elected president, said Thursday that “I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down.” Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Biden in March appointed border czar, visited the border in June after bipartisan pushback.
Federal officials “have lost complete control” of the southwest border under President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, three former high-ranking immigration enforcement officials told a panel of Republican senators on Oct. 20.
“We have lost complete control of the border. I’ve talked to several Border Patrol chiefs who tell me they have lost operational control of the border under this president,” former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Thomas Homan told three Republican senators during a roundtable discussion of the situation on the U.S.–Mexican border.
“They’ve also lost respect for the commander-in-chief and the [DHS] secretary,” Homan told Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Rick Scott of Florida.
Johnson said in his opening statement that he convened the roundtable discussion after Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, declined to convene a hearing on the border crisis.
A committee spokesman for Peters didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment on Johnson’s claim. Johnson had preceded Peters as committee chairman prior to Democrats’ gaining control of the chamber in the 2020 election.
Homan’s intense criticism of Biden and Mayorkas was affirmed by Mark Morgan, who was chief of the U.S. Border Patrol during the Obama administration, and Rodney Scott, who served in the same role under both Biden and his predecessor, President Donald Trump.
Morgan told the senators that “what happens at the southwest border does not stay at the southwest border.”
“Every town, city, and state in this country is a border town, city, and state. If you have a drug overdose from fentanyl, take it to the bank that the fentanyl came from the southwest border,” he said.
“Almost every day I get up, as an American, angry. Why? Because I know because I’ve been there, this administration is way beyond not being transparent. They are lying to the American people.”
With “400,000 ‘gotaways’ this fiscal year, 1.9 million total enforcement encounters, an all-time record high, so if the secretary were sitting in front of me right now, I would say ‘Mr. Secretary, stop lying to the American people,’” Morgan said.
Morgan was referring to Mayorkas’s comment to a House committee in September that “the border is secure. We’re executing our plan,” and that the border today “is no less secure than it was” under Trump. “Gotaways” are illegal immigrants who come into the United States and are not apprehended by U.S. law enforcement officials.
A White House press office representative didn’t immediately respond to request for a response to Morgan’s comment.
Scott said he agreed to appear before the panel because he wanted “to bring attention to the irresponsible and reckless policies that are being implemented by the current administration on the border despite being advised otherwise by professional border security personnel that have been involved in this for decades.”
The immigration aspect of the issues involved in border security is only one area of a broader scope of issues that involve national security, he said.
“It’s just like your home; it’s exactly like your home. If we don’t know and can’t control who and what is in our home, we have no security. If we don’t know who and what are in our country, then we have no homeland security,” Scott said.
“When I left as [Border Patrol] chief, there were 15o nationalities mixed in. It’s not just the Haitians you hear people talking about, or just the South Americans, it’s 150 different nations, many of which are directly involved in or ignoring terrorism threats.”
The Biden transition team was briefed “by border security professionals … that if they rescinded the commonsense policies that were put in place recently, if they stopped building the border wall, we all predicted that there would be a mass migration,” Scott said.
The roundtable also heard testimony from two mothers, one of whom lost a daughter to fentanyl and the other who lost a son in a traffic accident caused by an illegal alien driving without a license.
Virginia Krieger of Cleveland, Ohio, president of the Fentanyl Awareness Coalition, told the senators that her 27-year-old daughter, Tiffany, died in 2015 as a result of ingesting what she thought was a Percocet capsule but, in fact, was a highly toxic dose of fentanyl.
“Tiffany didn’t seek to use fentanyl. Tiffany didn’t really have any issues at all before that day,” Krieger said. “And now, we have an entirely new population of young people dying, being affected by the fentanyl crisis that we have never before seen in this country. And they are the non-addicted victims.”
Krieger said young people “are getting counterfeit pills, either given to them by a friend or being purchased from an online platform like Snapchat that make these pills available to anyone with a smartphone, including children as young as 12.”
Mexican drug cartels smuggle billions of dollars worth of illegal drugs, including fentanyl, into the United States every year, with 95 percent of it coming across the southwest border, Morgan said.
Similarly, Sabine Durden-Coulter of Riverside, California, said her son, Dominic, was on his way to work as a 911 communications officer when he was killed in 2012.
“He was killed by an illegal alien, repeat offender, a felon with armed robbery convictions, no driver’s license, and two DUIs he received that he received probation for,” Durden-Coulter told the panel.
“The man made a deal with the judge and was charged with vehicle manslaughter without gross negligence and received nine months, with five years probation. And he served 35 days.
“If the immigration laws that were on the books would have been upheld the first time they had him, the second time, the third time, I wouldn’t be here and my son would still be enjoying his beautiful life and thousands of other families like mine wouldn’t know this grief and pain.”
For al-Qaida, the war with the West is far from over. The Biden administration has invited the terrorist organization to America and they’re all too happy to take up the offer. Al-Qaida is picking up where they left off, and according to a new report, they could be headed to a neighborhood near you.
Panama Foreign Affairs Minister Erika Mouynes reportedly told Texas GOP Rep. Tony Gonzalez that over 100,000 migrants had crossed through her country on the way to the United States. That’s not the worst of it. Mouynes also told Gonzalez that Panama had apprehended 52 people associated with al-Qaida.
“I asked her one specific question: ‘Have you caught anybody on the terrorist watch list?’” Gonzalez related in an interview on the Real America podcast with Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. “She goes, ‘Funny you ask that, Tony, because in Panama we do biometrics and we have apprehended 52 people that are associated with al-Qaida.’”
People have speculated about al-Qaida’s eagerness to exploit Biden’s border policy, but Mouynes is the first government official to go on the record saying this is happening in real-time.
Panama uses biometrics to identify possible threats. When asked if she had reported this real threat to the Biden administration, Mouynes reportedly told Gonzalez, “There’s no one home. I’m here talking to you because the administration is absent.”
In January and March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents arrested two Yemeni men on a terror watch list as they crossed the border illegally, according to Reuters.
Are Biden’s policies inviting terrorists into the U.S.?
It doesn’t take a lot of terrorists to commit a horrendous amount of murder and mayhem. The tragedy of 9/11 was committed by 19 al-Qaida militants who hijacked four airplanes and killed 2,996 people.
An immigration expert noted that “the reason Haitian migrants discard their Chilean and Brazilian ID cards over here on the Mex side is to obscure from asylum reviewers that they were already safely and prosperously situated for years and years before coming for the American upgrade,” according to The Post Millennial.
If this is true of prosperous migrants, what lengths might terrorists go to carry out jihad against their sworn and lifelong enemy?
In July alone, 213,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. It is estimated that another 1,000 illegal immigrants evaded capture every day, according to The Epoch Times.
By the same formula, over 500 migrants passing through Panama probably went undetected. How many of these were potential al-Qaida operatives, let alone other radicals who seek the ruin of the West?
Nevertheless, that some terrorists are entering the U.S. undetected and with malicious intent is highly probable. In all likelihood, considering the influx of illegal immigrants at the porous southern border, it is more than 19.
Former President Donald Trump has long warned Americans of the dangers of open-border policies, which serve to make the land of the free particularly susceptible to terrorism.
“We have them all the time; we have terrorists from the Middle East coming through our country through the southern border. That was before [the construction of the border wall] … Removing any of these measures would hamstring our workers, endanger our country, and cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” Trump said in a January speech.
Why is the Biden admiration bent on an open border? Do they, too, seek the demise of the West as they dream of a global utopia?
It is difficult to say. Whatever the case, the Biden administration’s blatant disregard for border security cannot be attributed solely to incompetence, though there is a lot of that going around.
It becomes clearer and clearer each day: Where the border cannot hold, things fall apart. In a fallen world, utopia cannot be created by human means.
Where globalists lead, all hell is sure to follow.
“This is gonna be the biggest change to immigration policy in my lifetime. It’s being done without anybody knowing what’s going on about it,” says Aaron Stevenson.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) insider who blew the whistle on transnational cartels exploiting U.S. immigration loopholes to carry out child sex trafficking operations has gone public.
Aaron Stevenson, an Intelligence Research Specialist for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), explained to Project Veritas how the Biden administration is fundamentally overhauling America’s immigration protocols to the benefit of the sex traffickers with zero oversight.
“This is gonna be the biggest change to immigration policy in my lifetime. It’s being done without anybody knowing what’s going on about it and there’s been no coverage for the American people to know what’s going on,” Stevenson said. “There’s no brakes on the car.”
Stevenson was referring to the new shift in policy that would enable fee-funded USCIS to adjudicate alien asylum claims rather than immigration judges.
“USCIS is fee-funded. All of its operations, all of its cover, overhead, everything is based on the fees filed by aliens when they just,” he explained.
“That leaves very little accountability to the public when this kind of operation exists. And when you couple that with giving adjudicative authority away from an immigration judge to an asylum officer, you’re removing any type of public pressure that they could apply on policies they’re creating.”
Stevenson added the new policy shift is “going to be a rubber stamp of immediately getting ‘credible fear’ or ‘reasonable fear’ to be able to say in the country” and get immediately processed for defensive asylum.
“That’s going to exist very quickly. Also, their path to citizenship, within a year of getting defensive asylum, they can adjust their status to a lawful current resident (LCR). Three years from there, they can apply to be naturalized to a U.S. citizen,” he said.
“So, it’s fast-tracking, and that’s the only thing that this looking to consider in the actual rule proposal. It’s looking to make it quicker. That’s it. They don’t want to backlog. It’s not over until the alien wins.”
“Once [a migrant gang member] makes the declaration of, ‘My life is in danger and I may be harmed if I return home,’ they’re taken off the [Transnational Organized Crime] watchlist. That makes it a giant loophole,” Stevenson had said.
On the Oct 7th Hannity show Donald Trump unloaded on the Biden administration. One clip in particular was quickly censored off the web which was Trump blaming Central American countries for dumping their prison populations on our southern border.
Senate Democrats want to pass a new “voting rights” bill that would limit laws requiring voter identification and produce a federal framework for voting.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been skeptical of such a bill, as he is wary of a federal takeover of voter laws. Voting law has traditionally been a province of states, not the federal government.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced the new bill on Thursday, and he is planning a vote on it for next week.
One positive sign for Republicans is Schumer saying that if Republicans have ideas “on how to improve the legislation, we are prepared to hear them, debate them, and if they are in line with the goals of the legislation, include them in the bill.”
Voter identification laws, though, are critical to maintaining a fair voting system.
The Bill of Rights Institute identifies several reasons that voting identification procedures by the states are a good idea:
“In general, it is a good idea to verify a voter’s identity in order to ensure a one-vote-per-person system.
“There are many cases in which people registered in multiple states vote multiple times.
“There are many cases in which deceased registered voters cast a ballot-someone is fraudulently claiming to be the deceased voter.
“Non-citizens vote in large numbers, though they do not possess the legal right to do so.”
Voting identification laws are a fundamental way that states can use to require free and democratic elections.
Furthermore, as states have traditionally been in charge of elections, this latest bill represents an attempt at federal overreach.
Our federalist system depends on having a certain balance of power between the federal government and the state governments, which this bill threatens to make worse.
The balance of power has long been eroded by increasing the power of the federal government, and this bill represents another step backward in the balance of power.
There is a strong chance that this voting rights bill will fail, as there is a 50-50 party division in the Senate and 60 votes are required to overcome a filibuster.
Some Democrats contend that new voting rights laws in Texas and other states are a return to Jim Crow-era laws. However, this new bill in the Senate would prevent the kind of good voter identification laws that are needed in this country.
Let us hope that the Senate Republicans do not allow this bill to pass. It would be a step backward and a sign of a dangerous federal government becoming even more powerful.
Morale among Border Patrol agents has plummeted to an all-time low as they struggle to process unprecedented volumes of illegal immigrants, while knowing they’re unable to secure the border against cartel activity. Many blame their own leadership for enabling it.
“Day after day, they just look like they want to eat their gun,” an agent told The Epoch Times, referring to some local agents in the Rio Grande Valley Sector, who he says are bearing the brunt of it. “They just look like hell. It’s hard to put it—you just start seeing the life leaving people’s faces.”
The agent, Jose (not his real name), spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.
U.S. authorities have apprehended more than 1.5 million illegal immigrants since January, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.
“It’s a very, very hopeless feeling for the Border Patrol,” Jose said. “Of course, we’re all still doing our jobs as best we can. Nobody is giving up, but it’s definitely more of a hopeless feeling just in general.”
During August, the average daily number of illegal immigrants in Border Patrol custody along the southwest border was just shy of 10,000, according to CBP. Agents are spending most of their time processing illegal immigrants rather than being on the front line along the border.
“None of us signed up to be secretaries for these family units coming in,” Jose said.
Border Patrol agents have been especially overwhelmed in the two busiest sectors—the Rio Grande Valley and Del Rio in Texas.
In one week in September, border agents scrambled to deal with an influx of nearly 15,000 mostly Haitian illegal aliens in Del Rio alone. The effort left highway checkpoints closed and hundreds of miles of the U.S.–Mexico border unpatrolled.
“If we went back to actually doing our jobs, it would be amazing,” Jose said. “But right now, the common thought on this is that we’re just aiding and abetting illegal aliens—furthering their illegal activity. Many border agents are spending the majority of their time taking care of the humanitarian needs of illegal aliens rather than out on the border stopping criminal activity.
“And that’s not what any of us signed up for.”
Thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly Haitians, live in a primitive, makeshift camp under the international bridge that spans the Rio Grande between the U.S. and Mexico while waiting to be detained and processed by Border Patrol, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 21, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Leadership
The Biden administration has said it’s concentrating on the “root causes” of illegal immigration and views it as a race issue.
“Immigration, we consider, is part of racial equity—which is a broad issue, but that’s how the president has spoken about that crisis over the past several months,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in the early days of the Biden presidency.
President Joe Biden was quick in January to dismantle many of former President Donald Trump’s border security measures, which, along with his campaign rhetoric, has resulted in record surges of illegal crossings this year.
The president tapped Vice President Kamala Harris in March to address the growing border crisis, and she has since traveled to Central America and Mexico to discuss the issue with leaders from those nations.
Harris was outspoken against Border Patrol and ICE agents (comparing them to the KKK) in 2019 during the last surge of illegal immigrants, and again in 2020, when specialized border agents were deployed to Portland, Oregon, to defend a federal courthouse from Antifa and other rioters.
And Border Patrol agents haven’t forgotten.
“We knew Kamala Harris didn’t like us in the very beginning. She attacked us, called us storm troopers … in Portland, and she hated us and we knew it,” another agent, Alex, told The Epoch Times, on condition of anonymity.
“So then, she becomes our vice president and is now a border czar of the very agency she hates.
“From top down, when you have complete leadership that fundamentally does not like you; when you have agents that you don’t know if they’re working for the cartel; if you have half of America that thinks you’re the enemy and you put kids in cages and kill them, all because of propaganda, it weighs on you.”
Border Patrol apprehends illegal immigrants at Penitas, Texas, on May 10, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Alex said his children are bullied at school because he’s a Border Patrol agent.
“They’re asked if I kill kids, put kids in cages,” he said. “The border encompasses everything. So that’s why it weighs down. Because I have to think my choice to be a Border Patrol agent is negatively impacting my family’s emotional state and well-being as well. So that’s also a pretty heavy weight.”
He said it’s not a simple fix to find another job. He’s not prepared to get the COVID-19 vaccine at this stage and federal agencies are mandating it. Border Patrol agents have until Nov. 22 to be fully vaccinated or else face being fired. Several agents The Epoch Times has spoken to fall into that category. Some are submitting their retirement paperwork, while others are counting the days until they’re eligible. Agents can retire at age 50, but often stay on until mandatory retirement at 57.
“We’re not making any difference. Zero, nothing. I always say, today’s turnback is tomorrow’s gotaway,” Alex said, referring to illegal aliens that turn back to Mexico before being apprehended and those who get away from Border Patrol and enter the United States.
Then-head of the Del Rio Border Patrol Sector Austin Skero said on June 24, as illegal immigration continued to escalate: “None of us really feel good about the current situation we’re in. So it has taken a toll on morale. Our agents are frustrated. They’re frustrated, but they’re highly motivated.”
Focus
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s three-part plan to address illegal immigration is to invest in the countries that people are leaving, to build “safe, orderly, and humane pathways” for migration, and to rebuild the asylum system and refugee program. So far this year, illegal immigrants have hailed from more than 160 countries.
Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said in a June 24 community meeting in Del Rio that the agency’s focus is to streamline the processing of illegal immigrants.
Border Patrol drops van loads of Haitians who crossed the U.S. border illegally at local NGO Border Humanitarian Coalition to catch a bus to San Antonio or Houston, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 22, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
This year, the administration released hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants into the United States with a notice to appear, which indicates the scheduled date of their immigration court case.
However, the border agencies got so swamped that agents were directed to speed things up by handing out a “notice to report,” which is a request for the illegal immigrants to check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within 60 days.
It’s unclear how many subsequently reported to ICE. The Epoch Times has submitted a freedom of information request for that data, but hasn’t received a response.
On Oct. 8, the Biden administration announced its intention to cancel existing border fence contracts in the Rio Grande Valley and Del Rio border sectors. Harris, in 2019, had called Trump’s border wall project his “vanity project” and the surge of illegal aliens an “emergency of his own creation.”
During the last crisis in 2019, Border Patrol agents were accused of running state-sanctioned concentration camps and putting “kids in cages” at the overwhelmed facilities along the border.
The Border Patrol agency took a hit in morale at the time, but this year is much worse, agents say.
“It’s definitely much more profound,” Jose said.
“We’re not securing the border anymore. We’re not fighting the incursion, we’re just rolling over and taking it. It’s just being a secretary. It’s not fixing anything, it’s not helping America.”
Illegal migrants from at least eight different nations, including Uzbekistan, crossed the southern border at Yuma, Arizona, on Friday as the migration crisis continues to escalate in the area.
Daily Caller reporter Jorge Ventura shared a video of a family from India illegally entering the U.S. through what is known as “The Gap.”
My first time encountering migrants from India crossing illegally into Yuma at ‘The Gap’. So far I’ve encountered migrants from 8 different countries today in Yuma pic.twitter.com/IujT57ACTu
Group of 80 migrants from Georgia, Venezuela, Brazil, Uzbekistan and El Salvador apprehended by border patrol in the Yuma sector pic.twitter.com/2fsKPqVOJZ
On Tuesday, Ventura reported that illegal Colombian migrants had crossed the border at Yuma.
“‘I didn’t even want to try’ says Colombian migrants that crossed illegally into Yuma, Arizona when I asked if they attempted to come under the Trump administration,” Ventura tweeted.
“I didn’t even want to try” says Colombian migrants that crossed illegally into Yuma, Arizona when I asked if they attempted to come under the Trump administration. I also interviewed Nicaraguan migrants that crossed illegally into Yuma that shared the similar sentiment pic.twitter.com/WMaCI0n2SG
Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs visited abandoned border wall supplies in Yuma, Arizona, on Thursday, demanding in a video that President Joe Biden restart construction “now” to address the surge of illegal immigrants.
Biggs tweeted a video of himself standing beside piles of steel beams intended for a border wall with Mexico.
“Down at the Yuma border. I’m surrounded by millions of dollars worth of wall material that is lying around, unused, because Biden cancelled the wall contracts. The border crisis worsens by the day, we need to start rebuilding, NOW,” Biggs wrote on Thursday.
Down at the Yuma border. I’m surrounded by millions of dollars worth of wall material that is lying around, unused, because Biden cancelled the wall contracts. The border crisis worsens by the day, we need to start rebuilding, NOW. pic.twitter.com/BZbKZdslK5
“This is Biden’s waste pile,” Biggs says in the video.
“This is about $2 million worth of fencing panels just waiting to be installed, but they won’t be installed. We’ll pay the contractors, but we’re not going to install these.”
“Shame on Joe Biden. Shame on [Homeland Security] Secretary Mayorkas. This stuff needs to be done. This fencing needs to be completed,” Biggs says.
In an earlier video, Biggs said he had watched Border Patrol agents apprehend five illegal immigrants as he stood at the border.
Massive amounts of border wall supplies continue to waste away at the southern border after the Biden administration canceled contracts with construction companies slated to build the wall.
Well, the Biden administration may deny that there’s a crisis at the southern border and that its withdrawal from Afghanistan was a horrific failure, but the convergence of those very real issues could soon put American lives at risk.
Rep. Tom McClintock of California, the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, is warning that terrorists could try to breach our country at its weakest point thanks to the release of Islamic State prisoners by the Taliban in Afghanistan and our “porous southern border.”
I don’t care what you think about mean tweets and massive egos. I become more convinced with each passing day that former President Donald Trump will be remembered by history as having been absolutely right about the border.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday, McClintock expressed his “grave concern” about “the security risks posed by the release of 7,000 terrorists, including members of the Taliban, ISIS-K, and Al-Qaeda, from Bagram Air Base combined with the porous southern border.
“Shortly after the president ordered the unconditional surrender of Bagram Air Base to the Taliban, Taliban forces took control and released the terrorists that had been in U.S. custody,” he wrote. “Days later 13 U.S. servicemembers were murdered by a suicide bomber at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.”
The lawmaker noted that the Islamic State Khorasan suicide bomber behind the attack was one of the terrorists released by the Taliban from Bagram Air Base.
“The whereabouts of the [other terrorists] is unknown,” McClintock said. “It is possible, if not likely, that many will attempt to enter our country through Mexico with the purpose of committing similar terrorist attacks.
“In fact, we already know that aliens found in the Terrorist Screening Database have been apprehended on the southern border this year,” he continued. “The release of thousands of terrorists back into Afghanistan and the criminal cartels’ control of human smuggling on the southwest U.S. border, mean the terrorist threat is urgent.”
The Biden administration has confirmed that thousands of terrorists were released from the prison facilities at Bagram in the days leading up to the Kabul bombing, including Islamic State Khorasan fighters known to the U.S. to be dangerous.
The U.S. abandoned Bagram in July without bothering to do a thing about the known terrorists housed there, so when the Taliban swooped in after our hasty departure, what do you think they did?
They released a horde of Islamic extremists who have pledged their lives to waging war against everyone they view as an enemy to their mission to establish an Islamic state — and you’d better believe that includes the United States of America and its citizens.
As we know, it was only days later that one of these terrorists targeted U.S. troops facilitating the escape of American citizens and at-risk Afghans from the clutches of the new Islamic regime.
Nothing — least of all our southern border — will stop these ruthless killers from trying to destroy American lives.
McClintock asked Mayorkas to “help us understand the ongoing terrorism-related threats at the southwest U.S. border and how the Biden administration’s failures in Afghanistan affect border security.”
The Republican congressman gave Mayorkas until Monday to provide his panel with information about foreign nationals encountered at the border this year and the countries they are coming from.
It’s a rather tall order, considering this administration is handling the surge of illegal migrants about as well as it did the Afghanistan withdrawal.
It’s up for debate whether Biden can blame his predecessor for the Afghanistan debacle, but there’s no escaping the fact that he made a point of reversing border policies put in place by Trump within hours of taking office. Now, overwhelmed border officials are bearing the brunt of his disastrous approach to national security and immigration.
The Biden administration has admitted 160,000 illegal aliens into the country since March and released over 94,000 of them into the U.S. interior, a crippling influx that is causing massive logistical and security challenges for communities along the southern border.
Thanks, Joe. No, really — this week, illegal immigrants who had just managed to cross our border personally thanked Biden for their easy entry into the country.
Last week, 30 lawmakers sent a letter to Biden declaring that the American people are “fed up with false reassurances that the border is closed.”
The administration’s word that the border is secure is mud — so how can we possibly trust that it’s prepared for the eventuality that Islamic terrorists waltz across it?
A year after presidential candidate Joe Biden attacked then-President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy, President Joe Biden will be putting it back into action.
“This is the first president in the United States of America that said anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before in America,” Biden said last October in the second debate between him and Trump, according to U.S. News and World Report.
“They’re shaking in squalor on the other side of the river,” he said.
Now, however, Biden, who tried to end the policy but has been stymied by the courts over the way he went about it, is going to embrace it beginning next month, according to CNN.
In August, 208,887 illegal immigrants were apprehended by Customs and Border Protection agents, according to ABC News. It said that was more than three times the August 2020 level of 62,707.
The “Remain in Mexico” policy, known formally as the Migrant Protection Protocols, required migrants seeking asylum to await their hearings in Mexico.
The order came in response to the reality that many illegal immigrants who claimed asylum and were given court dates would never appear, instead drifting into the United States never to be found and deported.
Biden tried to end the policy, but in August, in response to a lawsuit from Texas and Missouri, a U.S. district judge ruled the administration did not lay sufficient administrative groundwork to end the program, according to The Washington Post.
The Biden administration appealed the decision to the Supreme Court but lost.
Ah, it appears the Biden Admin is realizing that telling migrants to come to the US then having no plan to screen them, process them, house them, covid test them, etc doesn’t work. Governing is hard. https://t.co/6hP0F8UGPT
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement late Thursday that it is “taking necessary steps to comply with the court order, which requires us to reimplement MPP in good faith,” the Post reported.
The statement blamed any delays in implementation on Mexico.
“Mexico is a sovereign nation that must make an independent decision to accept the return of individuals without status in Mexico as part of any reimplementation of MPP,” DHS said. “Discussions with the Government of Mexico concerning when and how MPP will be reimplemented are ongoing.”
The “Remain in Mexico” policy faded after the COVID-19 pandemic began as the Trump administration used Title 42 of the public health law to send illegal immigrants back without an asylum hearing.
The Biden administration has continued to use Title 42 to expel those illegal immigrants it does not admit.
As the Biden administration works to comply with the courts and restore the Migrant Protection Protocols, other parts of the president’s team are laying the administrative groundwork so that he can ax the policy.
A DHS memo outlining the basis for ending the policy will be “finalized shortly,” CBS News reported Friday.
However, for now, the administration is still bound to implement the policy under terms of the court ruling.
Border Patrol agents arrested a convicted sex offender who crossed the Rio Grande River near Laredo, Texas, U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealed on Thursday.
Agents apprehended a group of illegal immigrants on Tuesday in south Laredo. One of the men was found to be 44-year-old Alejandro Cano-Morales, a Mexican national with an active warrant who was registered as a sex offender.
He had been convicted of child molestation in Decatur, Georgia, in 2011.
Cano-Morales was arrested and turned over to the U.S. Marshals Service, according to a local news release from CBP on Thursday.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said last week that the Border Patrol has experienced a major spike in criminal alien crossings of the border as the crisis continues to escalate.
Paxton shared the concerns during an interview on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends First.”
When asked, “How many are getting in?” he responded with concern. “I don’t even think we know,” Paxton said.
“I think my state isn’t told much about what’s actually happening. We’re not given the statistics. We’re given broad statistics, but we don’t know exactly how many people are escaping,” the attorney general said.
As Republican governors head to the southern border, Texas Attorney General @KenPaxtonTX sounds the alarm as the border patrol nabs gang members and sex offenders coming into the United States.https://t.co/pY61XYHeBz
He said the number of criminal alien crossings had increased significantly over last year.
“We do know that the numbers are up supposedly about 400 percent from just a year ago for criminal aliens coming into our country. So it’s a significant increase. The Biden administration knows it and they support it,” Paxton added.
Paxton also was asked, “How much worse could this get before something is done about it?”
The attorney general’s words offered little hope for a response from the Biden administration.
“I don’t think they have any intention, the Biden administration has no intention of stopping it even if it gets worse. The numbers are so significantly more than they’ve ever been, yet there’s no effort on their part to follow federal law or to even follow court orders,” said Paxton, a Republican and outspoken critic of the Biden administration.
“They’re allowing it. They’re inviting it. They’re wanting it,” he added.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott joined a group of 10 GOP governors for a news conference at the U.S.-Mexico border last week to address the growing crisis.
The news conference followed the action of 26 Republican governors who sent a letter last month to President Joe Biden to request a meeting to address the crisis.
“As chief executives of our states, we request a meeting with you at The White House to bring an end to the national security crisis created by eight months of unenforced borders,” the governors said in the letter.
“The months-long surge in illegal crossings has instigated an international humanitarian crisis, spurred a spike in international criminal activity, and opened the floodgates to human traffickers and drug smugglers endangering public health and safety in our states,” they said.
“A crisis that began at our southern border now extends beyond to every state and requires immediate action before the situation worsens.”
Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan blasted Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the Biden administration’s border crisis, declaring he is “lying to the American people.”
Documents leaked to Fox News this week revealed 160,000 migrants have been released into the United States since March. Homan offered his perspective on that during a “Fox & Friends First” interview on Thursday morning.
“The numbers show that the secretary has been lying to the American people,” Homan said.
Former acting ICE Director, Tom Homan, sounds off as we learn 160,000 migrants have been released into the U.S. under the Biden Administration.https://t.co/0aujDkzXx9
The Fox report also said that since Aug. 6, the Biden administration has released about 32,000 immigrants into the U.S. via parole — which gives migrants a temporary legal status and the ability to apply for work permits.
“Why are they using paroles?” Homan said. “Because they’ll be eligible for a work visa when they get here.”
“Again, here is the secretary not taking any enforcement posture, not doing anything to slow the flow,” he said.
“They’re calling their friends and neighbors back home, saying, ‘Not only did I get released. I got a job.’ This is just another enticement,” Homan said.
“This is just open borders gone wild.”
The border crisis led nearly three dozen Republican House members to send a letter to President Joe Biden on Friday to demand action.
“The recent surge of illegal aliens entering the United States in Del Rio, Texas, demands that you finally give the border crisis that you created the attention it deserves,” the letter read.
“The American people are fed up with false reassurances that the border is closed,” it said.
The House members said Biden’s open border policies were the cause of the crisis.
“There is one main driver for the current surge of illegal immigration: your policies have left the border open,” the letter said.
The lawmakers wrote that the border crisis is “directly linked” to Biden’s refusal to follow border laws.
“The surge of aliens into Del Rio and the accompanying lawlessness that developed because of the surge is directly linked to your refusal to comply with [District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s] order,” the letter read.
Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs, one of the signers, released a statement along with the letter.
“It is well past time for President Biden to acknowledge the border crisis that he has created and enforce laws to secure the border,” Biggs said.
“Biden has worked overtime to erase Trump administration policies and programs, like Remain in Mexico, that were securing our border and discouraging illegal immigration,” he said.
“We are demanding that the President provide Congress with accurate information about the extent of the border crisis so that we can understand the full impact of his open border policies.”
Former President Donald Trump released a statement Tuesday blasting the Biden administration for its failures regarding the border crisis, calling the border a “disgusting wreck.”
“Our Border has gone from the safest and most secure in history, by far, to a broken, dirty, and disgusting wreck with thousands of unknown people from unknown countries, including from their now emptied prisons all over the world, unsustainably pouring in,” Trump said.
NEW!
President Trump:
“Our Border has gone from the safest and most secure in history, by far, to a broken, dirty, & disgusting wreck…No country has ever seen anything like what is happening on the Southern Border…no country is stupid enough to allow such a thing to happen” pic.twitter.com/At6tQzSeQ3
“No country has ever seen anything like what is happening on the Southern Border of the United States—and no country is stupid enough to allow such a thing to happen,” he added.
The former president also spoke out against growing crime, predicting terrorism will be “the next big wave.”
“Crime will go up at levels that the U.S. has never seen before (it is actually already there), and terrorism will be the next big wave to lead the way,” Trump said.
The statement followed news this week from Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin appearing on the network Monday morning to reveal that stockpiles of steel beams remain near the U.S.-Mexico border in south Texas.
Melugin said he had been told by a federal official that enough steel was purchased to build more than 100 miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley and Laredo, Texas, but very little of it was used.
“Live with @BillHemmer & @DanaPerino this morning discussing the Biden admin’s decision to cancel the border wall contract. A federal source tells me steel for over 100 miles was purchased for wall in RGV & Laredo, but only about 14 miles were completed before Biden stopped it,” Melugin tweeted.
Live with @BillHemmer & @DanaPerino this morning discussing the Biden admin’s decision to cancel the border wall contract. A federal source tells me steel for over 100 miles was purchased for wall in RGV & Laredo, but only about 14 miles were completed before Biden stopped it. pic.twitter.com/pseT3kUo6A
“What does it look like to not build the border wall? Our drone is overhead in Pharr, TX at one location where steel for the border wall has been baking in the sun & going to waste since January,” Melugin said.
“Tens of millions of dollars worth of steel here already paid for,” he added.
NEW: What does it look like to not build the border wall? Our drone is overhead in Pharr, TX at one location where steel for the border wall has been baking in the sun & going to waste since January. Tens of millions of dollars worth of steel here already paid for. @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/RTdiMTyqAh
President Joe Biden’s former Border Patrol chief, Rodney Scott, said last week that the administration was paying up to $5 million per day to contractors to not complete former President Donald Trump’s southern border wall.
Scott recounted to Fox News anchor Bret Baier that on his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order halting construction on the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Many of those projects today are just still on hold, so we’re paying contractors. For a while, it was almost $5 million a day between [the Department of Defense] and [the Department of Homeland Security] to not build the border wall,” Scott said.
“There are stacks and stacks of border wall panels,” he added, along with “hundreds of miles of fiber optic cabling” and “hundreds of cameras” that are “just sitting. There is no action being taken.”
“That money is just trickling away to those contractors for not doing work each day,” Scott said.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham visited Yuma, Arizona, and expressed concern that the city could become the next Del Rio, Texas, the recent site of an encampment of thousands of illegal immigrants.
“Migrants coming to the US today are not trying to avoid detection — in fact they are turning themselves in,” Graham tweeted on Tuesday.
“Our asylum laws are being abused. It is what is leading to this surge at the border,” he added.
Migrants coming to the US today are not trying to avoid detection — in fact they are turning themselves in.
Our asylum laws are being abused. It is what is leading to this surge at the border. pic.twitter.com/faf4IoO68r
“The men and women of [Customs and Border Patrol] are heroes,” Graham said. “Unfortunately, the Border Patrol is being turned into the Border ‘Processing’ Patrol.”
The South Carolina senator also predicted that Yuma will become “the next Del Rio.” Nearly 15,000 illegal Haitian migrants crossed the Rio Grande in September and gathered under a bridge in Del Rio.
On Monday, Townhall reported that Border Patrol agents in the Yuma Sector were clearing out the area’s migrant overflow facility prior to Graham’s visit.
“Sources within Border Patrol told Townhall they have been seeing a lot of ‘movement’ with regards to apprehended immigrants being moved to other Border Patrol locations, released into the United States, or being deported to Mexico, but some of the agents were not told why the overflow facility was being cleared so quickly,” the outlet reported.
One source told Townhall that “the rapid movement of immigrants from the facility was ‘to make it look like there is no problem,’ adding two weeks ago they had people sleeping on the ground while some had to wait ten days to be fully processed.”
A video posted on Twitter by Townhall’s Julio Rosas shows illegal immigrants crossing the border in the Yuma Sector.
This scene plays out all day by Morelos Dam. People illegally cross into the US, they wait for Border Patrol since agents are often not there, they are then escorted through a gap in the border wall that was created when Biden halted construction. This group were Nicaraguans. pic.twitter.com/EuvAwi7nIi
Haitians have been massing at the southern border of the United States, and their situation is precarious. There is great suffering, with not much hope of alleviation in the immediate future. The hearts and minds of all men and women of goodwill go out to these people, in hope and prayer for their safety and well-being.
But this situation raises several questions. We have it on good authority that the United States is systematically, systemically, irredeemably, and irretrievably racist. The 50 states are dominated by white supremacists, racists, bigots, Nazis. We know this on good authority. The Black Lives Matter movement has demonstrated this over and over again, and then once more again. Proof of this contention emanates from major traditional media such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. The broadcast media such as CNN and MSNBC have supplied thousands of heart-rending hours of indications of this evil scourge. Hundreds, thousands, of world-class professors at the most prestigious universities in the land have supplied incontrovertible evidence in support of this claim.
Why, then, are thousands of people from the island nation seeking to immigrate to the United States? The obvious answer has to do with the poverty suffered there. Like many immigrants before them, the Haitians are seeking a better life in America.
Wait-a-sec. Virtually all Haitians are black. If there’s any white supremacy, anti-black racism in that country, it must be very insignificant, since there are so few Caucasians there. Don’t these Haitian emigrants realize that in coming to the United States they are only worsening their condition?
Then there’s the very opposite situation. Or, rather, lack of such. In 1892, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a Sherlock Holmes mystery, “Silver Blaze,” which featured a dog that didn’t bark. Something of the sort seems to be happening, or, rather, not happening, in the present context. If racism is so rife in the United States, why is there one-way traffic from places such as Haiti to the United States? Why isn’t the movement of people in the very opposite direction? That is, why are African-Americans not fleeing from this country in droves, and travelling to places like Haiti, where there is zero white supremacy and anti-black racism?
One of the most powerful indications of what is really going on in reality is “voting with the feet.” This sounds as if people go into the ballot box and instead of registering their vote with their hands, they do so, karate-like, with their toes. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, this means that we as social scientists can discern where human welfare is better, and where it’s worse. Black people continually fled the south to the north in the 1930s; from this we can deduce that at least in their own minds they were improving their condition. Jews left Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and Egypt in ancient times; they did not attempt to enter there. Similarly, masses of people tried to move from East to West Germany and North to South Korea, not the other way around.
Why does the United States have a better economy than Haiti? It is, obviously, because we rely to a greater degree here than there on the sanctity of private property rights, of economic freedom, of capitalism, and of other such institutions of Western civilization that are all too often dismissed as “white supremacy.” According to the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (pdf), the United States ranks as the sixth-freest country in the world; Haiti registers at number 118 out of 165 countries.
The people who claim that the United States is an unregenerate racist country reject all of these institutions. In addition, they aver that mathematics is racist, as is capitalism. The wokesters are trying to rid orchestras of the music of Bach and Mozart on the grounds that all white males such as these are racist.
Maybe there’s something not all that bad about the prevalent “racism” that supposedly occurs in this country, with a former black president and now a vice president. Black people from elsewhere want to partake of it, and African Americans here do not seem to be fleeing from it.
A Monroe County Sheriff’s officer found 32 illegal immigrants suspected of traveling to the United States from Cuba hiding in a boat after pulling a truck over for driving too slow in Marathon, Florida, law enforcement officials announced on Monday.
Sgt. Joel Slough conducted a routine traffic stop of a rental truck hauling a large boat and found four suspected illegal immigrants in the vehicle including three young children, according to the sheriff’s department. Law enforcement officials discovered two pregnant women and a 17-year-old along with dozens of other immigrants hiding in the boat.
Slough “noted the children in the truck, the lack of child safety seats as well as the overwhelming smell of saltwater and body odor,” according to the department.
Reidel Garcia-Espino, 29, of Seffner, Florida, was charged with child neglect because none of the children in the vehicle were restrained, according to the sheriff’s department. Garcia-Espino claimed the group was out fishing, but law enforcement officials didn’t find any fishing equipment on the boat.
The illegal immigrants were transferred to Customs and Border Protection custody and Garcia-Espino was taken to jail, according to the sheriff’s office.
The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Homeland Security will no longer conduct raids on workplaces that employ illegal aliens
The Department of Homeland Security will no longer conduct raids on workplaces that employ illegal aliens, the latest effort from the White House to curtail the agency’s mission to enforce immigration law.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests at worksites could discourage illegal immigrants from reporting other unlawful employment practices in violation of a Biden administration directive. DHS will now privilege other investigations that “most effectively protect the American labor market,” according to the memo released Tuesday.
“The deployment of mass worksite operations, sometimes resulting in the simultaneous arrest of hundreds of workers, was not focused on the most pernicious aspect of our country’s unauthorized employment challenge: exploitative employers,” the memo says. “These highly visible operations misallocated enforcement resources while chilling, and even serving as a tool of retaliation for, worker cooperation in workplace standards investigations.”
Worksite raids increased by nearly 400 percent in 2018 under former president Donald Trump, leading to the arrest and deportation of thousands of illegal aliens. During former president Barack Obama’s last year in office, ICE made just 106 worksite arrests.
Proponents of the practice say worksite raids encourage employers to fill open jobs with law-abiding U.S. citizens and visa holders and regularly lead to broader investigations for other serious crimes. In 2018, the owner of a Tennessee slaughterhouse pleaded guilty to tax evasion and wire fraud following a worksite raid. He was later sentenced to 18 months in prison.
The largest single worksite raid in DHS history took place in 2019 at a Mississippi food processing plant and resulted in the arrest of 680 illegal aliens. Four Americans were also charged with violating immigration law.
Former immigration officials say the Biden administration will only encourage companies to abuse workers. Corporations will be able to hire illegal immigrants at substandard wages with impunity, according to former ICE chief of staff Jon Feere.
“Lawbreaking employers have benefited from the Biden administration’s lack of worksite enforcement this year, and now Mayorkas is outright abolishing this important enforcement tool,” Feere said. “Media in Central America reported on ICE worksite operations under the Trump administration and that undoubtedly had the effect of discouraging illegal immigration.”
The Mayorkas memo effectively restores Obama-era policies, which critics say hamstrung the agency from policing employers. By delegating the Department of Labor to be the chief investigator when an illegal alien files a worksite complaint, as Mayorkas’s memo orders, DHS is sidelined.
Under Obama, the Labor Department refused to share information about investigations with DHS, nor would it allow joint investigations with DHS. That practice ended most employer investigations by DHS, meaning lawbreaking employers often went unpunished. In his memo, Mayorkas calls for a review of whether E-Verify—a federal tool that allows businesses to check if a prospective employee is an illegal alien—is “not manipulated to suppress unauthorized workers from, or to punish unauthorized workers for, reporting unlawful labor practices such as substandard wages, unsafe working conditions, and other forms of worker exploitation.”
Massive amounts of border wall supplies continue to waste away along the nation’s southern border after the Biden administration has canceled contracts with construction companies selected to build it.
Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin appeared on the network Monday morning and revealed that stockpiles of steel beams were left near the U.S.-Mexico border in south Texas.
Melugin said he had been told by a federal official that enough steel was purchased to build more than 100 miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley and Laredo, Texas, but very little of it was used.
“Live with @BillHemmer & @DanaPerino this morning discussing the Biden admin’s decision to cancel the border wall contract. A federal source tells me steel for over 100 miles was purchased for wall in RGV & Laredo, but only about 14 miles were completed before Biden stopped it,” Melugin tweeted.
Live with @BillHemmer & @DanaPerino this morning discussing the Biden admin’s decision to cancel the border wall contract. A federal source tells me steel for over 100 miles was purchased for wall in RGV & Laredo, but only about 14 miles were completed before Biden stopped it. pic.twitter.com/pseT3kUo6A
“What does it look like to not build the border wall? Our drone is overhead in Pharr, TX at one location where steel for the border wall has been baking in the sun & going to waste since January,” Melugin said.
“Tens of millions of dollars worth of steel here already paid for,” he added.
NEW: What does it look like to not build the border wall? Our drone is overhead in Pharr, TX at one location where steel for the border wall has been baking in the sun & going to waste since January. Tens of millions of dollars worth of steel here already paid for. @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/RTdiMTyqAh
President Joe Biden’s former Border Patrol chief, Rodney Scott, said last week that the administration was paying up to $5 million per day to contractors to not complete former President Donald Trump’s southern border wall.
Scott recounted to Fox News anchor Bret Baier that on his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order halting construction on the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Many of those projects today are just still on hold, so we’re paying contractors. For a while, it was almost $5 million a day between [the Department of Defense] and [the Department of Homeland Security] to not build the border wall,” Scott said.
“There are stacks and stacks of border wall panels,” he added, along with “hundreds of miles of fiber optic cabling” and “hundreds of cameras” that are “just sitting. There is no action being taken.”
“That money is just trickling away to those contractors for not doing work each day,” Scott said.
A report released by Republicans serving on the Senate government operations and border management subcommittee in July put a firmer number on the cost of Biden’s order to end construction.
The minority staff report determined the president’s decision had cost taxpayers between $1.837 billion and $2.087 billion to that point.
“In January 2021, DOD contractors in charge of overseeing wall construction along the southern border received $10 billion in taxpayer money, which had been obligated toward wall-related projects,” Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, ranking member of the subcommittee, said in a news release.
“By the end of June, the Biden Administration has wasted roughly 20 percent ($2 billion) of the $10 billion meant to build the wall to pay contractors to watch steel rust in the desert.”
The report said the cost stood at $3 million per day at the end of June.
Trump was able to get 453 miles of a new primary and secondary border wall built before Biden took office and was in the process of constructing 211 more miles in the Border Patrol’s San Diego, El Centro, Yuma, Tucson, El Paso, Del Rio, Laredo and Rio Grande Valley sectors.
America’s “border czar” played bingo and bought cupcakes on Friday instead of joining a high-level meeting on border security in Mexico City.
Vice President Kamala Harris was dispatched to New Jersey for a photo op at a daycare center at Montclair State University and at a vaccination site in Newark, according to Fox News. While in Newark, she also made a pit stop at a local bakery, according to the New York Post.
@KamalaHarris playing Bingo while the Adults are in Mexico City trying to help the Crisis at the border (that they caused ) – can’t make this stuff up. pic.twitter.com/p6gqaFkNnc
“There will be an end to this,” she said. “We really feel we are starting to get in front of this.”
As Harris posed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland were in Mexico City for meetings with Mexican officials about the illegal migration crisis that has overwhelmed the southern border.
In March, Harris was tasked with managing the Biden administration’s response to the crisis.
Since then, she has made one foreign trip to Central America and Mexico. In June, several hundred thousand illegal immigrant arrivals ago, she made a brief trip to the border.Should Harris be replaced as America’s ‘border czar’?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
This week, 11 Republican senators led by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio sent President Joe Biden a letter saying the border crisis needs to be in different hands.
“We write to ask that you appoint a new Border Czar to replace Vice President Harris, who completely failed to work with neighboring countries to stem the flow of illegal migrants into our country and secure the border. In fact, things have only gotten worse since her appointment as Border Czar,” the letter read.
The letter noted that “from August 2020 to August 2021, there has been a 317 percent increase in encounters at the border. The current surge is the largest in 20 years as illegal border crossings have increased substantially since you took office.”
“Despite these alarming numbers, the Vice President only visited the southern border once, and that visit was hundreds of miles from the epicenter of the surge.
“Even her trip to Guatemala and Mexico intended to address the ‘root causes’ of illegal immigration into America was a public relations disaster with absolutely no substantive policy commitments from neighboring countries,” the senators wrote.Related:Kamala Harris Flies to California Resort Town, Media Not Allowed to Watch Departure
“Many of these migrants — despite originally being from Haiti — reported they came from South and Central America. Many stated that they made the dangerous journey because you, and Vice President Harris, promised to open America’s borders,” the letter continued.
“Vice President Harris has done absolutely nothing to help secure our border, develop a strategy to partner with our neighbors, or even talk to the American people about the border crisis.
“It is stunning that America’s Border Czar was silent as thousands of Haitian migrants illegally crossed the border, and set up a de facto refugee camp in America.
“Now, with estimates that tens of thousands of additional migrants are headed toward the southern border, it is essential you replace Vice President Harris as Border Czar with someone more qualified and engaged for this important role,” the letter read.
Noting that the border has been an “unmitigated disaster” under Biden and that “many of your policies are making the situation worse,” the senators said America needs a border czar “who is prepared, and willing to engage, to address the crisis at the southern border.”
In comments to Fox News on Thursday, Rubio said the situation at the border is the Biden administration’s fault.
“If you talk to people at the border, people that have crossed, they will all tell you the same thing: They expect to get into the United States, they expect to enter, they expect to be released pending an asylum hearing that many have no intention to show up for,” he said.
“No nation on earth can have the open border we basically have now and just tell anyone who wants to come to please show up. You can’t do it. But that’s what this administration thinks they are going to do. And if Kamala Harris is the one in charge of this, they need to find somebody else and fast.”
While speaking with Fox News this week, President Joe Biden’s former Border Patrol chief, Rodney Scott, confirmed that under Biden’s leadership, U.S. taxpayers are paying millions of dollars each day “to not” build a wall along its border with Mexico.
What did he say?
Scott told host Bret Baier that at one point, the U.S. was paying $5 million a day to contractors despite the fact that wall construction had been canceled.
“Many of those projects today are just still on hold, so we’re paying contractors. For a while, it was almost $5 million a day between [Department of Defense] and [Department of Homeland Security] to not build the border wall,” he said.
“That money is just trickling away to contractors for not doing work each day,” he added.
Scott also noted that in places where former President Donald Trump had ordered wall construction all that is left are “stacks and stacks of border wall panels,” “hundreds of miles of fiber optic cabling,” and “hundreds of cameras” that are just “sitting there.”
Scott’s claims matched the findings of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management report released in July.
In the report, the committee revealed that the Biden administration has spent roughly $2 billion — or $3 million per day — on costs associated with canceling wall construction inaugurated under Trump.
Contractors, instead of getting to work building the wall, are now paid primarily to guard construction materials.
“By the end of the Trump Administration, $10 billion had been transferred to U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) accounts for border wall construction and related projects. As of June 2021, the Biden Administration has wasted roughly 20 percent ($2 billion) of that $10 billion on suspension and termination costs related to border wall contracts,” the report stated.
“The Biden Administration is paying contractors at least $3 million per day to guard steel, concrete, and other materials in the desert,” the report went on to explain. “This waste of taxpayer resources threatens military readiness and national security.”
Anything else?
Scott, who described himself as nonpartisan, agreed that Biden’s approach to border security was endangering the country.
He said he was there during all of the transition briefings and made clear to the new administration that rolling back Trump’s immigration enforcement policies would cause disaster at the border. But no one listened.
“We made it very clear that if we dropped all of the initiatives that have been put in place over the last several years that we would get an influx of mass migration that we would not be able to control,” he said. “It was very clear there are people involved in this process that have been involved before, and they’re choosing not to take simple, commonsense steps to secure the border.”
Scott served in Border Patrol for nearly 30 years before stepping down in June. He was replaced by Raul L. Ortiz in August.
(CNSNews.com) – Never mind the hundreds of thousands of unvetted foreigners breaching the southwest U.S. border, leaving environmental degradation in their wake.
The Department of Homeland Security is worried about climate change. And all DHS employees are expected to fall in line with those concerns. In fact, they’ll be educated about the “climate crisis.”
On Thursday, DHS released a new Climate Action Plan that presents five “priority actions,” including a “DHS-wide climate education plan to raise awareness among our employees about the climate crisis.”
DHS admits that getting all employees to buy into the left’s version of climate change will be a challenge: “The Department must reach all employees to foster a workforce of understanding and compassion and ensure climate literacy is accepted and embraced,” the plan says.
And it sounds like there may be a test: “The Department will monitor progress in climate literacy through employee training and will measure employee understanding of climate change impacts and environmental justice,” the plan says.
The DHS Climate Action Plan runs 25 pages and is full of government-speak.
Priority Action #5, the climate “literacy” effort, indicates that DHS employees are expected to accept climate change dogma, as presented by leftists, without question or exception:
“Understanding, mitigating, and adapting to climate change and its impacts require cooperation across every level of DHS,” the plan says.
“DHS is committed to creating and growing a climate literate workforce that understands the principles of climate change, can assess scientifically credible information about climate, can communicate about climate change in a meaningful way, and is able to make informed decisions about climate change impacts on mission activities.”
DHS says it will create a “National Security and Climate Honors Program” to give students and recent graduates an opportunity to help DHS adapt to climate change. “DHS will aggressively pursue strategies to ensure a diverse applicant pool, to include applicants from underserved communities…”
The plan says: “Without adequate climate literacy training for employees and stakeholders, the Department risks developing infrastructure, management decisions, and project designs that do not sufficiently integrate climate resilience, environmental justice, and gender and racial equity considerations.”
The phrase “environmental justice” crops up several times, as follows: “The climate literacy curriculum will be innately tied to environmental and climate justice.”
And: “The DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties will collaborate with Department subject matter experts and stakeholders to enhance climate literacy and its intersections with environmental justice in DHS federally assisted programs.”
At a time when government schools are forcing critical race theory on unwilling students and parents, this DHS “climate literacy” effort bears watching.
Here are the other four “priority actions” identified by DHS in its Climate Action Plan:
— Ensuring climate-ready services and supplies…to secure supplies of food, medicine, energy, and other vital resources.
— Creating climate-resilient facilities and infrastructure, including by aiming to electrify 50 percent of the DHS vehicle fleet by 2030.
— Making sure “climate change considerations are appropriately incorporated” in all DHS planning and processes and mission areas;
— Incorporating climate adaptation into national preparedness and community grants and projects…to provide incentives for state, local, tribal, and territorial governments to adopt modern, disaster-resistant building codes.
CNSNews Reader,
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Human smugglers are using the social media app TikTok to promote their illicit services to bring migrants across the southern border of the U.S., according to an MSNBC report on Friday.
“Behind the camera is a coyote … a human smuggler, documenting their trafficking operations in order to promote them on social media,” MSNBC reported. “Some posts advertise their prices, which vary depending on the final destination. Others show off their profits with wads of cash.”
The videos reportedly reveal many of the methods human smugglers use to guide migrants across the border.
“After stashing them in safe houses, the migrants are transferred to vans and hidden under blankets,” MSNBC reported. “Other footage shows them cramped in the back seats.”
While Border Patrol is aware of the videos, there appears to be no crackdown on the posts by the Chinese-owned social media app.
“The proliferation of videos like these, where they are seen running from authorities, exposes how they avoid getting caught,” MSNBC reported.
“What social media doesn’t show are the journeys that end in tragedy, migrants missing or dead in the attempt to reach the American dream.”
MSNBC reports that smugglers are using TikTok to advertise their human trafficking operations as illegal immigration surges under Biden’s open borders policies. pic.twitter.com/GdG6scWi0T
Apps like TikTok and WhatsApp have been utilized by many migrants, including those crossing the border in Del Rio, Texas, and Yuma, Arizona.
“Haitian migrants find new route to cross illegally into United States in Yuma, Arizona, location is known as ‘The Gap,’” the Daily Caller’s Jorge Ventura tweeted Thursday.
“As the state of Texas prepares for 60,000 Haitian migrants to arrive later this month, Haitian migrants find new route in the Yuma sector.”
Ventura shared a video of three Haitian adults allegedly heading to the United States with three young children.
“We’re getting early reports of Haitian migrants starting to make their way into Yuma, Arizona, after the 15,000 Haitian caravan arrived in [Del Rio, Texas] in late September,” Ventura said.
Haitian migrants find new route to cross illegally into United States in Yuma, Arizona , location is known as ‘The Gap”. As the state of Texas prepares for 60,000 Haitian migrants to arrive later this month , Haitian migrants find new route in the Yuma sector pic.twitter.com/8sFgZEPs83
A second video allegedly showed a human smuggler receiving a cash payment from illegal Cuban migrants who arrived at “The Gap.”
“Before crossing into the United States illegally, human smuggler gives his final instructions to these Cuban migrants and receives his cash payment. Cuban migrants cross into Yuma, Arizona,” Ventura tweeted.
Before crossing into the United States illegally, human smuggler gives his final instructions to these Cuban migrants and receives his cash payment. Cuban migrants cross into Yuma, Arizona. This route is known as ‘The Gap’, Haitian migrants are also crossing through this route pic.twitter.com/SqIGt4NQFa
President Joe Biden’s de facto open-borders policy has fueled a nightmarish surge in convicted criminal illegal aliens trying to enter the United States.
The number of convicted sex offenders, murderers, wife-beaters, drunken drivers, drug traffickers and other criminals who were arrested has quadrupled from the previous fiscal year, according to a chilling analysis published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
From Oct. 1, 2020, through this August, CBP arrested a total of 9,278 criminal illegal aliens, compared with just 2,438 in fiscal 2020, when Donald Trump was president.
Criminal illegal aliens are individuals who have been convicted of crimes, either abroad or in the United States, prior to being apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol.
Of those arrested this year, 448 migrants were convicted sex offenders, nearly triple the total of 156 in FY 2020.
Yuma Sector agents arrested a child rapist that illegally entered the U.S. on Monday. The migrant, Edgard Antonio Gutierrez-Martinez, has felony convictions for first degree child rape and incest. Agents turned over the migrant to US Marshals this morning to face prosecution. pic.twitter.com/YXPs3LGMQG
— Chief Patrol Agent Chris T. Clem (@USBPChiefYUM) October 6, 2021
Agents in the Del Rio sector alone have arrested 95 convicted sex offenders in this fiscal year. https://t.co/u5XvMGP2RQ
— The Western Journal (@WestJournalism) May 27, 2021
Meanwhile, 1,062 illegal aliens apprehended in fiscal 2021 were previously convicted of assault, battery or domestic violence. That’s a fivefold increase from FY 2020.
In the same period, 1,510 illegal aliens have been arrested after having been convicted of driving under the influence. That’s quadruple the DUI convicts apprehended by Border Patrol in fiscal 2020.
For reference, some 10,000 Americans are killed by drunken drivers every year, according to the Department of Transportation.
Allowing convicted drunken drivers from foreign countries to illegally enter the United States is a direct threat to public safety. Naturally, the Biden administration doesn’t seem to care.
Father-of-five who advocated rights for illegals is hit and killed by illegal alien on probation for a DUI who was ordered to be deported back to El Salvador eight months ago https://t.co/Z4V3w232RV
This illegal alien who had 2 prior DUIs and a assault arrest who has now been charged with killing 3 former cops and injuring 9 others in a DUI? https://t.co/WVQRhXT5wY ICE tells me he had DACA!!!!
Tellingly, there was a dramatic surge in the number of convicted murderers and drug dealers trying to sneak across our porous southern border.
This year, 1,935 criminal aliens had previously been convicted of illegal drug trafficking or possession, compared with 386 last year.
Remarkably, 53 migrants apprehended at the border in FY 2021 are convicted murderers, compared with just three in FY 2020.
Nonstop rafts coming across full of illegal immigrant families. The smugglers are in a playful mood, laughing and making jokes to our cameras. This one is saying “money” and making the cash sign with his hands. @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/uwZkbIE8t8
Not surprisingly, illegal aliens who had previously been apprehended or deported became more emboldened under the feckless Biden administration.
In FY 2021, some 5,552 illegal aliens had prior convictions for illegal entry into the United States — more than quadruple the 1,261 convicted the previous year.
The figures were just through August; fiscal 2021 didn’t end until Sept. 30, so the numbers are likely to get much worse.
These alarming statistics paint a grim picture of a country in decay and under siege, with Americans’ safety being sacrificed on the altar of the Democratic Party’s open-borders agenda to increase its voting bloc.
Barraging the U.S. with unvetted migrants from all over the world in the middle of a pandemic — and amid rocketing inflation that’s destabilizing the economy — makes no sense.
This is why numerous commentators say the mass influx of illegal aliens is calculated.
“Nothing about it is an accident, obviously. It is intentional,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined in September. “Biden did it on purpose.
“Why would a president do this to his own country? No sane, first-world nation opens its borders to the world. Promising the poorest people on the planet that they can have endless free, taxpayer-funded services if they show up and break your laws isn’t just stupid. It’s suicidal. … Our system can’t handle this many destitute newcomers.”
Carlson said Biden revealed his strategic reason for flooding the United States with illegal immigrants back in 2015 when he was vice president.
“Joe Biden said it. To change the racial mix of the country. That’s the reason,” the Fox News host explained. “To reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the third world.
“And then Biden went further and said that non-white DNA is the source of our strength. Imagine saying that. This is the language of eugenics. It’s horrifying. But there’s a reason Biden said it. In political terms, this policy is sometimes called the great replacement — the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.”
Carlson said Biden’s destructive rhetoric and policies are further dividing the nation and causing America to implode.
“The president has a moral obligation to represent all Americans equally, not just those of a specific color,” he said. “For four years, remember, they told you Donald Trump was a racist. But has anyone shown that Trump ever in his life said anything half as disgusting as Joe Biden said on that tape?
President Joe Biden’s former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott said this week that the administration was paying up to $5 million per day to contractors to not complete former President Donald Trump’s southern border wall.
What a shameful example of government waste and emblematic of the incompetency of the 46th president.
In a Tuesday interview, Scott recounted to Fox News anchor Bret Baier that on his first day in office Biden issued an executive order halting construction on the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Many of those projects today are just still on hold, so we’re paying contractors. For a while, it was almost $5 million a day between [the Department of Defense] and [the Department of Homeland Security] to not build the border wall,” Scott said.
“There are stacks and stacks of border wall panels,” he added, along with “hundreds of miles of fiber optic cabling” and “hundreds of cameras” that are “just sitting. There is no action being taken.”
“That money is just trickling away to those contractors for not doing work each day,” Scott said. https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZnyyhTUh74I?feature=oembed
A report released by Republicans serving on the Senate Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management in July put a firmer number on the cost of Biden’s order to end construction.
The minority staff report determined the president’s decision has cost taxpayers between $1.837 billion and $2.087 billion since Jan. 20.
“In January 2021, DOD contractors in charge of overseeing wall construction along the southern border received $10 billion in taxpayer money, which had been obligated toward wall-related projects,” a news release from subcommittee ranking member Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma said.
“By the end of June, the Biden Administration has wasted roughly 20 percent ($2 billion) of the $10 billion meant to build the wall to pay contractors to watch steel rust in the desert.”
The report says the cost stood at $3 million per day at the end of June.
Trump was able to successfully have 453 miles of new primary and secondary border wall built before Biden took office and was in the process of constructing 211 more miles in the Border Patrol’s San Diego, El Centro, Yuma, Tucson, El Paso, Del Rio, Laredo and Rio Grande Valley sectors.
Of course, some of those areas — like Del Rio and Yuma — have seen the greatest influx of migrants since Biden took office.
Scott told Baier that the Biden administration was made aware of what the catastrophic results of ending Trump’s policies would be.
“We made it very clear that if we dropped all of the initiatives that have been put in place over the last several years, that we would get an influx of mass migration that we would not be able to control,” he said.
Nonetheless, Biden ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for those making asylum claims and signaled in his rhetoric and his administration’s actions a more lax border policy.
“The result of that is the message goes out. And then instead of having a couple of hundred encounters a day, we quickly went up to about 6,000 encounters a day,” Scott said. https://www.youtube.com/embed/KqOV3U0JITc?feature=oembed
The number of those apprehended crossing the southern border illegally during fiscal year 2021 exceeds the population of 11 American states.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, so far there have been over 1.5 million encounters of people crossing the southwest border through August, a 21-year high.
That number will go up by 200,000 or more when September’s numbers are included, if recent trends continue.
By comparison, there were just 458,000 encounters in all of 2020.
CBP Encounters, Southwest Land Border. (Check out those 2021 ‘single adult’ numbers.)
No need to travel to see it ‘first hand’… It’s right there on the freaking website! pic.twitter.com/7G7q1sbaOn
Last month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki chastised Republicans for “giving speeches about how outraged they are about the situation at the border. Not many who are putting forward solutions or steps that we could take.”
“So we’re a little tired of the speeches,” Psaki said.
.@PressSec Jen Psaki: “There are a lot of Republicans out there giving speeches about how outraged they are about the situation at the border. Not many who are putting forward solutions or steps that we could take. So we’re a little tired of the speeches.” pic.twitter.com/ujqfcJOrOX
The confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 took Democrats to a new low for childish, irresponsible behavior, but the current harassment of a fellow Democrat, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, is showing them to be full-out wacko. I’m not sure it’s possible to be any more wacko than they are at this point, but the year isn’t over and we shall see.
Speaking of Kavanaugh, there happens to be a link between the harassment of then-Sen. Jeff Flake — also from Arizona — over his vote to confirm Kavanaugh, and that of Sen. Sinema now, over the insane spending bills currently on the table. As reported by Jordan Davidson at The Federalist, both of these agitator groups were funded by the same organization, which in turn gets money from George Soros.
Recall that Sen. Flake, after he announced that he’d be supporting Kavanaugh’s nomination, was ambushed in an elevator in the U.S. Capitol by two extremely confrontational women, one of whom offered a frenzied condemnation of Kavanaugh based mostly, it seemed, on what had happened to her personally and to other victims of assault.
A week after that incident, an email from the Center for Popular Democracy took credit for it, along with “the Women’s March … and other groups.”
Fast-forward to 2021, and a group called Living United for Change in Arizona has taken credit for the ambush, complete with video cameras, of Sen. Sinema in a women’s restroom at Arizona State University, where she was on a break from teaching a class. It turns out that this group is a close partner of the Center for Popular Democracy.
The report in The Federalist gives details on the funding for both, but I’ll just say that leftist-globalist billionaire and would-be Bond villain George Soros funded LUCHA to the tune of at least $250,000 in 2017 and at least $1.5 million in 2019 and is the group’s largest donor.
I don’t know what these protesters think they’re getting for behaving this way. Do they think this relentless bullying is persuasive? Sadly, in some cases, it has been, but by now the strategy has been used so much that for many, it’s just getting tiresome.
In a statement, Sinema said this was not a legitimate protest. “It is unacceptable,” she said, “for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to close university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom.”
But these people on the left aren’t just bullies; they’re highly organized bullies, and the more we find out about their network of “nonprofit” organizations, the more we see that at the center of the massive spider web is the same little group of poisonous spiders.
So, what about those who use social media to encourage agitators to bully lawmakers?
So-called “feminists” are doing exactly this. For example, Jezebel writer Ashley Reese used Twitter to distribute a piece originally headlined “Absolutely Bully Kyrsten Sinema Outside Of Her Bathroom Stall.”
The piece mocks those who would hesitate to follow a woman into a restroom with their video cameras. It serves Sinema right, Reese says, for hiding from the voters “like a coward.” Oh, and she adds that President Biden was right to dismiss what was done to the senator as just “part of the process.”
Twitter’s own rules state: “We prohibit behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups with abusive behavior.” Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw called out Twitter on this, asking “Hey, just wondering if you’re going to enforce this bullying rule? Or does it not count when the victim isn’t liberal enough?”
I wonder how Ms. Reese would react if some conservatives followed her into the restroom and made videos while verbally harassing her. I would imagine she’d press charges, with good reason. But it’s not likely we’ll ever find out what she’d do, because no real conservative I know would ever do a thing like that.
“For all the pearl-clutching,” Reese had written of the restroom incident, “few are providing a more effective and safe alternative to what these activists did.” But Vespa says it’s not effective, because Sinema doesn’t care; they apparently can yell in her face all day and she’d just walk away before she’d kowtow. Good for her.
And what about the media double standard? When Sen. John McCain went against his party and stopped the effort to repeal Obamacare, The New York Times knelt to worship him. “It was a stunning moment,” the paper wrote, “a flash of the maverick John McCain, unafraid of going his own way despite the pleas of his fellow Republicans.”
But for going her own way despite the continuing harassment from her fellow Democrats, Sinema is vilified in the media. The Times ran an Op-Ed headlined “What’s Wrong With Kyrsten Sinema?” Here’s a gem that ran in The Nation in March: “How Kyrsten Sinema Sold Out: the origin story of the Senate’s newest super villain.”
Byron York at Townhall cites the portrayal of Sinema on “Saturday Night Live,” which he says “often functions as a sort of televised, in-kind campaign contribution to the Democratic Party.” (As do most of the media, I would add.) On SNL, she’s played as “a weirdo who just wants to do bad things,” he says. If you (like us) rarely see SNL anymore because it’s just not funny, York includes a description of the sketch.
Steven Kruiser at PJ Media has an explanation for the Democrats’ bizarre bullying behavior: “What we are witnessing now from the Democrats is a very public and ongoing nervous breakdown brought on by too many years of lying to the American people and themselves. Public incivility towards anyone who disagrees with them is not only forgiven but encouraged, even by the President.”
I can’t outdo his description of CNN, which he says was once actually respected but is now “a human zoo packed with frothing, rabid psychopaths who were so damaged by Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton that they’ve lost all of their humanity.” And more: “What we are witnessing with the 2021 Democrats is a collective mass delusion that presents itself as a psychotic break from reality.”
I don’t think that’s too harsh a diagnosis; that’s exactly what we’re seeing. And I’d add that it’s not just the media — it happened within the government, inside the Justice Department, State Department, FBI, CIA. Trump’s election (or even just the threat of it), in their fevered minds, excused anything they wanted to do. And we’re still finding out what that encompassed.
Illegal Haitian migrants are crossing the southern border of the U.S. via a new route in Yuma, Arizona, as Border Patrol braces for the arrival of up to 60,000 Haitian migrants.
“Haitian migrants find new route to cross illegally into United States in Yuma, Arizona, location is known as ‘The Gap,’” the Daily Caller’s Jorge Ventura tweeted Thursday.
“As the state of Texas prepares for 60,000 Haitian migrants to arrive later this month, Haitian migrants find new route in the Yuma sector.”
Ventura shared a video of “three Haitian adults with three young children making their way to the United States.”
“We’re getting early reports of Haitian migrants starting to make their way into Yuma, Arizona, after the 15,000 Haitian caravan arrived in [Del Rio, Texas] in late September,” Ventura said.
Haitian migrants find new route to cross illegally into United States in Yuma, Arizona , location is known as ‘The Gap”. As the state of Texas prepares for 60,000 Haitian migrants to arrive later this month , Haitian migrants find new route in the Yuma sector pic.twitter.com/8sFgZEPs83
A second video showed a human smuggler receiving a cash payment from illegal Cuban migrants who had arrived at “The Gap.”
“Before crossing into the United States illegally, human smuggler gives his final instructions to these Cuban migrants and receives his cash payment. Cuban migrants cross into Yuma, Arizona,” Ventura tweeted.
Before crossing into the United States illegally, human smuggler gives his final instructions to these Cuban migrants and receives his cash payment. Cuban migrants cross into Yuma, Arizona. This route is known as ‘The Gap’, Haitian migrants are also crossing through this route pic.twitter.com/SqIGt4NQFa
“Migrants coming off the raft were wearing bracelets that cartels/smuggling groups put on them to track and determine payment,” he tweeted.
We documented over 100 migrants smuggled into the US by smugglers on rafts making their way from the Mexican side. Migrants coming off the raft were wearing bracelets that cartels/smuggling groups put on them to track and determine payment.Stay tuned for full story @DailyCallerpic.twitter.com/d7Q0vL8AU5
Many of those crossing the border illegally were children.
Border Crisis Continues : Last night we witnessed human smugglers bring over 100 Central American migrants with small rafts from the Mexican side. You can see small children on the rafts being smuggled into the United States throughout the night. @DailyCallerpic.twitter.com/Ahhxf9B9m6
Amid an unprecedented flood of illegal immigrants pouring across the southern border, a convicted child rapist was apprehended in the Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector, which stretches from California through Arizona.
“Yuma Sector agents arrested a child rapist that illegally entered the U.S. on Monday. The migrant, Edgard Antonio Gutierrez-Martinez, has felony convictions for first-degree child rape and incest. Agents turned over the migrant to US Marshals this morning to face prosecution,” Chief Patrol Agent Chris T. Clem wrote in a Twitter post.
Yuma Sector agents arrested a child rapist that illegally entered the U.S. on Monday. The migrant, Edgard Antonio Gutierrez-Martinez, has felony convictions for first degree child rape and incest. Agents turned over the migrant to US Marshals this morning to face prosecution. pic.twitter.com/YXPs3LGMQG
— Chief Patrol Agent Chris T. Clem (@USBPChiefYUM) October 6, 2021
There is wide acknowledgment that far more illegal immigrants enter the U.S. than are ever apprehended, according to an April report in The Washington Post.
The Post estimated that during the April surge of illegal immigrants, nearly 1,000 border crashers entered the country while Border Patrol agents were busy elsewhere.
Yuma sector has been heating up bigtime. Migrant encounters last month up over 2000% compared to last year. We are planning to go there next after this Texas trip in the RGV. Follow Julio for some fantastic on the ground reporting. https://t.co/xdoTY2qalX
Of those who are caught, many are entering the country illegally after being previously convicted of a crime in the U.S., according to a report by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona.Are criminals running wild because of Joe Biden?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
The report only covers those cases where the U.S. Attorney’s Office was involved in a prosecution.
In August alone, the report said 212 individuals were charged with illegal reentry and that of those 180 had been convicted of criminal offenses unrelated to immigration status.
Of those, the report said 42 had violent crime convictions, including convictions for murder, sex offenses, domestic violence, drug crimes and other offenses.
On the Yuma Sector’s Twitter account, Clem offers frequent snapshots of the reality behind those numbers.
#YumaSector agents encountered more than 1,000 migrants who illegally crossed the border into the U.S. from Mex on Thursday, a new fiscal year record for daily apprehensions. The total includes migrants from 21 different countries. #BorderSecurity is #NationalSecuritypic.twitter.com/Ax2mpUkDbL
#YumaSector Border Patrol agents apprehended a group of 140 Brazilian migrants this morning. So far this month, agents have encountered a daily average of more than 600 migrants, up more than 2,000% over this time last year. #BorderSecurity is #NationalSecuritypic.twitter.com/6eRAB88Zly
#YumaSector Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 2,700 migrants who illegally entered the U.S. from Mexico from Friday through Monday. This number included several large groups: a group of 42, 52 and 80 on Saturday; 50 and 53 on Sunday; and 93, 45 and 79 on Monday. pic.twitter.com/gZcmZ73oBF
— Chief Patrol Agent Chris T. Clem (@USBPChiefYUM) August 31, 2021
Yuma Sector covers 126 miles of the border from the Imperial Sand Dunes in California to the Yuma-Pima County line in Arizona.
An army of 60,000 illegal aliens, mostly Haitians, is expected to flood the U.S. border in the coming weeks, and a second caravan is waiting in the wings preparing to further barrage the United States.
One of the people spearheading the next migrant invasion is Irineo Mujica, a dual citizen of Mexico and the United States who is director of the leftist advocacy group Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders), Border Report revealed Tuesday.
Mujica warned that he and his caravan of illegal aliens “are ready for war” and will reach the United States with or without the consent of governments standing in their way.
“We are leaving in 20 days,” he vowed Tuesday on social media, according to the report. “We prefer to march with [travel] papers. […] And this time, with papers or without papers, we are ready for war.
“If the National Guard comes and they are cowardly enough to beat women and children, let them prepare because God’s hand is with us.”
Mujica’s words came amid mounting frustration that the Mexican government has begun detaining caravans barreling through Mexico en route to the United States.
Mexico recently started intercepting caravans at the behest of the Biden administration amid escalating alarm among Americans about the daily invasions.
The United States gives Mexico an average of $320 million in aid every year, in part to incentivize it to secure its own border so its residents won’t sneak into America.
When former President Donald Trump was in office, he worked with Mexico’s leader to stem the influx of illegal aliens.
After Biden took office, that arrangement went out the window, and the border devolved into an open door for armies of unvetted migrants from numerous countries.
Some 60,000 mostly Haitian migrants are heading to Texas right now, the Washington Examiner reported Tuesday. That’s on top of the 20,000 Haitians who illegally crossed into Del Rio last month.
Another 30,000 are currently traversing Colombia en route to the United States, Border Patrol authorities told the outlet.
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said that because the Biden administration refuses to stem the migrant influx, he has ramped up efforts to secure his state’s border.
“Texas National Guard is gearing up at the border for increased caravans attempting to cross the border caused by Biden’s open border policy,” Abbott tweeted last week.
Texas National Guard is gearing up at the border for increased caravans attempting to cross the border caused by Biden’s open border policy.
They are working with the Texas Dept. of Public Safety to seal surge locations at the border & arrest trespassers.
On Wednesday, Abbott said he has deployed thousands of National Guard soldiers and Texas law enforcement officers to curb the armies of unvetted migrants who are en route.
“Biden created the chaos. Texas is stopping it,” Abbott tweeted.
Texas has thousands of National Guard & Texas Dept. of Public Safety personnel deployed at the border.
$3B has been allocated for border security efforts, including building a border wall.
Despite its best efforts, Texas simply cannot stop the enormous migrant influx on its own, especially since the numbers have swelled into unprecedented proportions.
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned department officials that as many as 400,000 illegal aliens could swarm the southern border this month alone, NBC News reported.
By now, millions of Americans believe Biden’s border crisis is not an accident. Fox Nation host Lara Logan, a former CBS News reporter, suggested that the border debacle is intentional.
“They don’t tell you the national security threat posed by letting the cartels come across the southern border, do they?” Logan told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in August.
“Whoever is in power right now, whoever is really pulling the strings … they could do anything they want to change this. And they’re not,” she said. “The United States government could change this even today. And they don’t do it.”
Yuma Sector agents arrested a child rapist that illegally entered the U.S. on Monday. The migrant, Edgard Antonio Gutierrez-Martinez, has felony convictions for first degree child rape and incest. Agents turned over the migrant to US Marshals this morning to face prosecution. pic.twitter.com/YXPs3LGMQG
— Chief Patrol Agent Chris T. Clem (@USBPChiefYUM) October 6, 2021
Biden has been in politics for five decades, with two terms as U.S. vice president. To suggest that he’s unaware of the long-term impact of his border catastrophe is naive and defies logic.
We’ve all heard the pitch: President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better™ plan won’t cost a cent.
It’s paid for. Just tax the rich. The money will magically roll in — painlessly, effortlessly. Ol’ Lunchpail Joe will hold our nation’s plutocrats by their ankles, give them a good shake, and — by Jove — $3.5 trillion will end up falling out of their pockets.
That’s how you get tweets like this one Monday from the presidential Twitter account, evincing someone who’s not living in reality: “The fact of the matter is my Build Back Better Agenda costs $0 — and it won’t raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year. We’re going to pay for it by ensuring those at the top and big corporations pay their fair share.”
The fact of the matter is my Build Back Better Agenda costs $0 — and it won’t raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year. We’re going to pay for it by ensuring those at the top and big corporations pay their fair share.
That’s deluded enough — but passing it off as an actual tax cut is some next-level economic gaslighting.
On Tuesday, Biden was in Howell, Michigan, pitching the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending bill as a necessary step for an America that’s lagging behind the rest of the world in infrastructure development.
“This is a blue-collar blueprint for how we restore America’s pride,” Biden said, according to the Detroit Free Press.
“Other countries are speeding up and we’re falling behind. We have to speed up the pace.”
We’ve seen Biden’s you’ve-gotta-spend-money-to-make-money pitch since March, when he introduced the first round of exorbitant spending on infrastructure. We’ve been hearing for weeks that this latest round of spending isn’t going to cost a cent and the only people who’ll feel the pinch will be the rich, who need to step up and pay their fair share. That’s nothing new.
This line is, however: “My friends on the other team have no problem giving billionaires and millionaires gigantic tax breaks. This is a tax cut!”
“You know, what it does is — now and it’s in place, and people in your state are understanding it now — instead of — it provides, it upped the ante for how much you could get for a child under 7,” Biden said. “You get $3,600 bucks, tax cut, on a yearly basis. And you get $3,000 for a child under 17.”
Biden’s argument here centers on incentives given to families under the proposed plan. This is all wonderful, but Biden continues to insist that the $3.5 trillion he’s about to spend won’t cost a cent.
Therefore, logic dictates that revenue would need to be increased by at least $3.5 trillion by the plan for it to pay for itself. That money isn’t going to come from growth, so it’s going to need to come, by and large, from taxes, both on individuals and corporations — categorically the opposite of a tax cut.
Fine, a liberal might say, but this is just splitting hairs using Biden’s verbal infelicity. What he meant to say is that, if you’re not a corporation or someone making over $400,000 a year, you’ll end up paying less. You’re getting the breaks and the monocle-wearers are getting soaked. Why complain?
This is wrong, too. An analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation — a non-partisan congressional tax scorekeeper — found the vast majority of Americans, almost every income level below the threshold the Biden administration said would be immune, would take a hit.
The JCT also found that 66.3 percent of the burden of a corporate tax hike would end up being shouldered by lower- and middle-class Americans and that 98.4 percent of taxpayers who paid for it would have incomes under $500,000. That’s not even counting inflation — that nasty, unseen form of taxation that robs families that can’t hedge against it.
We’ve already seen plenty of inflation during the first 10 months of the Biden administration, and we’re going to see a whole lot more of it after trillions upon trillions of dollars are pumped into the economy, diluting the power of the dollar.
That, to Joe Biden, isn’t just a net-zero proposition that allows Democrats to pay for a massive spending bill that doesn’t so much build infrastructure as it does funnel money to a long list of Democrat priorities and constituencies. It’s a tax cut, Biden claims.
It’s one thing to promise us that we can get all sorts of government largesse that we don’t have to pay a dime for. This is how Democrats get elected, after all — by telling us they’ll be providing every American with a free unicorn that eats plastic waste and excretes clean water, and all we have to do is tax billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates to afford it.
It’s quite another thing, however, to insult our intelligence by insisting we’ll be so good at taxing the rich that the government will pay us to take the unicorn, if only we can just give Joe Biden a chance to have his way.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton revealed U.S. Border Patrol has experienced a major spike in criminal alien crossings of the border as the crisis continues to escalate.
Paxton shared the concerns during an interview on “Fox & Friends First” Wednesday morning. When asked, “How many are getting in?” he responded with concern.
“I don’t even think we know. I think my state isn’t told much about what’s actually happening. We’re not given the statistics. We’re given broad statistics, but we don’t know exactly how many people are escaping,” the attorney general said.
As Republican governors head to the southern border, Texas Attorney General @KenPaxtonTX sounds the alarm as the border patrol nabs gang members and sex offenders coming into the United States.https://t.co/pY61XYHeBz
He said the number of criminal alien crossings is reportedly up “about 400 percent” from last year.
“We do know that the numbers are up supposedly about 400 percent from just a year ago for criminal aliens coming into our country. So it’s a significant increase. The Biden administration knows it and they support it,” Paxton added.
Paxton also responded to the question, “How much worse could this get before something is done about it?”
The attorney general’s words offered little hope for a response from the Biden administration.
“I don’t think they have any intention, the Biden administration has no intention of stopping it even if it gets worse. The numbers are so significantly more than they’ve ever been, yet there’s no effort on their part to follow federal law or to even follow court orders,” said Paxton, a Republican and outspoken critic of the Biden administration.
“They’re allowing it. They’re inviting it. They’re wanting it,” he added.
The news comes as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott plans to join 10 additional GOP governors for a news conference at the U.S.-Mexico border on Wednesday to address the growing crisis.
The media briefing will be held in Mission, Texas, and will also include the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety and the president of the National Border Patrol Council, according to WOLF-TV.
The announcement comes after 26 Republican governors sent a letter last month to President Joe Biden to request a meeting to address the crisis.
“As chief executives of our states, we request a meeting with you at The White House to bring an end to the national security crisis created by eight months of unenforced borders,” the governors requested in the letter.
“The months-long surge in illegal crossings has instigated an international humanitarian crisis, spurred a spike in international criminal activity, and opened the floodgates to human traffickers and drug smugglers endangering public health and safety in our states.
“A crisis that began at our southern border now extends beyond to every state and requires immediate action before the situation worsens,” the letter added.
NEW 🚨 26 GOP Governors Demand Biden End The Border Crisis
No meeting with Biden has yet been announced. Abbott and his fellow governors are now taking matters into their own hands.
The governors expected to visit on Wednesday are Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Idaho Gov. Brad Little, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, according to Border Report.
Arizona’s Krysten Sinema is the first openly bi-sexual senator and the first (I think) to be a female triathlete competitor. She also shows up in Congress in green hair.
These things would normally set the New York Times aflutter as “too cool for school,” but not these days. Ms. Sinema, with Joe Manchin, is blocking what they deem all-important legislation or, as the NYT’s erstwhile arbiter of cool herself (on the oped page since 1995), Maureen Dowd, put it:
“Sinema and Manchin are now directing what Joe Biden gets to do and deciding how his presidency will be defined.”
Are they though? Some of us might think he has already done a pretty decent job of defining his presidency by himself—in the Afghanistan debacle and on our porous Southern border, not to mention a murder epidemic unseen in decades, almost exclusively in our minority communities, after the man occupying the White House for the better part of a year now played “first you say you do and then you don’t” about defunding the police as the sociopaths of Antifa tried to burn our cities down.
Oh, and I forgot, he and his pal Fauci were going to rid us of the dreaded COVID. (Are we or are we not allowed to get together for Christmas? I forget.)
And then there’s that little matter of inflation—due, in great part, to Biden’s non-stop spending spree—that many economists are predicting will be devastating to poor and middle-class Americans. In fact, it already is.
But no matter. Dowd knows what the real danger is and who’s to blame:
“Some Democrats even worry that the recalcitrant pair could be helping Donald Trump vault back into the White House.”
Even? I think they’re terrified of it and they should be, assuming they have read the latest polls—and, since they’re politicians, no doubt they have.
But back to Sinema and her alleged sins. To Dowd—and I think it’s safe to assume this is basically the NYT party line—she’s the scalawag of scalawags, an apostate who must be discredited at all costs.
“Even as Biden traipsed up to Capitol Hill to try to rescue his F.D.R. dreams, Sinema flew back to Phoenix in the middle of nail-biting negotiations on the scope of Biden’s social policy bill.
“Her spokesman said that she had a doctor’s appointment for a foot injury, but The Times reported that she was also slated to play footsie with donors at her political action committee’s dinner at a fancy resort.”
OMG—or should I be more upscale and say “Mon Dieu”—Ms. Sinema meets with her donors!
As opposed to whom, exactly?
Evidently to “legitimate” statesmen with authentic “F.D.R. dreams” who only accept donations from impoverished social workers in Sandusky, Ohio like Sen. Bernie Sanders… Oh, wait.
The above link goes to OpenSecrets where you can find the contributions to all senators. Only the ultra-naive will be surprised, if you look at the various categories, that Bernie’s contributions are more than a hundredfold those of Sinema’s and come from such “impoverished social workers” as Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Apple, and so on.
Nevertheless, the New York Times reporter cited by Dowd, Jonathan Weisman, would have us believe that a senator meeting with backers on the same weekend she is having her foot examined is actually information that disqualifies her. It’s not even “dog bites man” when it comes to being news.
This is no surprise considering the level to which the NYT trucks in propaganda. We have yet to have a serious apology, other than some perfunctory uttering from Dean Baquet, for their two years of outright lies on Trump-Russia collusion, all based on anonymous sources, for which they gained multiple Pulitzers for the writers.
And they haven’t even had the basic morals to give the prizes back.
But returning again to Sinema, I have a suggestion for the NYT, and anyone else interested, for that matter, on just why the Arizona senator is balking on Biden’s multi-trillion dollar social policy bill.
Call it good old Occam’s Razor. Maybe she—like the majority of Americans, as it happens—thinks the three trillion plus price tag (no one’s really sure of how much it will ultimately cost. Three trillion… five trillion… eight trillion… pretty soon, as the jokes goes, you’re talking about real money) is anywhere near the benefit that could accrue from it or the damage that could come from escalating inflation that we have already seen at the gas stations and supermarkets of this country. (Welcome to Weimar.)
She may also think—I’d bet on it, in fact—that Joe Biden is full of it when he claims this spending is revenue neutral. It’s anything but. Joe doesn’t exactly have, to be kind as possible, a great reputation for probity.
Finally, she probably thinks she was elected by her constituents to represent what they believe. It’s a safe bet endlessly printing money for no sensible reason ranks pretty low among them.
For Dowd and other media-Beltway types, loyalty to the team, their team, almost always trumps loyalty to the people that elected them.
Whether they acknowledge it or not, they are the spiritual and intellectual mothers and fathers of the creeps that pursued Sinema into a bathroom at Arizona State University in Phoenix Sunday.
So is the President who calls being followed into bathrooms “part of the process.”
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced he will join 10 additional GOP governors for a news conference at the U.S.-Mexico border on Wednesday to address the growing border crisis.
The media briefing will be held in Mission, Texas, and will also include the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety and the president of the National Border Patrol Council, according to a news release from the governor’s office shared with WOLF-TV.
The announcement comes after 26 Republican governors sent a letter last month to President Joe Biden to request a meeting to address the border crisis.
“As chief executives of our states, we request a meeting with you at The White House to bring an end to the national security crisis created by eight months of unenforced borders,” the governors requested in the letter.
“The months-long surge in illegal crossings has instigated an international humanitarian crisis, spurred a spike in international criminal activity, and opened the floodgates to human traffickers and drug smugglers endangering public health and safety in our states.
“A crisis that began at our southern border now extends beyond to every state and requires immediate action before the situation worsens,” the letter added.
NEW 🚨 26 GOP Governors Demand Biden End The Border Crisis
No meeting has yet been announced. Abbott and his fellow governors are now taking matters into their own hands.
“Texas National Guard is gearing up at the border for increased caravans attempting to cross the border caused by Biden’s open border policy,” Abbott tweeted Saturday.
“They are working with the Texas Dept. of Public Safety to seal surge locations at the border & arrest trespassers,” he added.
Texas National Guard is gearing up at the border for increased caravans attempting to cross the border caused by Biden’s open border policy.
They are working with the Texas Dept. of Public Safety to seal surge locations at the border & arrest trespassers.
The governors expected to visit on Wednesday include Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Idaho Gov. Brad Little, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, according to Border Report.
In June, Abbott met with former President Donald Trump in Texas to discuss the ongoing border crisis. Biden has yet to visit the border, while Vice President Kamala Harris made only a brief appearance in El Paso without meeting with the governor.
WATCH LIVE: Former President Donald Trump is meeting with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at the Texas-Mexico border. https://t.co/jVlJLDyREs
I understand that people think harassing politicians and cornering them in bathrooms and elevators is an effective way to pursue change, but what if they’re wrong?
There should be enough to sink this strategy from an a priori standpoint. But if you want to enter into the a posteriori realm of judgment, consider the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Republicans were ambushed all over the Capitol grounds by activists screaming at them and demanding they vote against then-President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick.
It generated quite a few clips for the establishment media to applaud — and no substantive change in the final vote.
Three years later, however, the technique has made a comeback.
Since Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema won’t support the $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” spending blowout at its current price tag — and won’t support Democrats’ attempt to ram amnesty for illegal immigrants through the Senate — activists decided to confront her in a bathroom and on a plane in separate incidents.
The bathroom incident over the weekend was far from a grassroots effort. Instead, according to The Washington Free Beacon, it was carried out by a group supported by progressive moneybags George Soros.
In case you’ve managed to miss it, here was the scene as activists harassed Sinema in a restroom on the campus of Arizona State University.
Protesters followed Sen. Sinema into the bathroom at Arizona State University to confront her on Build Back Better and immigration pic.twitter.com/NDSmeu0h2M
The activists told Sinema “we need a ‘Build Back Better’ plan right now.”
“We knocked on doors for you to get you elected,” one individual said. “We need to hold you accountable.”
Sinema said the incident was “not legitimate protest” and “wholly inappropriate.”
“It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom,” she said in a statement.
There wasn’t a whole lot of media condemnation of the incident, nor were there many denunciations of the activists’ behavior from Sinema’s fellow Democrats. In fact, President Joe Biden called the bathroom harassment “part of the process.”
WOW. Biden just dismissed Senator @kyrstensinema being harassed and cornered into a bathroom this weekend, saying “it happens to everybody… it’s part of the process.”
The stunt was orchestrated by a group called Living United for Change in Arizona — or LUCHA, the Spanish word for fight. LUCHA said it “wouldn’t have to resort to confronting [Sinema] around [Phoenix] if she took meetings with the communities that elected her.” In other words, do what we say or we’ll harass you.
We wouldn’t have to resort to confronting @senatorsinema around Phx if she took meetings with the communities that elected her. She’s been completely inaccessible. We’re sick of the political games, stop playing with our lives. “Build back better, back the bill!” pic.twitter.com/3OA5t6e6Fl
Like many a progressive activist organization, its lawn has been pretty heavily astroturfed with money from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. In fact, Open Society is LUCHA’s biggest donor, the Free Beacon reported.
“The group gave $1.5 million to Living United in 2019 and $250,000 in 2017, according to the philanthropy’s grants database. Living United reported around $1.7 million in revenue in 2019 and $328,000 in 2017.”
Other contributors include Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration charity, a Democratic PAC and the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the country.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time a Soros-backed group has been involved in one of these viral confrontations. Remember this?
Jeff Flake announced he would vote YES on Kavanaugh and now he’s being screamed at and cornered in an elevator. pic.twitter.com/UjnsKaC4uR
Ana Maria Archila, who yelled at Sen. Jeff Flake and blocked him in an elevator during the Kavanaugh confirmation saga, was the executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy.
You’ll never believe this, but the CPD has received plenty of cash from Soros as well: “Soros provided the CPD with $130,000 from the Foundation to Promote Open Society in 2014 and $1,164,500 in 2015,” The Washington Free Beacon reported in 2017. “Soros provided an additional $705,000 from the Open Society Policy Center in 2016.”
Imagine the hue and cry if Sinema were popular on the left. She would be able to claim the incident brought on flashbacks of Jan. 6. If she said she thought she was going to die there in the bathroom stall, who would challenge her?
But, instead, the cause these activists were supporting is media-approved and Soros-funded. Thus, it’s merely “part of the process.” What a shocker.
Texas Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw called out Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Tuesday over a recent video of Arizona Democratic Sen. Krysten Sinema being harassed in a bathroom, asking whether she is “liberal enough” for the social media giant to enforce its rule against bullying.
Crenshaw’s tweet included a screen shot of Twitter’s bullying rule.
“We prohibit behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups with abusive behavior,” the rule states.
“This includes, but is not limited to; calls to target people with abuse or harassment online and behavior that urges offline action such as physical harassment.”
“Hey [Jack] just wondering if you’re going to enforce this bullying rule? Or does it not count when the victim isn’t liberal enough?” Crenshaw asked.
Crenshaw is one of a growing number of Republicans who have publicly spoken out against the bathroom video incident.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz blasted CNN commentator Ana Navarro-Cardenas for seemingly justifying the harassment in a Tuesday tweet.
“Ridiculous. [CNN] “journalist” rationalizing & justifying harassing Sinema in the women’s bathroom,” Cruz tweeted. “Unacceptable, regardless of your politics.”
Ridiculous. @cnn “journalist” rationalizing & justifying harassing Sinema in the women’s bathroom.
Sinema responded Monday to the activist who recorded the video while following the senator into a restroom at Arizona State University on Sunday night, calling the action “unacceptable” and “unlawful.”
“Yesterday’s behavior was not legitimate protest,” Sinema said in a statement.
“It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom,” the senator added.
Sinema said the actions were “wholly inappropriate.”
“In the 19 years I have been teaching at ASU, I have been committed to creating a safe and intellectually challenging environment for my students. Yesterday, that environment was breached. My students were unfairly and unlawfully victimized,” she said.
Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has previously knocked down Senate Democrats’ Plan A and Plan B immigration proposals in their draft versions of President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” spending program.
What MacDonough recommends on the expected Plan C that Senate Democrats are preparing could determine whether America’s borders are opened to millions of new legal immigrants and a new mostly “open borders” immigration system is thus erected for the federal government.
MacDonough—first appointed to the nonpartisan post in 2012 as the first woman ever to hold it—then is in the hot seat because Democrats are pushing the gargantuan Biden spending plan through Congress under its “reconciliation” process. They are doing so because reconciliation proposals need only 51 votes to pass the Senate instead of the usual 60.
With the Senate split 50–50, Democrats must corral all of their caucus members to vote for the plan, the biggest, most comprehensive expansion of the federal government since the New Deal, then have the tie broken by Vice President Kamala Harris.
MacDonough previously knocked down the Democrats’ first and second attempts to gain her positive recommendation for inclusion of multiple immigration provisions that are already in the 2,400+ page House version of reconciliation.
Under the standing rules of the reconciliation process, provisions in reconciliation bills must have an effect on the federal government’s spending and revenues that is more than “merely incidental.”
Changes that are strictly of a policy nature don’t qualify, even though they may affect the budget. That means there’s a gray area between the two absolutes of “merely incidental” and wholesale changes. Democrats hope the third time will be the charm as MacDonough opens the door to some or most of their reform proposals.
What is certain is the huge impact on the United States that will result from enactment of the major Democratic proposals, according to immigration experts interviewed on Oct. 4 by The Epoch Times.
MacDonough recommended against the earlier Democratic proposals to authorize amnesty for as many as 8 million illegal aliens already in the country in September, but millions more legal immigrants would be covered by various provisions in the House bill that Senate Democrats are seeking to advance.
The provisions would “substantially increase permanent, legal immigration using a combination of interpretation gimmicks and exemptions to current immigration law,” according to a recently published analysis by Robert Law, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) director of regulatory affairs and policy.
“Step one involves a concept advocates of unlimited immigration have dubbed ‘recapturing unused immigrant visas.’ By law, family-based immigration has a floor of 226,000 green cards per year, while the employment-based immigration level is set at 140,000,” Law wrote.
“Under this theory, a green card that could have been issued in a given fiscal year in the past but was not (either family-based or employment-based) is ‘unused’ and, therefore, should be brought back to life for the benefit of a current or future prospective immigrant.”
But in fact, Law notes, green cards don’t go “unused.” Those from one category that remain available at the end of a year are transferred to the other category for the following year. Democrats instead want to “recapture” all “unused” green cards issued between 1992 and 2021 and make them permanently available.
If what Law calls the Democrat’s “resurrection fantasy” becomes law, he estimates that nearly 800,000 green cards will thus be added to the supply. Also added would be a second step, in which winners of the immigration lottery between 2017 and 2021 who were unable to complete the process effectively get a free pass.
But the third step in the Democratic proposals is the most significant because it provides another way around the green card process.
“Step three in the legal immigration bonanza is rather crass, as it offers an exemption from the green card annual numerical limits and the per-country cap if they have the means to pay a supplemental fee,” Law said.
“More precisely, this carve-out applies to those aliens seeking to adjust status to lawful permanent resident, a process reserved for aliens already in the country, but who have to wait at least two years for a green card to become available based on the Department of State’s Visa Bulletin.
“Through Section 60003 of the [House reconciliation bill], any family-based prospective immigrant with a two-year wait can jump the line for an additional $2,500, any employment-based prospective immigrant (preference categories 1-3) can jump the line for an additional $5,000, and any EB-5 immigrant investor can jump the line for an additional $50,000.”
Provisions like those are why Law’s CIS colleague Jessica Vaughan told The Epoch Times that, even without the amnesty previously rejected by MacDonough, “the reconciliation bill being pushed by the House Democrats includes the most consequential changes to U.S. immigration law in 60 years. With a series of gimmicks, the bill would expand legal immigration dramatically, essentially bypassing the numerical limits set by Congress by offering work permits to those who can get into the country with a visa and find a job.”
Vaughan, who is director of policy studies for CIS, said “millions of foreign students who would get indefinite work permits while waiting for a green card” would be big winners. This would mean a big expansion in the number of de facto immigrants, and especially those competing with U.S. college grads for jobs.”
While MacDonough has been in the national media spotlight in recent weeks, Chris Chmielenski, deputy director of NumbersUSA, told The Epoch Times that Senate Democrats “can choose to ignore the parliamentarian if they want to. It wouldn’t be good, and it would set a precedent, and they would have to have a vote on it, but they could do it, and probably successfully.”
And Liberty Government Affairs founder Brian Darling, former general counsel to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), told The Epoch Times that in the final analysis, Senate Democrats can do as they please as long as they keep their caucus voting in unison.
“The Senate parliamentarian does not ‘rule’ on anything. That is a myth perpetuated by Senate Majority Leader [Chuck] Schumer. The parliamentarian recommends rulings, and nothing prevents the vice president, who serves as president of the Senate, or the senator sitting in the Chair, from ignoring the recommended ruling of the parliamentarian,” Darling said.
“This is political theater, because if the Democrats wanted to ignore the recommended ruling of the parliamentarian, the only thing preventing it is their own caucus. Ultimately, a Republican senator would appeal any ruling on controversial provisions and Democratic senators could allow in certain controversial provisions to the bill if they could hold their caucus together.”
Darling added that it “all comes down to partisan fights and if Democrats want to use reconciliation to do an end-run around the filibuster. They can, even if the parliamentarian recommends against it, if they can hold their caucus together.”
President Joe Biden’s border crisis has been no secret since March, and the data about how disastrous it is continues to flow in.
A recent Washington Times analysis compared how many illegal immigrants the Biden administration released into the United States after being detained by Border Patrol with the number released under the Trump administration in August 2020.
Unfortunately, the numbers are concerning, but not shocking.
Last August, the Trump administration “caught” 47,000 migrants at southern border, but only released 10 of them into the United States immediately.
This was a result of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, in which migrants were required to wait in Mexico while awaiting their immigration hearing.
By contrast, the Biden administration detained 195,000 migrants and released 43,941 of them into the United States.
The outlet reported that this is an increase of more than 430,000 percent.
“If you tell the migrant they’re not going to be released, they’re not going to come. If a migrant knows they will not be released into the United States awaiting their immigration process, they will not come,” said Mark Morgan, the former acting head of Customs and Border Protection under Trump, according to the Times.
Morgan is correct that this figure is the result of Biden scrapping the “Remain in Mexico” policy almost immediately after taking office, with the change going into full effect back in June, CNN reported.
The opposite of “Remain in Mexico” is commonly referred to as “Catch and Release,” which raises numerous concerns about everything from crime to an unexpected population spike in communities across America.
The Supreme Court ordered the policy to be put back in place at the end of August, saying that the White House likely broke federal law by getting rid of it, the Associated Press reported.
However, the executive branch plans to scrap the policy for a second time once the court’s injunction is over, according to The Hill.
“A new memorandum terminating MPP will not take effect until the current injunction is lifted by court order,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.
“In issuing a new memorandum terminating MPP, the Department intends to address the concerns raised by the courts with respect to the prior memorandum.”
MPP is a reference to Migrant Protection Protocols, which is the formal name for “Remain in Mexico.”
Title 42 is one of the few bold policies that remains in place from the Trump era that allows for migrants to be quickly removed from the U.S. if there is a serious health risk in the migrants’ home country.
Of course, that serious health risk is currently COVID-19, but that measure has done little to prevent the crisis from escalating.
The Washington Times’s comparison of just two months shows the stark contrast between conservative and liberal immigration policies, and Americans should take note.
In the Texas city that was ground zero for the latest surge of Haitian illegal immigrants, residents know who to blame.
“I feel that it’s the fault of the president,” one local resident of Del Rio, Texas, told Fox News.
Illegal immigrants “felt that they had been promised by the president that they would become United States citizens,” a resident said.
The 35,000-person city was deluged with illegal immigrants last month as a mass of roughly 15,000 Haitians gathered under the Del Rio International Bridge.
Although the mass of migrants has moved on, the town is left with the scars and costs.
A resident named Diane said she had to install security cameras and lights because illegal immigrants wandered into her yard.
She said America should focus on the needs of Americans.
“We need to take care of our own people. We need to take care of our poor people, we need to take care of the vets,” she said, apparently adding harsh words for the Biden administration.
“They’ve done nothing, zero, zilch,” she said.
“It’s been mounting bit by bit,” a woman named Laura said. “It’s not just a thing that happened, like, over the course of one week.”
Miguel Chavez, a local restaurant owner, said feeling sympathy with illegal immigrants is one thing, but dealing with thousands is another.
“Yeah, you know, I welcome immigrants, but not to that point. It’s hard being here as it is,” Chavez said. “I see their problems and I try to feel for them, but we have our own problems.”
Del Rio is not alone. A few hours down the road in Laredo, Texas, Customs and Border Protection built a 100,000 square-foot tent for processing the illegal immigrants who were bused there from Del Rio, according to Fox News.
Robert Eads, Laredo’s city manager, said Laredo has to divert resources to deal with the flood of illegal immigrants.
“What we’re going to have to do is take resources from our community that we’ll have to apply somewhere else,” Eads said. “If it’s an EMT, fire department, police department, traffic control — whatever it may be — we’re going to have to suspend that so we can address this.”
“Our health system cannot support those volumes,” Eads said. “Even if a migrant themselves, God forbid, gets sick, it’s the same resource that we’re going to lack, so they may not get the services that they need.”
The Laredo Police Department is now battling an upsurge in human trafficking.
“We have stash houses that are popping up everywhere,” said Investigator Joe Baeza of the police department’s public information office. “In one particular house we had close to 100 people. Three bathrooms for 100 people. It’s going to be messy.”
“The department always has its hands full but more so now with these issues related to immigration.”
The Supreme Court has vacated a lower court ruling prohibiting the federal government from diverting funds from the military to construct the U.S.–Mexico border wall, sending the case back to the lower court for review.
During his administration, then-President Donald Trump had sought to transfer money from the Department of Defense toward the construction of a U.S.–Mexico border wall after Congress rejected his request for more funding. But President Joe Biden canceled the Trump-era emergency declaration when he took office and returned the unspent funds to the Pentagon.
The Supreme Court’s Oct. 4 decision means that the justices agreed to take the appeal and vacated a previous federal district judge’s ruling.
“The District Court should consider what further proceedings are necessary and appropriate in light of the changed circumstances in this case,” the justices said in a brief order. Biden had signed an executive order on Jan. 20 prohibiting border wall construction.
The Sierra Club, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and others had previously challenged the Trump-era wall order, challenging Trump’s emergency declaration to divert the funds. A district court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals have both ruled that Trump acted improperly.
“Today’s order comes after the government conceded that the Trump wall was wasteful and destructive, and returns the case to the district court so that Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition can seek relief for the damage the wall has already inflicted,” Dror Ladin, an attorney at the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Hill. The groups also want the administration to remove the wall, saying that the structure disrupts wildlife and damages protected plants.
In the case, at issue was about $3.6 billion in funding that the Biden administration has since diverted to about 60 military construction projects.
In February, the Supreme Court also agreed to a Biden administration request to cancel arguments on a separate case that challenged the diversion of about $2.5 billion in military funds that were used for the wall construction.
“The President has directed the Executive Branch to undertake an assessment of ‘the legality of the funding and contracting methods used to construct the wall,’” the administration wrote to the court.
In recent weeks, the Biden administration has come under increasing criticism for its handling of border security and a surge in illegal immigration along the U.S.–Mexico border.
Thousands of illegal aliens of Haitian origin created a makeshift encampment underneath a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, in late September. Later, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that about 12,000 of the Haitians were released into the interior United States with pending court dates.
The crisis triggered calls from Republicans and even some Democrats to restart the construction of the border wall, which was a major campaign promise of Trump’s during his 2016 presidential campaign.
The Washington Post reported Friday that the Department of Defense was trying to dispel the notion that there was any kind of security risk represented by Afghan refugees hastily airlifted out of the failed state by the U.S. military.
For Karen DeYoung and John Wagner’s piece — headlined “Pentagon seeks to tamp down concern about Afghan refugees as Trump, GOP question vetting” — the chief Pentagon dispeller and concern-tamper-downer was Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, head of the U.S. Northern Command. He said that among the 53,000 people who have been brought into the United States so far, there have only been what he termed a handful of security incidents.
“For a population of 53,000,” VanHerck said, “what we’re seeing is law enforcement violations on par with and in most cases significantly lower than in similar-sized” American cities.
This is a particularly sanguine way of looking at the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. It’s also not terribly relevant as a parallel.
Most towns of 53,000 people, for instance, aren’t comprised of refugees on a military base who know they need to be on their best behavior to get permanent residence in America. There also aren’t a whole lot of reports of adult men with child “brides” taking up residence in 53,000-person towns; there have been an undetermined but not insubstantial, if reports are to be believed, number of those among the Afghan refugees.
There typically aren’t 28 people in towns of 53,000 who are flagged as potential national security threats — the same number of flagged national security threats, it must be noted, who had reached U.S. soil by Sept. 10, according to a previous report from the Post.
And in most U.S. cities and towns of 53,000 persons, you don’t routinely have over 700 people simply disappear because they no longer wish to be subject to the town’s jurisdiction.
On Friday, Reuters reported that the number of “independent departures” of Afghan refugees being housed at our military bases has topped 700 and could well be higher, according to sources. Over 300 of those came from Fort Bliss, which straddles the Texas-New Mexico border.
“Independent departure,” for those of you who can’t suss the meaning out, involves people walking off the bases without receiving resettlement services. The wire service reported that “the phenomenon is raising alarms among immigration advocates concerned about the risks to Afghans who give up on what is now an open-ended, complex and completely voluntary resettlement process.”
A Department of Homeland Security representative didn’t comment but said the individuals who had left “generally” had the resources to support themselves and ties to the United States via family and/or friends.
The chief concern of those quoted in Reuters’ article was whether walking off the bases might cost those who did it dearly. According to the wire service, “leaving early could cost other Afghan evacuees critical benefits — like expedited work permits – and create a slew of legal problems down the road, given the complexities of the U.S. immigration system.”
“It’s a giant can of worms,” a Citizenship and Immigration Services official said. “This could lead to years and years of terrible immigration status problems.”
A bigger issue might be the fact there’s no legal authority that the military has to keep the refugees on bases. According to Reuters, by leaving the bases, refugees break no U.S. laws, and there’s no legal authority by which military officials can hold the Afghans against their will.
Apparently, President Joe Biden isn’t willing to do anything to make this more difficult, either.
The news about the refugees walking off of bases, however, comes after a number of assaults at both Fort McCoy in Wisconsin and Fort Bliss.
At Fort McCoy, as the Daily Mail pointed out Friday, one 20-year-old Afghan refugee is charged with three counts of engaging in sex acts with a minor and a 32-year-old man faces charges for assaulting his wife by strangling and suffocating her.
Meanwhile, at Fort Bliss, reports state that a soldier was assaulted by at least three Afghan refugees while she was reporting for duty.
There’s also the question of child brides. Yahoo News reported that a Sept. 5 Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis report said that “U.S. officials at intake centers in the United Arab Emirates and in Wisconsin have found many incidents in which Afghan girls have been presented to authorities as the wives of much older men.”
The report went on to say “forced or coerced ‘marriages’ are indicative of the level of desperation Afghan families are willing to consider helping loved ones escape the Taliban and qualify for evacuation to Western countries.”
“The concern is, we’re seeing a lot of family units with very young girls. These girls are brought into the U.S. as wives,” an official familiar with the reports told Yahoo News. “It’s not a small number.”
“The reality is, overseas the vetting process sucks — there’s minimal vetting,” the official added. “So now we have a 60-year-old guy with a 12-year-old girl saying, ‘That’s my wife.’”
Sound like your 53,000-resident town?
And yet, when Biden put forth a vaccine mandate last month, part of the reason he gave was this: “My job as president is to protect all Americans.”
We’re supposed to assume that’s anything other than empty rhetoric when poorly vetted refugees can walk off military bases with no legal recourse?
Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema responded Monday to a protester who recorded video while following the senator into a restroom at Arizona State University on Sunday night, calling the action “unacceptable” and “unlawful.”
“Yesterday’s behavior was not legitimate protest,” Sinema said in the statement.
“It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to close university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom,” the senator added.
Sinema later added that the actions were “wholly inappropriate.”
“In the 19 years I have been teaching at ASU, I have committed to creating a safe and intellectually challenging environment for my students. Yesterday, that environment was breached. My students were unfairly and unlawfully victimized. This is wholly inappropriate,” she said.
The recording originated from “Blanca,” a reported immigrant youth from Arizona, with more than five million views of the video on Twitter in less than 24 hours.
“We knocked on doors for you to get you elected. Just how we got you elected, we can get you out of office if you don’t support what you promised us,” one activist yelled in the video.
“I was brought here to the United States when I was 3 years old and in 2010 my grandparents both got deported because of SB 1070 and I’m here because I definitely believe that we need a pathway to citizenship,” the other activist added.
The related Facebook post by the user recording the video shared details regarding the activist’s motives.
“I will speak about the controversy regarding following Senator Sinema into the bathroom when I have time. None of you have the right to tone police my desperate demands for labor protections after what I have endured as a human trafficking survivor due to the f***ed up gig economy,” the Facebook post said.
“For now, connect with the fact that you are on stolen Indigenous land and Indigenous women and children go missing and murdered because we don’t have access to stable jobs, stable housing, clean water, clean food, or stable decent healthcare despite the fact that Indigenous people have upheld our end of the treaty in assimilating and getting educated,” the post added.
“Arizona is among the top three states in the USA where Indigenous women and children go missing and murdered,” she continued, before pleading for more people to be allowed to enter the state.
“Give my indigenous relatives to the south of the US-Mexico border citizenship now!” the post concluded.
The identity of the activist was revealed as Sophia Marjanovic.
“Sophia Marjanovic identified herself as the woman shown filming Sinema as she entered a bathroom stall at ASU in her Facebook post,” the Daily Wire reported.
“Marjanovic tagged 99 other people, presumably those who work with her or support her efforts to convince Sinema to abandon her position against spending $3.5 trillion using the ‘reconciliation’ process.”
Some said the tactic of following the senator into the restroom was way over the line.
These criminal insurrectionists are stalking a female US Senator while she goes to the bathroom
According to Breitbart, the immigrants were trapped in the locked cargo area.
Sabri Y. Dikman, Tuscon’s acting chief patrol agent posted an image of the immigrants on Twitter, including a small child. Border Patrol agents found the illegal immigrants during a stop in Arizona near the southern U.S. border.
Eleven migrants, to include a small child, were discovered in a U-Haul with no means of escape. Douglas Station #BorderPatrol agents foiled the smuggling attempt after stopping the vehicle east of Douglas, #AZ. The U.S. citizen driver will be prosecuted. #HonorFirstpic.twitter.com/JCnBSFazWp
Earlier this year, Border Patrol agents uncovered a human smuggling operation in Texas where 33 illegal immigrants were reported to be “close to perishing due to excessive heat” in a U-Haul truck.
“Had our heroic agents not been able to free these trapped undocumented migrants, we could have seen 33 miserable deaths in this event,” Border Patrol’s Big Bend Sector Chief Sean McGoffin told KVIA. “Smugglers do not care what type of misery they put people through as they take their money.”
Arrests at the U.S.–Mexico border topped 200,000 in both July and August this year. Border agents apprehended 208,887 people in August, more than a four-fold increase from August 2020, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
Nearly 65 percent of illegal immigrants caught in 2021 were single adults, while approximately 27 percent who were arrested were part of a family unit. About 8.6 percent of those apprehended were unaccompanied children.
The number of border arrests has risen for 16 straight months, starting during the Trump administration, after hitting a low of just 17,106 in April 2020, shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Currently the total number of border encounters for this fiscal year sits at 1.54 million, as of August 2021. Depending on the September update, the Biden administration could eclipse a fiscal year record. The current record is 1.64 million, set in 2000.
Since taking office earlier this year, the Biden administration has reversed several policies put in place by the Trump administration. President Joe Biden has attempted to overturn the “Remain in Mexico” policy, a move that was blocked by a Texas district court in August. The administration has also suspended construction of the border wall.
However, just last month the Biden administration enacted Title 42, which was established by former President Donald Trump, to deport nearly 4,000 Haitian illegal immigrants, a controversial decision even among Democrats. Title 42, aimed at preventing the spread of COVID-19 in holding facilities, allows border authorities to expel illegal immigrants.
Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona was stalked Sunday by angry immigration activists who followed her into a bathroom while shouting their demands and then shared the incident on social media.
A video on the incident at Arizona State University, where Sinema teaches a class, was posted to Twitter by the leftist activist group Living United for Change in Arizona.
🔴BREAKING: Blanca, an AZ immigrant youth confronts @SenatorSinema inside her classroom, where she teaches @ ASU. “in 2010 both my grandparents got deported bc of SB1070…my grandfather passed away 2 wks ago & I wasn’t able to go to Mexico bc there is no pathway to citizenship.” pic.twitter.com/JDZYY2fOD2
On Saturday, Sinema had blasted Democrats for not holding a House vote on a $1 trillion infrastructure package that has bipartisan support but is being held hostage by liberals in the House until they get a social programs package they like. The senator has said the $3.5 trillion plan is way out of America’s fiscal ballpark.
Canceling the U.S. House vote on the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act denies Americans millions of new good-paying jobs and hurts everyday families. Full statement ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/BM7hrUL3KK
The video showed Sinema first being confronted in a classroom.
She was then followed down the hall as she walked, without a word of comment to those confronting her, into a women’s bathroom and into a stall.
Even then, a female activist harangued her, at one point calling for her to support legislation that creates a pathway to citizenship for illegal migrants.
“We knocked on doors for you to get you elected. Just how we got you elected, we can get you out of office if you don’t support what you promised us,” one activist yelled in the video.
“I was brought here to the United States when I was 3 years old and in 2010 my grandparents both got deported because of SB 1070,” said the woman, identified as Blanca. “And I’m here because I definitely believe that we need a pathway to citizenship.”
Sinema emerged from the stall, washed her hands and continued to refuse to speak to her antagonists.
Some said the tactic of following the senator into the restroom was way over the line.
If you think this will be effective in moving Sinema, ask yourself when the last time was that you took unsolicited advice from a stranger in a bathroom. https://t.co/AthcIJNuqm
Protesters followed Sinema into a bathroom to film themselves confronting her. This is over the line. Gross, unnecessary, and counterproductive. Get a grip. pic.twitter.com/2kMFLvSoQ5
LUCHA Arizona said in a follow-up tweet that it “wouldn’t have to resort to confronting @senatorsinema around Phx if she took meetings with the communities that elected her. She’s been completely inaccessible. We’re sick of the political games, stop playing with our lives.”
We wouldn’t have to resort to confronting @senatorsinema around Phx if she took meetings with the communities that elected her. She’s been completely inaccessible. We’re sick of the political games, stop playing with our lives. “Build back better, back the bill!” pic.twitter.com/3OA5t6e6Fl
Moderates who have opposed the massive spending bill have been facing intense pressure.
Kayakers went to the water to surround the houseboat where Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia stays when he is in Washington.
Manchin confronted by kayakers in his DC houseboat over his lack of support for Democrats’ radical $3.5 trillion socialist spending bill.https://t.co/qxsWnwbu5g
The federal government won’t secure the border — but that doesn’t mean there aren’t governors who are picking up the slack.
Take Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The Republican’s Operation Lone Star has been running for seven months now to combat the border crisis. According to USA Today, hundreds of state troopers, Texas Rangers, National Guard soldiers and other authorities have backed up the Border Patrol, arresting more than 4,600 border crossers as of late August.
That might not compare to the hundreds of thousands of border crossings during the crisis brought on by President Joe Biden, but it’s an example for the rest of the country — an example illegal immigrant activists are furious about.
“The crisis at our southern border continues to escalate because of Biden Administration policies that refuse to secure the border and invite illegal immigration,” Abbott said a statement in March, while launching the operation, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
“Texas supports legal immigration but will not be an accomplice to the open border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans. We will surge the resources and law enforcement personnel needed to confront this crisis.”
Texas National Guard Soldiers identify & apprehend illegal immigrants on land and in water crossing into Texas from Mexico.
Through Operation Lone Star, the State of Texas is working night and day to combat Biden’s border crisis & secure our border. pic.twitter.com/3wa6bgDsQQ
Texas National Guard Soldiers deploy tactical vehicles to the border in support of Operation Lone Star.
As Biden does nothing, the Lone Star State continues to surge manpower & equipment to put an end to the chaos at our southern border. pic.twitter.com/IrDH8fN3AO
Granted, the program has seen some pushback from left-wing activist groups who have hoped to challenge the legality of Operation Lone Star in court. They say since the Constitution delegates immigration enforcement to the federal government, the plan is unconstitutional. Critics have also charged the plan leads to racial profiling.
“Whenever you ask untrained law enforcement officers to engage in immigration enforcement efforts, they are going to revert to racial profiling,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “That’s exactly what an initiative like this invites.”
The program has also faced problems in court.
On Tuesday, charges of criminal trespassing against two illegal immigrants arrested as part of Project Lone Star, Ivan Nava and David Muñoz, were dismissed by a Texas district court judge because prosecutors were “unprepared to present probable cause,” USA Today reported. Both men remained in custody as of late last week, however, and immigration activist groups were concerned the two could still be deported.
Both had crossed into the U.S. illegally in June, according to USA Today. (In USA Today terminology, they “crossed without permission.”)
“Operation Lone Star relies on racial profiling and systemically violates due process,” Kevin Herrera, the men’s attorney, said in a statement, according to USA Today.
He wanted President Joe Biden’s administration to allow the men to stay in the United States pending a hearing on their immigration case — and more: “We demand … that [Department of Homeland Security] cease any collaboration with this unconstitutional program.”
The same day the charges against Nava and Munoz were dismissed, the same judge ordered 243 more illegal aliens arrested under Operation Lone Star to be released under “no-cost bonds,” USA Today reported.
However, proponents of border security contend programs like Operation Lone Star could be a blueprint for other governors to enforce border laws when the federal government is unable or unwilling to do so.
Jessica Vaughn of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter controls on immigration, said Operation Lone Star mostly picks up illegal immigrants who want to sneak past Border Patrol and who aren’t turning themselves in to seek asylum.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out,” Vaughn told USA Today. “We could end up with a blueprint from the courts on exactly what can be done by states to address illegal immigration.”
Whatever the case, it gives a whole new meaning to “don’t mess with Texas.” And if any actor is going to address illegal immigration, it’ll have to be in state governments for now — especially since last month’s crisis involving an encampment of Haitian migrants that swelled to over 15,000 individuals at Del Rio, Texas proved how quickly the Biden administration will capitulate on border security when faced with the slightest breeze of opposition from the left wing of the Democratic Party.
After footage showed Border Patrol agents using horses to prevent Haitian migrants from entering the United States via the Rio Grande — with some lawmakers and social media pundits erroneously stating they were using whips or lassos — administration officials quickly condemned the agents, foreswore the use of horses at the border and promised an investigation that could lead to the agents’ termination.
Abbott responded by telling Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace on Sept. 26 that the Biden administration was “in dereliction of duty” because they have “abandoned any pretense of securing the sovereignty of either Texas or the United States by having these open border policies.”
Abbott on Biden’s investigation into Border Patrol agents: “I want them to know something. If they are risk of losing their job by a president who is abandoning his duty to secure the border, you have a job in the state of Texas. I will hire you to help Texas secure our border.” pic.twitter.com/gzVtv5iKgt
For instance, Abbott said, the crisis at the Del Rio flashpoint was brought under control only after Texas surged state troopers to the area, with hundreds of vehicles creating a “steel barrier” aimed at keeping out illegal immigrants.
“That’s exactly what the Biden administration could do if they wanted to,” Abbott said. “But, Chris, it’s the kind of thing that Texas is going to have to continue to do in addition to the other policies that you did not announce and that is, as opposed to catch and release, Texas has imposed a policy where we are going to arrest and jail people who come across the border for trespassing into areas into the state of Texas.”
The Biden administration has made it clear it won’t enforce immigration law at the southern border. In fact, it’s more likely to come down hard on Border Patrol agents who were trying to enforce the law — which is why Gov. Abbott has an offer for anyone who suffers the consequences for simply doing their job.
“I have worked side by side with those Border Patrol agents,” Abbott said. “I want them to know something, if they are at risk of losing their job, got a president who is abandoning his duty to secure the border, you have a job in the state of Texas. I will hire you to help Texas secure our border.”
Why not? After all, I’m assuming those who joined the Border Patrol did so to enforce the law.
If they lost their job for doing it at the federal level, they could always get a job doing it for the state that has the longest border with Mexico.
Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending bill gives migrants same child benefits as Americans
President Joe Biden’s budget includes a provision that provides billions of dollars in cash to illegal aliens with children.
The $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill extends the Child Tax Credit to anyone in the United States who provides an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, overturning a crucial safeguard against fraud. Federal law required a valid Social Security number to receive the cash transfer from the federal government. The potential payout for illegal immigrants is massive, with each family receiving a monthly payment of $250 to $300 per child.
A survey from the Pew Research Center found that roughly 675,000 children are not eligible for a Social Security number, making the tax credit expansion for illegal aliens cost between $2.025 billion to $2.43 billion a year. Other estimates put the total number of illegal children residing in the United States at more than 800,000.
Families, regardless of their legal status, would be eligible to receive checks of $3,600 per year per child. The Democratic bill would amount to a universal basic income for parents residing in the country. Under U.S. law, illegal immigrants are barred from enjoying the benefits of federal entitlements.
Democrats are trying to advance an amnesty provision into the budget reconciliation bill, a process reserved for budgetary matters. Congressional Democrats have argued that granting legal status to millions of illegal aliens would add $139.6 billion to the budget deficit by 2032 due to their increased use of welfare programs. The Senate parliamentarian ruled in September that Democrats cannot include a road to citizenship for illegals in their bill, although party leaders have vowed to keep fighting for its inclusion.
Welfare policy expert Samuel Hammond said the potential payout for illegals under the expanded Child Tax Credit exceeds the per capita income of many migrants’ home countries.
“Consider that the value of the CTC for an infant child is now $3,600 per year. That alone represents 40 percent of Colombia’s per capita income, and nearly 120 percent of Haiti’s. This is why countries with unconditional welfare benefits also tend to have relatively restrictive immigration laws,” Hammond wrote in American Compass. “America’s historical openness to immigration, in contrast, has in large part been enabled by rules and program structures that minimize the fiscal cost of lower wage migrants.”
The White House did not return a request for comment on the Child Tax Credit provision.
As the country faces a historic surge of migrants applying for asylum, the Biden administration risks compounding the crisis by offering a greater financial incentive to those willing to make the trip to the southern border. One 2015 study commissioned by the Institute of Labor Economics concluded that expanding Norway’s welfare benefits to poorer European countries generated “substantial (expected) costs for the welfare state” and a distorted labor market.
“For families with children, [the cash benefit] entails that a job in Norway may be attractive even if the offered wage is extremely low. For example, the Norwegian cash‐for‐care subsidy for a one‐year-old child now amounts to NOK 6,000 per month, which … corresponds to 629 Euros, or around 80 percent of average earnings in Poland,” the researchers wrote. “Such features give employers and prospective immigrant employees incentives to agree on very low wages and poor working conditions.”
What appears to be a killing field used by a Mexican drug cartel has been discovered just south of Mexico’s border with Texas.
“The characteristics of the place allow the inference that it is an extermination site that has been used for years and until very recently, which will have to be confirmed by experts,” said a statement by Mexico’s National Search Commission, according to the Associated Press.
“This is the first site of these dimensions found in Nuevo Laredo,” the statement said.
In June, three members of a Texas family were kidnapped in the region, according to Breitbart.
Gladys Cristina Perez Sanchez, 39, was traveling with her 16-year-old son, Juan Carlos Gonzales, and her nine-year-old daughter, Cristina Duran when they disappeared.
The three had been returning to Laredo, Texas, after visiting a sick relative in Sabinas Hidalgo.
Israel Garza, a relative of the family, said cartel gunmen had been stopping travelers along the highway, with reports of at least 71 people who have gone missing along this highway in recent months.
The FBI sought information about the missing family, according to Spectrum Local News.
Officials in Mexico say they have found an apparent long-running “extermination site” outside the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo, near the border with Texas. https://t.co/0LyQ8khMUspic.twitter.com/My2hkjwaXa
Karla Quintana, the head of the Mexican National Search Commission, said a “clandestine crematorium of considerable size” was found along with charred bone fragments, according to the AP.
Quintana said the facility had been set up many years ago but showed signs of recent use.
“The characteristics of the place allow the inference that it is an extermination site that has been used for years and until very recently, which will have to be confirmed by experts,” the commission said, according to the News & Observer.
Angelica Orozco, of the group United Forces for Our Disappear, which includes families of those who went missing, said it was “very worrisome for us that the commission has come out with such alarmist statements without informing us.”
The group said, “these statements totally re-victimize, and cause anguish and torture for the relatives of the disappeared,” because many assume the bodies of their family members may have been burned after death.
Quintana has said that turf battles between cartels could be linked to the disappearances, according to the AP.
The Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Sept. 29 that it intends to issue a new memo scrapping the “Remain in Mexico” immigration program implemented by former President Donald Trump despite a Supreme Court ruling that the program was to be reinstated.
Also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), the “Remain in Mexico” program centers around making some immigrants who seek asylum wait in Mexico while their claims are heard in the United States.
The program was launched in January 2019 under the Trump administration and was widely credited by proponents for the decline in illegal border crossings.
Mark Morgan, who was acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection at the time, told The Epoch Times that the MPP was ”the most significant game-changer” and largely responsible for a 75 percent drop in such crossings.
However opponents, including Democrat leaders, have argued that the immigration system needs to be completely overhauled, and have slammed the MMP as “inhumane” and “dangerous” to illegal aliens who are at greater danger of exploitation by cartels and criminal organisations in Mexico.
MMP was swiftly suspended by President Joe Biden on his first day in office in January, along with several other Trump-era immigration policies.
Although DHS issued a memo ending the program in June, a Texas-based federal judge ruled that the MPP must be restarted and placed an injunction that required the department to work in “good faith to re-start MPP.” DHS appealed that injunction but was blocked by the Supreme Court in August.
“The Department of Homeland Security intends to issue in the coming weeks a new memorandum terminating the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP),” the DHS announcement reads.
“A new memorandum terminating MPP will not take effect until the current injunction is lifted by court order. In issuing a new memorandum terminating MPP, the Department intends to address the concerns raised by the courts with respect to the prior memorandum.”
Republicans decried the move. GOP members of the House Homeland Security Committee said it was “negligent and irresponsible,” adding: “Like much of the rhetoric coming out of the administration, this action flies in the face of our homeland security and foundation of laws.”
Illegal immigrants, many from Haiti, wait in lines to board buses under the Del Rio International Bridge, in Del Rio, Texas on Friday, Sept. 24, 2021. (Julio Cortez/AP Photo)Illegal immigrants take supplies back and forth between Acuna, Mexico, and the United States (far side) across the Rio Grande, the international boundary with Mexico, in Acuna, Mexico, on Sept. 20, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
DHS said that in the meantime, it will continue working in good faith to re-start MMP in compliance with the Texas judge’s order and is engaged in ongoing diplomatic talks with Mexico.
But according to court documents filed this week, Mexico has so far been resisting the rebooting of the program and Biden is yet to send a single illegal immigrant back to the country.
“Discussions with Mexico are ongoing and are proceeding in good faith, but, as of yet, Mexico has not yet agreed to accept returns under the Court-ordered restart of MPP,” Brian Ward, a lawyer at the U.S. Department of Justice, wrote in one filing.
“Simultaneously, the Department has instituted an interagency Task Force to efficiently rebuild the infrastructure and reapportioning the staffing that will be needed to restart MPP once that concurrence has been obtained. Among many other steps, the Task Force is updating policies and procedures to account for COVID-19 and preparing to put in place contracts to rebuild the soft-sided Immigration Hearing Facilities used for court proceedings associated with MPP,” DHS added.
The department noted its commitment to building a “safe, orderly, and humane immigration system that upholds our laws and values,” stating that it will continue to process immigrants in accordance with U.S. law.
The memo comes at a time when border patrol agents are buckling under the weight of increasing illegal immigrant crossings that show no sign of slowing down. Agents made over 200,000 arrests at the southern border alone in August, one of the highest months on record.
Fox News host Chris Wallace, the moderator of last year’s first presidential debate last September, appeared to advocate for a wall on the country’s southern border on “Fox News Sunday” when speaking to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Wallace, who teamed up against former President Donald Trump during the debate with then-candidate Joe Biden, asked Mayorkas, point-blank, why the federal government isn’t interested in using a physical barrier, such as a “wall,” to stop the flow of illegal immigrants entering the country.
“Why didn’t you stop them from coming into the country?” Wallace said Sunday during a conversation about thousands of migrants huddled under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, earlier this month.
“We — we did. We encountered them, they gathered — they assembled in that one location in Del Rio, Texas, and we applied the laws,” Mayorkas claimed. “We applied the public health law under the CDC’s authority, and we applied immigration law.”
Wallace, a Democrat, then found himself in the uncomfortable position of suggesting a border wall could have been effective — something Trump spent years both talking about and working to get built.
“My question is why did you allow them in the country in the first place?” he said. “Why didn’t you build — forgive me, a wall or a fence to stop them from walking in — this flood of people coming across the dam, it looks like a highway that allows them to cross the Rio Grande.”
Fox News’ Chris Wallace to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Haitian migrants:
“Why did you allow them in the country in the first place? Why didn’t you build, forgive me, a wall?”pic.twitter.com/k6APdhntHc
Wallace appeared to understand the irony of his question as he was asking it.
Mayorkas, for his part, responded: “It is the policy of this administration. We do not agree with the building of the wall. The law provides that individuals can make a claim for humanitarian relief. That is actually one of our proudest traditions.”
Mayorkas is proud of presiding over an open border, but the odd part of this interview was seeing Wallace seemingly suggest one of Trump’s key positions before, during and after his term in the White House may have worked to prevent the border crisis.
Wallace in January of 2019 was vocal in his opposition to a border wall while speaking with former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders during an interview.
Wallace at that time was of the opinion that an open border was not a national security threat, which Sanders disagreed with.
“We know that … nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally,” Sanders told the Fox host. “It’s by air, it’s by land and it’s by sea. It’s all of the above.”
“[T]he most vulnerable point of entry that we have into this country is our southern border, and we have to protect it,” she added as she advocated for strict application of the country’s immigration laws.Do you think Democrats are intentionally allowing immigrants to flood across the border?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Wallace, who opposed a physical barrier on the border, fired back.
“[Suspected terrorists are] not coming across the southern border,” Wallace claimed. “They’re coming and they’re being stopped at airports.”
Nine months into the Biden administration’s border crisis, and Wallace has seemingly now seen the light.
He apparently never held any strong personal beliefs against a border wall. It’s looking more and more like he simply opposed the man who wanted to build and maintain it.
The Biden administration was warned about a surge of Haitian migrants heading for the southern border, according to Panama’s foreign minister.
In an interview with Axios, Erika Mouynes said “we sounded the alarm when we should have.”
“We’ve engaged with every single authority that we can think of, that we can come across, to say, ‘Please, let’s pay attention to this,’” Mouynes said.
She also said the mass of more than 15,000 Haitians who camped out under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, early this month is nothing compared to what is coming.
Mouynes estimated another 60,000 Haitian migrants are on their way north from Panama, with about 27,000 expected to cross a section of the country known as the Darien Gap this month. That’s higher than the total number from 2019, she said.
“Let’s recognize that they all are heading toward the U.S.,” she said, calling for action after meetings with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and members of Congress.
Mouynes called it “shocking” that the first meeting of officials from South American countries, Mexico, Canada and the U.S. to discuss illegal immigration was not held until August.
“We all have a role to play in this issue, and the regional approach is the correct approach,” Mouynes said. “It is impossible for Panama to solve it on its own.”
Panama is not alone in dealing with Haitians making the trek to the U.S., according to the Miami Herald.Has the Biden administration lost control of the southern border?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“They enter Guyana and they do not remain here. Very few leave through the channels they came. These people are being smuggled,” Anil Nandlall, Guyana’s attorney general, said in June.
With the need for action growing, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy issued an open letter last week criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris, who was tasked with addressing the root causes of the border crisis.
“Since her appointment six months ago by President Biden to lead efforts to ‘stem migration’ at the southern border the situation has actually only spiraled further out of control. The humanitarian situation continues to be dire, our border communities overwhelmed, and border patrol agents are being asked to do the impossible,” McCarthy wrote.
He noted that on Sept. 19, “as Customs and Border Patrol agents at the Del Rio sector were being overwhelmed by the massive influx of immigrants arriving — Vice President Harris was conducting the coin flip prior to kickoff at a college football game.”
Over 1.2 MILLION illegal aliens have already crossed the border since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office.
It’s a disaster. It’s a public health catastrophe. It’s a national security catastrophe. It’s a humanitarian catastrophe. pic.twitter.com/LNWTLfamwM
“As ‘Border Czar’, Kamala Harris has done nothing to help stop the border crisis,” McCarthy continued.
“She has let down the local leaders and our Border Patrol agents who have been forced to deal with the fallout of this administration’s bad policies. Even after months of being named to this position, this administration still has no clear plan to address the situation. Her lack of leadership has failed the American people.”
That lack of leadership is making leaders of Val Verde County, Texas, desperate enough to sue the federal government over its immigration policies, according to the New York Post.
County Commissioner Beau Nettleton said he was “sick and tired” of the ongoing border crisis.
“We’ve talked about immigration reform for as long as I can remember. Both parties have had control of Washington at one point or another over the last 20 years, and we have failed to do anything about it other than create the mess that we have today,” Nettleton said.
“It is a complete failure of everything that is going on in Washington for not just the last couple of years, but for many, many years,” he added. “I am for people coming into this country legally. This is not a legal process. This is not the way to do it.”
Former President Donald Trump blasted the Biden administration in a statement on Thursday, claiming Democrats are sneaking “unlimited” funding into a spending bill to support Afghan refugees.
“Snuck into the government funding bill, or CR, the Democrats are trying to pass, and just found, is unlimited money to random, unscreened, unvetted Afghan nationals. Republicans can’t let this happen,” Trump said in the statement.
“This is a further insult after Biden’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, that needlessly killed 13 Americans,” he added.
NEW!
“Snuck into the government funding bill, or CR, the Democrats are trying to pass, and just found, is unlimited money to random, unscreened, unvetted Afghan nationals. Republicans can’t let this happen. This is a further insult after Biden’s humiliating withdrawal… pic.twitter.com/UlCZGmKQFZ
The proposed $6.4 billion for Afghan refugee resettlement in a proposed continuing resolution “would allow for the tens of thousands of Afghans being brought in to quickly apply for permanent U.S. residency,” according to a Fox News report.
The resolution would allow Afghan refugees access to a green card within a year. A green card holder can then apply for U.S. citizenship within a few years, according to the report.
The former president called the policy change “a major immigration rewrite.”
“This is not a ‘clean’ government funding bill. It’s a major immigration rewrite that allows Biden to bring anyone he wants from Afghanistan for the next year — no vetting, no screening, no security — and fly them to your community with free welfare and government-issued IDs,” Trump said.
“from Afghanistan, that needlessly killed 13 Americans.
This is not a “clean” government funding bill. It’s a major immigration rewrite that allows Biden to bring anyone he wants from Afghanistan for the next year—no vetting, no screening, no security—and fly them to your…
Concerns with some Afghan refugees have already been discovered, according to Trump’s statement.
“We’ve already seen some of the horrible assaults and sex crimes that have taken place. But these terrible assaults will just be the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming if this isn’t shut down,” Trump said.
“community with free welfare and government-issued IDs. We’ve already seen some of the horrible assaults and sex crimes that have taken place. But these terrible assaults will just be the tip of the iceberg of what’s coming if this isn’t shut down.
The former president even referred to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as “an incompetent radical,” saying the bill must be opposed.
“The CR even covers people who don’t live in Afghanistan and haven’t in many years, as long as they used to live there. So Biden and Blinken can load up planes of former Afghans from Pakistan or elsewhere without any limits, checks or even a lawful visa or refugee status,” Trump said.
“The only ‘rule’ is that Mayorkas — an incompetent radical — give them a green light. This bill must be opposed!” he concluded.
The only “rule” is that Mayorkas—an incompetent radical—give them a green light. This bill must be opposed!” – President Donald J. Trump
“Joe Biden left behind thousands in Afghanistan who already have American citizenship, green cards, or pending visas,” Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas tweeted.
Now he wants to award unlimited green cards to people who didn’t serve alongside our troops and who may even threaten our safety and health—all while exempting them from the normal refugee screening process. https://t.co/rH9WqyaW7p
“Now he wants to award unlimited green cards to people who didn’t serve alongside our troops and who may even threaten our safety and health — all while exempting them from the normal refugee screening process.”
Border Patrol agents in Texas have apprehended a convicted killer who illegally reentered the United States after his deportation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said on Tuesday.
The arrest took place on Sept. 27 in CBP’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, which covers 320 miles of border in southeastern Texas. Among a group of six captured illegal immigrants was a Honduran national, who has been convicted in Miami, Florida, of homicide, according to CBP.
The man was sentenced to 18 months in prison and three years of probation for the offense, and was subsequently removed from the United States, CBP said. If convicted of illegal reentry after removal, which is a federal crime, he could face up to 20 years in prison.
Later that day, Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers requested assistance over a suspected stash house operation. CBP agents responded and apprehended 12 illegal immigrants. Those individuals were from Ecuador, Central America, Mexico, and Peru, and DPS troopers took custody of one person to be charged with smuggling and running the stash house.
According to the CBP, Border Patrol agents around the nation so far in fiscal year 2021 have found more than 440 illegal immigrant stash houses just in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. Agents have also arrested 325 gang members, of which more than 150 were arrested in Rio Grande Valley.
The news comes after President Joe Biden said some Border Patrol agents will “pay for” the way they allegedly “whipped” Haitian nationals seeking to evade officers at the Texas-Mexico border, according to media reports which turned out to be untrue. In response, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said his state is willing to hire any agent worried that the Biden administration might fire them.
“I will hire you to help Texas secure our border,” Abbott said on “Fox News Sunday” when asked by the host whether he was “troubled” by photos showing mounted agents trying to detain Haitian immigrants near Del Rio, Texas, on horseback.
“The person who took those pictures said that the characterization that the Democrats have made about the Border Patrol using them as whips, whipping people who were coming across the border, is false,” Abbott said. “They were simply maneuvering horses.”
“I want them to know something: If they are at risk of losing their job at a president who is abandoning his duty to secure the border, you have a job in the state of Texas,” he said.
The number of those apprehended crossing the southern border illegally during fiscal year 2021 that ends today exceeds the population of 11 American states.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, so far there have been over 1.5 million encounters of people crossing the southwest border through August.
That number will go up by 200,000 or more when September’s encounters are included, if recent trends continue.
The current tally already exceeds the total populations of 11 states, according to 2019 figures, including Hawaii (population: about 1,416,000), New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming (population: about 579,000).
By comparison, there were just 458,000 encounters in 2020.
CBP Encounters, Southwest Land Border. (Check out those 2021 ‘single adult’ numbers.)
No need to travel to see it ‘first hand’… It’s right there on the freaking website! pic.twitter.com/7G7q1sbaOn
Last week, 26 Republican governors — including border governors Doug Ducey of Arizona and Greg Abbott of Texas — sent an urgent letter to President Joe Biden seeking a meeting to discuss the border crisis within 15 days.
“As chief executives of our states, we request a meeting with you at The White House to bring an end to the national security crisis created by eight months of unenforced borders,” they wrote.Do you think Biden is derelict in his duty to secure the border?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“The months-long surge in illegal crossings has instigated an international humanitarian crisis, spurred a spike in international criminal activity, and opened the floodgates to human traffickers and drug smugglers endangering public health and safety in our states. A crisis that began at our southern border now extends beyond to every state and requires immediate action before the situation worsens,” the governors added.
NEW 🚨 26 GOP Governors Demand Biden End The Border Crisis
“More fentanyl has been seized this fiscal year than the last three years combined—almost 10,500 pounds of fentanyl when only 2 milligrams prove fatal. This is enough to kill seven times the U.S. population,” they further noted.
The governors argued they are doing what they can to mitigate the situation, but that in the end, it is a federal issue.
‘[O]ur Constitution requires that the President must faithfully execute the immigration laws passed by Congress,” they wrote. “Not only has the federal government created a crisis, it has left our states to deal with challenges that only the federal government has a duty to solve.”
Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psakiaccused Republicans of being more interested in making speeches than solving the border crisis.
“There are a lot of Republicans out there giving speeches about how outraged they are about the situation at the border,” she said at Friday’s news briefing, according to a White House transcript. “Not many who are putting forward solutions or steps that we could take. So we’re a little tired of the speeches,” she said.
.@PressSec Jen Psaki: “There are a lot of Republicans out there giving speeches about how outraged they are about the situation at the border. Not many who are putting forward solutions or steps that we could take. So we’re a little tired of the speeches.” pic.twitter.com/ujqfcJOrOX
On Biden’s first day in office, he suspended construction of the border wall and ended former President Donald Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy for those seeking asylum in the United States, which Republicans have argued triggered the 21-year high surge in border crossings.
In a Newsmax interview this week, James Carafano, a national security expert with the Heritage Foundation who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel during a 25-year Army career, argued that what happened in Del Rio, Texas, this month with a massing of migrants on the border, has now become part of the playbook for illegal entry into the U.S.
“They’ll just throw a camp up on the border, put thousands of people there and then the Biden team will be so anxious to get it off of the news cycle, they’ll just take those people and ship them right into the interior,” Carafano said.
“Look, we’re going to wind up with not millions, but if we keep this up, ten of millions of people coming in,” he predicted.
Carafano argued that the Biden administration really wants open borders, despite anything officials might say to the contrary.
“They’d like to hide that fact as much as possible from the American people, but at the end of the day, when the open-borders people say, ‘Do this,’ they jump,” he said.
The former West Point professor contended that having an open border, in addition to the unsustainable flow of migrants into the U.S., imperils national security.
“The other key thing is, we have a wide open border. It’s more wide open than it was on 9/11,” he said near the end of the interview, pointing out that the terrorist group al Qaida is reconstituting in Afghanistan and looking to hit the U.S. again.
“So it’s all fun and games, my friends,” Carafano said. “It’s all a big laugh until more people die than died on 9/11, and that’s going to happen, if we don’t do something.”
WESLACO, Texas (ValleyCentral) — The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) held a briefing on Operation Lone Star Thursday morning.
At the briefing, DPS Regional Director Victor Escalon and TMD Lt. Colonel Rodney Kelley will provide an overview of last week`s migrant numbers in Del Rio and the operations that were used to secure the area.
Operation Lone Star was put in place by Gov. Greg Abbott in March, and it allows Texas DPS and the Texas National Guard to team up and patrol high-risk areas along the southern border, including the Rio Grande Valley.‘
“Troopers that work along the border they deal with this day in and day out,” said Lieutenant Christopher Olivarez. “But the numbers that we are seeing this year have been historic, just the surge of migrants that have been coming across, the criminal activity, the increase in vehicle pursuits, we have never seen that before in prior years.”
Former President Barack Obama is getting sick of the Biden administration’s border crisis, even though he will not admit his former vice president is at fault.
In an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Obama called for the reform of the “dysfunctional” system that allows serious incidents like the one in Del Rio, Texas, to occur.
“It’s no secret that we don’t have that. It’s the reason I proposed comprehensive immigration reform. It’s the reason [President] Joe Biden proposed it during his administration, and it’s something that is long overdue,” he told anchor Robin Roberts on Tuesday.
Of course, he gave credit to Biden for his nearly nonexistent efforts to mitigate the crisis at the border, adding that it “is a painful reminder that we don’t have this right yet and we’ve got more work to do.”
“As big-hearted as he is, nobody understands that better than Joe Biden,” the former president said.
“And the question is now: Are we gonna get serious about dealing with this problem in a systemic way, as opposed to these one-offs where we’re constantly reacting to emergencies? And I think that that’s something that every American should wanna put an end to.”
“It is heartbreaking,” he continued, “and it is, I think, one of those situations in which if you have a system that overall is dysfunctional, you are going to get episodes in which what’s happening right in front of you is something that nobody wants.”
Obama said that the reason immigration reform is difficult to discuss is due to Americans’ predisposed compassion towards immigrants.
“Immigration is tough,” he said. “It always has been. Because, on the one hand, I think we are naturally a people that wants to help others.”
The most notable quote from the interview, and one that is sure to frustrate the far-left, was when Obama admitted a nation needs borders.
“At the same time, we’re a nation-state. We have borders. The idea that we can just have open borders is something that, I think, as a practical matter, is unsustainable. The way we solve this problem is to have a smarter, more efficient, more effective immigration system.”
Obama got a mix of issues right and wrong in the interview, and it’s all a result of partisan politics.
He was correct that the United States cannot have open borders, and that humane immigration reform is necessary.
What he got wrong, however, was his conviction that Biden is the right leader to be in charge as the border crisis rages on.
Biden repealed most Trump administration policies and efforts that were effective in deterring migrants from coming across the border illegally, including “Remain in Mexico” and the construction of the border wall.
Obama will never admit it has been the Biden White House’s poor leadership that has perpetuated the border crisis for several months.
Migrants interested in coming to the United States deserve better information and a clear-cut system to make a safe decision for themselves, and Americans are entitled to be in a country with a secure border.
Texas mayor Pete Saenz: ‘It was working under Trump, call it whatever you want to call it, but it was working’
The Democratic mayor of Laredo, Texas, slammed President Joe Biden’s immigration policy, alleging that his party has no plan to fix the southern border and has abandoned local communities in favor of massive spending proposals for other interest groups.
Mayor Pete Saenz says that for months many of his city’s public services have been forced to focus on providing humanitarian aid, medical services, and transportation for thousands of migrants who pass through Laredo. Those are jobs, he says, the federal government should handle—particularly as the Biden administration loosens immigration restrictions. The added threat of COVID-19 has led Saenz to admit reluctantly that former president Donald Trump’s policies benefited Laredo residents.
“We need to truly secure the border,” Saenz told the Washington Free Beacon in an exclusive interview. “It was working under Trump, call it whatever you want to call it, but it was working.”
As Democrats scramble to pass $3.5 trillion in federal spending on programs ranging from free community college to “achieving a carbon pollution-free power sector,” Saenz notes how little of that money will be used to support Customs and Border Protection. The president’s budget allocates virtually no additional funds to the agency, which since is dealing not only with inflation but also with record numbers of illegal immigrants since Biden took office.
“We’re spending billions of dollars on alternative things but immigration isn’t given priority. Border Patrol isn’t being funded to the extent that Border Patrol has to be funded,” Saenz said. “Their workload has increased to three times or four, and yet they’re not funded. So, that kind of leads me to think the Democrats have the same mentality [toward the Border Patrol] as defunding law enforcement generally.”
Laredo, which has a population of 260,000, is 95-percent Hispanic, making it one of the least diverse cities in the country. The city’s concerns over Democrats’ immigration politics challenge the conventional wisdom that strong border policies serve the anxieties of a dwindling white population. Republicans in 2020 doubled their turnout in the county in which Laredo sits, a pattern that continued in districts throughout southern Texas.
Biden’s immigration policy, Saenz contends, serves neither Americans nor migrants well. He pointed to the squalid Del Rio bridge under which thousands of Haitian migrants lived and the outbreaks of COVID-19 and other diseases in Laredo as evidence that a de facto open borders policy is far from the humanitarian solution. Instead, he said, the Biden administration should work on processing overseas asylum claims—the principle that guided the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.
“The key, ultimately, is removing the incentive to come to the border and file for asylum. I believe in the asylum process. It needs to be followed or changed. If we don’t like the way people are attempting to come, we can have them apply remotely or from either the country of origin or some other place that is close to the country of origin,” Saenz said. “No person wants to spend their last penny giving it to the cartels, then risking life and limb travel to try and get all the way to the border. And then there’s still the uncertainty that they may not even be granted asylum. At some point, they’ll be fugitives.”
The border crisis has caused Saenz to reevaluate his own politics. The mayor in 2015 told then-candidate Donald Trump that a large wall across the southern border was not practical. He told NPR in 2019 that Trump’s proposal to order the Pentagon to construct fencing in Laredo would be less effective than the “virtual wall” backed by Biden. But, Saenz says, Laredo residents are growing tired of empty promises from Democrats, particularly as the city’s fire department is forced to serve as shuttle service for migrants who get dropped off by charities and federal agencies. Saenz has not heard from the Biden administration on any plans for a “virtual wall” or any other measure to stem the tide of illegal immigrants.
“If Biden doesn’t come out with implementing a virtual wall, people here will be begging for a wall, a physical structure, simply because of his lack of attention to the border and especially the size of these surges,” he said. A wall would “deter or at least buy time, so to speak, for law enforcement.”
The Biden administration did not return a request for comment.
A Federal Emergency Management Agency grant for Laredo has eased the burden of paying city employees overtime to relocate migrants. That money came only after the city filed a federal lawsuit that accused the administration of negligence. Customs and Border Protection began transferring hundreds of migrants to the city after processing stations in other parts of Texas reached capacity. The number of migrants who have tested positive for COVID-19 led to targeted shutdowns in Laredo and a lack of hospital beds for city residents—in other words, a government-caused health catastrophe.
For now, the federal government has spared Laredo from facing the ongoing brunt of the migrant crisis. The city’s policy of busing out migrants has proven a temporary salve, but no community withstand the constant influx Laredo has seen.
“The border’s not secure and hasn’t been for a while,” he said. “We can’t continue this way, and I really haven’t seen any measures yet from Washington to remedy this.”
Federal immigration authorities are trying to alleviate the pressure on Laredo by redirecting the surge of migrants to other Texas towns. Customs and Border Protection announced the opening of a temporary processing facility 15 miles south of Laredo. Twenty-four hours earlier Saenz had to dispatch local police to assist federal authorities to break up a pair of stash houses in which smugglers had crammed dozens of people. Authorities were shocked to find that one of the locations was allegedly run by a teenager.
Situations like these, Saenz said, are entirely avoidable. “It’s really an embarrassment for us as a country now. You know we can do so much better.”
But for sheer disassociation from reality, for Biden-level oblivion to the obvious, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas has proved again that she’s difficult to beat.
Jackson, a Houston Democrat who’s spent a quarter-century in Congress — God help us — has a well-deserved reputation for spewing nonsense.
Her remarks can be merely stupid — like when she called for gun control while displaying her utter ignorance about what Democrats love to call “assault weapons.” They can be stupidly dangerous – like when she spread an unfounded story that a white man had murdered a young black girl in Houston two years ago.
But on Wednesday she veered into the land of lunacy during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, making a statement about the Biden administration’s border crisis that literally any thinking American knows to be flat false.
“Let me pronounce to my friends that the border is both sovereign and secure,” Jackson Lee said. “It is obviously subjected to biased and unfair narratives for political purposes.”
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee says that the southern border is actually “sovereign and secure,” claiming that it is “subjected to biased and unfair narratives for political purposes.” pic.twitter.com/QSVLccryFj
If Jackson Lee considers the southern border secure, it’s difficult to imagine what insecure would look like.Will the border disaster hurt Democrats in the 2022 midterms?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Would a secure border be witnessing month after month of record numbers of illegal crossings? (The year’s total is projected to be about 1.85 million, according to the Washington Examiner, eclipsing a 20-year record set in 2000.)
Would a secure border require a state government to begin building a wall to defend its own territory because the Democrat in the White House has abdicated his responsibility to the country?
Would a secure border see thousands of illegal immigrants camping out under a bridge until a politically impotent administration allows them into the country — with a wink and a nod and the legal fig leaf of a future court hearing that all parties know will likely be ignored?
More importantly, just about any American with a modicum of interest in the matter would be well aware of the conditions at the border. Just as any American interested in the truth of the matter would be well aware that if there’s anyone using the illegal immigration crisis for political purposes, it’s Jackson Lee’s own Democrats.
(Just ask the Border Patrol agents being railroaded for doing their jobs on spurious accusations of “racism.”)
Jackson Lee clearly doesn’t have much interest in the truth. But it’s entirely possible, given her long record of dubious statements, that she simply lacks the ability to grasp what the rest of the country is seeing.
Regardless, her comments were met with a blizzard of scorn on social media. Rarely has that kind of scorn been so well deserved.
It would be easy to just brand Jackson Lee a liar. After all, she’s a prominent member of a political party that has spent the entirety of the 21st century building its power on lies.
But her brand of untruth goes far beyond the usual Democratic dissembling to nearly being divorced from reality.
Baselessly accusing Border Patrol agents of “racism” is garden-variety leftist lying. It’s doubtful anyone truly believes it, but Democrats keep spitting it out and the establishment media keeps lapping it up. If some innocents happen to get hurt in the process, well, there’s a news cycle to “win.”
Claiming that a border plagued by chaos thanks to Biden’s embrace of illegal immigration is actually “sovereign and secure” is a distortion worthy of the doddering president himself.
A Democrat is going to be in the White House for the next three years. Fortunately, voters have a chance to kick Jackson Lee’s party out of power on Capitol Hill in next November’s midterms.
The entire border debacle — and Democratic lies and delusions about it — should be near the top of the list of targets for Republicans trying to retake Congress.
Jackson Lee’s seat is almost certainly safe, of course. She won re-election in 2020 with 73 percent of the vote. But it shouldn’t be.
Most of her Democratic colleagues aren’t nearly as safe. And they shouldn’t be, either.
PUNTA GORDA, Fla.—To address what Governor Ron DeSantis called a “brazen disregard for federal immigration law” an executive order was signed and a new public safety czar announced on Tuesday.
DeSantis addressed what he called the “Biden border crisis” with his executive order that prohibits state agencies from providing support for the “resettlement of illegal aliens” in Florida.
The governor initiated the order because he says that illegal immigration is taking its toll on taxpayer dollars and overwhelming state agencies.
“This executive order makes it clear that Florida resources will not be used to prop up the failed open border agenda enacted by this administration,” he said.
The executive order (21-223) addresses several things including directing the Department of Children and Families to refuse to renew licenses to facilities that house unaccompanied minors. Then it asks that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement conduct audits of companies in Florida to verify they do not employ illegal aliens.
The second half of the order requires the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to “lawfully gather information on the number and identities of illegal aliens being transported from the border to Florida.” It also encourages state law enforcement to “detain any vehicle transporting illegal aliens if there is reason, suspicions, it is being used for human or drug trafficking.”
The order additionally requests information from state officials “on the number of illegal aliens who are pending criminal prosecution or have been convicted of a crime.”
To ensure that the executive order is followed, DeSantis named Larry Keefe as public safety czar.
“Larry Keefe was nominated by President Trump in 2018 to serve as the United States attorney for the Northern District of Florida,” wrote DeSantis’ press secretary Christina Punshaw in a statement.
“He resigned in February 2021 after Biden took office. Mr. Keefe was a trial lawyer for more than 30 years, during which he has tried criminal and civil cases in federal and state courts.”
DeSantis told reporters during a press conference that Keefe’s appointment is part of the state’s efforts “to protect Florida taxpayers from bearing the burden of reckless immigration policies.”
“We will continue to hold the federal government accountable for refusing to enforce the immigration laws of this country,” he said.
Keefe will serve to ensure the actions directed by the executive order “are carried out.”
The former U.S. Attorney told the press conference that: “I saw illegal aliens that would get deported and come back, and then get deported and come back in an endless cycle.”
“The states, including Florida, bear the brunt of this cycle. Over the coming weeks and months, our state agencies will be addressing the impacts illegal immigration has had on our state,” he said.
Keefe said if “people are illegally in the state, and they have broken (state) laws” they will be punished.
He also made a promise to law enforcement.
“We will support them (law enforcement) when they are attacked,” Keefe said. “And they will be attacked for trying to do their jobs.”
Lee County Sheriff Carmine Mancino said that people come to Florida for the sun as well as other things.
“But they also know that this is a law-and-order state, we will deliver on our end,” he said.
This all follows a letter that DeSantis sent to the Biden administration on Aug. 26, as was reported by The Epoch Times, asking for a meeting seeking more transparency regarding illegals being resettled in Florida. That letter went unanswered, according to DeSantis, which prompted him to act.
DEL RIO, Texas—The largest caravan of illegal immigrants to date was, for them, successful. At its height, around Sept. 18, nearly 15,000 mostly Haitian nationals who had primarily been living in Chile or Brazil, were camped under an international bridge in Del Rio, Texas, that had been closed to legitimate trade and travel.
More than 12,400 of the aliens were ultimately released into the United States as the primitive camp was cleared and dismantled, according to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The majority were given either a notice to appear, which is a date to appear in immigration court, or a notice to report, which is a request to check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within 60 days. None were tested for COVID-19.
About 2,000 Haitians were flown back to Haiti during the week, Mayorkas said on Sept. 24. He also said that Border Patrol had apprehended almost 30,000 illegal immigrants in Del Rio during the previous two weeks.
News spread swiftly among the Haitians in Del Rio, and when the first deportation flights landed in Haiti, many of those left under the bridge fled back across the Rio Grande to Acuña, Mexico, to wait out the uncertainty.
All of the Haitians that The Epoch Times spoke to had been living in Chile or Brazil for years before deciding to come to the United States. They all said it wasn’t an option for them to return to Haiti and that they were determined to get into the United States one way or another.
Illegal immigrants take supplies back and forth between Acuna, Mexico, and the United States (far side) across the Rio Grande, the international boundary with Mexico, in Acuna, Mexico, on Sept. 20, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
The southwest Mexican city of Tapachula is the common entry point of the well-worn route for Haitians making the trek north.
After passing through the treacherous Darien jungle from Colombia to Panama, they get help from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. Then, they make their way through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, before entering Mexico near Tapachula.
Haitians and African nationals have been gathering in Tapachula for years to wait for transit permits or to apply for asylum in Mexico.
In 2019, The Epoch Times reported that more than 5,000 Haitians and Africans were bottlenecked in Tapachula’s immigration center. At the time, it took more than one month to get the required documents, but no one wanted to be caught without legal documents and risk deportation at that stage, so they waited.
However, in mid-September this year, thousands of Haitians left Tapachula, some without legal documentation, and started making their way to the U.S. border, mostly by bus.
“The Mexican government has been very helpful,” Phanel, a Haitian national, told The Epoch Times on Sept. 21 in Acuña, Mexico.
“Legally, they are issuing permits, but some of us didn’t wait for it [in Tapachula]. But still they provided guidance on how to get here.”
Phanel said he had been living in Chile for three years before deciding to come to the United States. He had spent five nights under the bridge in Del Rio with his wife, son, and daughter, before crossing back to Mexico to retrieve groceries.
Another Haitian man who had been living in Chile for several years was looking for a hotel to stay at in Acuña to avoid deportation from the United States.
“I thought I was going to be let in [to the United States], be handed the notice to appear, and right away, look for a job so I can send money back to my family,” he said.
Traditionally, Haitians first made it to Puerto Rico, rather than take the overland route through Latin America. The second-busiest crossing point for Haitians had been the northern U.S. border (604 arrests in 12 years) and the southern border was third, with 473 arrests in 12 years.
But, in 2019, Border Patrol agents in Del Rio started apprehending upward of 1,000 Haitians within a few weeks.
This year, the number of Haitians crossing illegally into Del Rio has been on a sharp upward trend, especially since April, when agents apprehended 514 Haitians. The number grew tenfold to 5,196 in August. September is set to break all records.
Haitians, and others, who crossed the U.S. border illegally have been processed by Border Patrol and are dropped at local NGO Border Humanitarian Coalition to catch a bus to San Antonio or Houston, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 22, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Policy Incentives
On a policy level, the Biden administration has been lenient on illegal immigrants, including through policy changes that allow most to be released into the United States.
Mayorkas announced on May 22 an extension for Haitians currently eligible under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program that was put in place after the 2010 earthquake. That allowed Haitians who were already in the United States before the earthquake to stay, as their country was deemed unsafe to return. TPS holders get work permits and are shielded from deportation.
The original 2010 designation was extended several times until the Trump administration announced in January 2018 that Haiti’s designation would end, effective July 22, 2019. Subsequent lawsuits allowed the designation to remain in effect.
On Aug. 3, Mayorkas dramatically increased the number of Haitians eligible for the program by announcing that all Haitians who had made it into the United States by July 29 this year, would now be eligible to apply for TPS.
Former President Barack Obama started the practice of redesignating TPS so people who arrived after the original designation were also covered, said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C.-based think tank that promotes legal immigration.
“Redesignating … does provide an incentive to get here and then take advantage. You can never be sure that that’s going to happen, but I think it was a reasonable expectation for people that if they got here, the Biden administration would eventually do it again,” Vaughan told The Epoch Times.
“I don’t think the migrants themselves always know the specific policies and what the eligibility criteria are … they just know that people are being allowed to enter and stay here for an indefinite period of time.”
Social media such as Facebook and messaging platforms such as WhatsApp contribute greatly to the rapid spread of information and organizing capacity of large groups of would-be illegal immigrants.
As many as 30,000 Haitians are currently on their way to the border, according to reports received by Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano last week.
Thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly Haitians, live in a primitive, makeshift camp under the international bridge that spans the Rio Grande between the U.S. and Mexico while waiting to be detained and processed by Border Patrol, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 21, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
A Warning
Three months before the Haitian crisis, Jon Anfinsen, a Border Patrol agent and national union representative for Del Rio, said he warned the administration to prepare for an overwhelming influx of illegal immigrants. It was a warning cry he said was ignored.
“It was basically recommended that they should start building some kind of facility down here,” Anfinsen told The Epoch Times on Sept. 21.
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council said, “Not only did they ignore him, they came back and said, ‘We have more efficient ways to handle it.’”
“Now we’re in this situation,” Judd said as he pointed to the squalid conditions under the bridge in Del Rio.
Judd said “there’s no way in the world” that the Department of Homeland Security didn’t know 15,000 Haitians were on their way to the U.S. border.
“We have a very robust intel department. There is no way in the world they could not have prepared. They just didn’t do it,” he said.
Speaking to the media at the White House on Sept. 24, Mayorkas said the situation in Del Rio was unprecedented.
“It is unprecedented for us to see that number of people arrive in one discrete point along the border in such a compacted period of time,” he said.
He reiterated that the criteria for asylum don’t include “economic need, flight from generalized violence” but rather “credible fear of persecution by reason of one’s membership in a particular social group.”
It’s unclear if Haitians who have safely lived in Chile or Brazil for years will be eligible for asylum.
Vice President Kamala Harris was tapped in March to address the border issue and has said her focus is on the “root causes” of illegal immigration.
Mayorkas’s three-part plan is to invest in the countries that people are leaving, to build “safe, orderly, and humane pathways” for migration, and rebuild the asylum system and refugee program.
Vaughan said Congress has been unable to address border security and immigration issues for years.
“Immigration law and policy has been abdicated by Congress, and is now in the hands of the courts and the executive branch,” she said.
The effects of huge numbers of illegal immigrants being released across America will put a “huge burden” on communities, she said.
“[The communities] are going to have to pick up the tab for it—to have these kids in school, for health care. They’re going to be occupying a lot of the affordable housing, they’re going to be trying to work off the books because they don’t have work permits. And they will eventually be accessing all kinds of public welfare programs.”
Haitians who crossed the U.S. border illegally have been processed by Border Patrol and are dropped at local NGO Border Humanitarian Coalition to catch a bus to San Antonio or Houston, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 22, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Off the Border
As the Haitian nationals poured across the border, Border Patrol was forced to close several highway checkpoints for more than a week in order to send agents to deal with the influx. That left Highway 90—a direct shot from Del Rio to San Antonio—open, as Texas state troopers also left the highways to guard the border.
On Sept. 24, before the checkpoint reopened, Highway 90 kept troopers and local law enforcement tied up with vehicle pursuits and smuggling arrests.
The driver of a stolen pickup truck out of Houston took state troopers and Kinney County deputies on a high-speed chase for several miles, before he careened off the road and smashed through a high game fence. Five illegal aliens were arrested near the truck and the remaining three were located and arrested with the help of the DPS helicopter. Border Patrol took all eight into custody.
The closed Border Patrol highway checkpoint on Highway 90 near Uvalde, Texas, on Sept. 17, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Within hours of that stop, Kinney County Sheriff’s Deputy Danny Molinar stopped a vehicle suspected of carrying illegal aliens. The driver, a 15-year-old boy, had stolen the car from his father in Cedar Creek, Texas, and was smuggling four Mexican nationals.
The boy is currently in juvenile detention facing four felony counts of human smuggling. A recent law change in Texas has made it easier to prosecute human smugglers by removing the requirement to prove pecuniary gain, or payment, to the smuggler.
“When you look at the resources that are being pulled to the bridge to deal with this, it’s completely and totally depleted the field resources of not just DPS but the Border Patrol,” Judd said.
“And Del Rio, you’ve got close to 240 miles that just is being patrolled by an absolute skeleton crew. And, of course, the cartels are going to exploit that.”
Take all of the imagery you have seen of the over 14,000 Haitian migrants camped under an international bridge in the small Texas border town of Del Rio and add the complications of disease, public excrement, unbearable heat, and heightened frustrations. It has led to violence that has injured Border Patrol officers.
Now close your eyes and imagine it is 100 times worse.
Because that’s what it is, said Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, the freshman Republican who represents 42 percent of the border. The overwhelmed city of Del Rio had been in a rapidly deteriorating crisis situation when illegal immigrants first began surging into the community in January, but Gonzales now says the situation here is a “Category 5” and that the environment is unlike anything he has ever seen before.
“I arrived here today to pure chaos,” he said. “I’ve never seen it in this environment. There literally is no border left.”
Gonzales said Del Rio is in dire straits. “There’s no doubt there’s COVID here, there’s measles, tuberculosis, all kinds of diseases,” he said. “You’ve got kids running around in nothing but diapers. A handful of port-a-potties—my God, the stench is terrible. This is not good for the migrants. It is not good for the residents. It’s not good for wherever our government is sending them in the interior of the country.”
Despite the Department of Homeland Security insisting repeatedly the Haitians would be deported, as of Tuesday, it had only removed 1,000 of the estimated 15,000 under the bridge. Multiple news organizations including CNN reported that buses have been escorting them to a nonprofit organization in town where they purchase bus or plane tickets. They are then moved to a gas station where buses pick them up and take them to other parts of the country.
The Washington Post reported that the number is in the thousands of those released to parts unknown in the interior of the country.
“My takeaway after I walked through it all, I look over at the sector chief, and I go, ‘Man, I just feel sad.’ He goes, ‘I know. Everyone just feels beaten here,’” Gonzales said.
Migrants, many from Haiti, encamped along the Del Rio International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas. (Tony Gonzales)
Del Rio residents have seen their lives turned upside down. The international bridge has been closed—a lifeline bringing tens of millions of dollars to the local economy. If you’re a small-business owner and your business has somehow survived COVID-19, something like this could easily wipe you out.
Everybody has been sucked into this chaos.
“The worst thing is that we are not even talking about the other places where this is happening,” Gonzales said. “Today, we’re talking about Del Rio, but tomorrow, it’ll be Laredo or Brownsville or Eagle Pass or El Paso. This problem is not going away.”
Gonzales said he asked the chief of Border Patrol, Raul Ortiz, at a Homeland Security Committee hearing about its surge of agents to Del Rio. “Those agents are coming from somewhere,” he said. “And my worry is other sectors are going to be weakened, thus creating a national security crisis, putting us at risk in other sectors, because everyone is focusing on Del Rio.”
Ortiz agreed. He also confirmed that reports were true that migrants had assaulted Border Patrol agents—five of them, to be exact.
It is hard to imagine that this scene is playing out in America. It is also hard to imagine that our government has failed to secure the border or address this crisis with the seriousness it deserves.
Which is what makes the other part of this crisis political: Until a photo of a Border Patrol agent on horseback herding migrants back over the Rio Grande to Mexico was circulated on Twitter, Democrats, journalists and the White House had almost completely ignored or downplayed the 15,000 people who had been living in squalor under the bridge.
Blue-check Twitter cried foul, claiming that the agent’s long reins were whips and absurdly likening the image to that of a white overseer whipping a slave. Suddenly, not only did press secretary Jen Psaki and the vice president notice, but they along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House press corps fabricated a story about Del Rio—not about the appalling migrant crisis, but about how racist the Border Patrol is.
That story has been debunked, and to date, there are no reports that any migrant was ever “whipped” by agents.
It irks Gonzales that Border Patrol agents, who risk their lives and are coming under immense pressure right now, are having their actions and motives unfairly impugned. “They see their jobs as patriotic,” the former Navy cryptologist said. “They know they are both protecting their community as well as their country.”
The Biden administration and Washington Democrats’ blind eye to this crisis have already had an impact politically. Hints of the future may have cropped up in last year’s election, when majority-Hispanic areas rejected the Biden campaign’s rhetoric that former President Donald Trump’s handling of the border was racist.
Texans pummeled President Joe Biden in several border counties, with large numbers of Hispanic voters going for Trump. That shift away from Democrats may grow given the handling of the border. Already this summer, Republicans unexpectedly won two big mayoral elections in border towns that are overwhelmingly Hispanic and historically Democratic.
And it is not just South Texas Hispanics who are running away from Biden and by default from the Democrats. It is all Texas Hispanics. Last week, a Dallas Morning News/University of Texas-Tyler poll showed that Biden’s approval rating with Hispanics in Texas is 19 points underwater, with only 35 percent approving of the job he is doing and a whopping 54 percent disapproving. There may be a realignment in the works.
In short, while white liberals in Washington think that using words like “Latinx” matters to the Hispanic community or connects them with its values, they are ignoring a crisis that deeply affects middle-class Hispanic families. They justifiably worry about their safety and their ability to pursue prosperity. The Democrats’ oblivious lack of concern for their real-world concerns is already backfiring.
Maybe if one of them, any of them, spent a few days living in a border town, the party would understand just how dire and dangerous life there has become.
The Biden administration’s repeated release of illegal immigrants has drawn a legal challenge from the state of Florida.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican, sued the federal government over its “catch-and-release” policy, which has led to the freeing of over 225,000 illegal immigrants this year.
The lawsuit primarily concerns the treatment of immigrants seeking asylum, which is granted in cases where authorities rule they have a legitimate fear of persecution based on their race, religion, or several other reasons.
Federal law requires the government to detain the asylum seekers until authorities rule on their case. But under President Joe Biden, it has released at least 225,000 illegal immigrants, including asylum seekers, so far, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
“Releasing this many arriving aliens into the interior necessarily means that the government is violating congressional commands in the immigration laws,” the 23-page suit, filed in federal court in Pensacola, states.
“We are seeing dramatic effects at our border. It is an unmitigated crisis based on this president’s refusal to follow federal law. It’s in black and white folks, and it’s not a president’s responsibility to decide whether he agrees with the law. In fact, the head of an executive branch must follow the law,” Moody told reporters during a briefing in Lee County.
Florida has been negatively affected through elevated costs to hold illegal immigrants, officials say.
Florida is asking the court to find the Biden administration’s “catch-and-release” policy unlawful and require defendants to stop enforcing the policy while coming into alignment with requirements set by federal law.
The Biden administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Officials have defended the widespread release of illegal immigrants, claiming the law is being followed because they’re being given notices to appear in court or at an immigration office.
“We remain in touch with them. We monitor them to ensure their appearance in court at the designated time of appearance,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters in Washington last week after the administration released over 12,000 illegal immigrants who were clustered in Del Rio, Texas.
But fewer than 6 in 10 illegal immigrant asylum seekers show up in court, according to Department of Justice data.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is seen in a file photograph. (Patrick Semansky/AP Photo)
Florida officials say the Biden administration’s policies are designed to boost immigration numbers and illegal immigration has skyrocketed since the Democrat took office.
Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, said the Biden administration has been bypassing what previous administrations did, which was only releasing illegal immigrants when detention facilities were full.
One way the administration is doing that is by using its parole power, which was designed to be used for a small number of cases and only for “urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit.”
“The policy of releasing immigrants into the country on parole is vast, widespread, and historic in its scope,” Bensman told The Epoch Times.
The new suit asks the judge to stop the Biden administration from paroling immigrants without engaging in a case-by-case review.
Also on Tuesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, announced an executive order that bars all Florida agencies under his purview from facilitating illegal immigration and requires state officials to collect information on the costs and scope of illegal immigration in the state.
“Since President Biden took office—which has been less than one year—the Border Patrol has released nearly a quarter-million illegal aliens into the United States,” DeSantis said in a statement. “This executive order makes it clear that Florida resources will not be used to prop up the failed open border agenda enacted by this administration.”
There are forces that wish to destroy America. Some of them are visible and some are stealth.
The visible forces include terrorists and certain nation states like Iran. Radical Islamic preachers cry “death to America” in their sermons, encouraging martyrdom through suicide bombings. Sept. 11 was their crowning achievement, so far. There will likely be other attacks. Some of our military leaders have so predicted. China might also make the list, if not as a destroyer, then as a nation that wants to supplant America as the world’s top economic and military power.
Those who would destroy by stealth include undocumented immigrants flowing across our southern border. Their intention may not be to destroy America, but that will be the effect if we don’t quickly stop the influx and discourage others from coming. It’s almost laughable to hear some in the liberal media claim we have a “moral obligation” to help immigrants when we are ignoring the plight of women in Afghanistan and so many other areas to which the word “moral” might rightly be attached.
Reaction to the open border has been as predictable as the coming of the fall season. Some Democrat progressives shout racism because the latest flood includes Haitians. Signs rapidly appear. Some say, “stop deportation now!” Where did the signs come from? Who are the people carrying them and where do they come from? Is someone paying them? The media never ask these questions.
Undocumented immigrants are not only attracted by low-paying jobs but by lots of free stuff, like access to healthcare and public schools, all paid for by American taxpayers. If a pregnant non-citizen gives birth on U.S. soil, her child instantly becomes a U.S. citizen with all the benefits of full citizenship.
One of the few political leaders responding to this crisis is Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas). Abbott has ordered state police to close off parts of the border because the migrants are violating Texas law. For this he is being pilloried and even sued by the Biden administration, though the White House announced just recently that it would swiftly begin to deport Haitian migrants flooding into Del Rio, Texas. But where’s Vice President Kamala Harris who was assigned to fix our border crisis?
In public schools and too many universities of what I would describe as “lower learning,” America’s history is being re-written to shame young people and load them aboard the progressive train wreck. There are many stories of students returning home and accusing their parents of racism, and worse. The stain of racism can never go away despite the money that has been spent and the programs enacted to help lift descendants of slaves out of poverty and into better lives.
Once more or less united, Americans are now fragmented into groups and those groups are pitted against each other as gladiators once were in the Roman Coliseum. Caesar, we who are about to die, salute you!
Seriously, can we go on like this and think we will pass down anything to succeeding generations that remotely resembles what we received from previous ones, especially those we have honored by calling them “the greatest generation”? What made them great and what makes us a small shadow standing in their historic presence?
Values, morals, and economic principles that transformed this nation from an agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse to now a leader in technology, are all threatened by those who breach our borders.
If we don’t find the national political leadership to do something about our steady decline and defend ourselves, as in warfare (because war is what it is, though it is being fought with different weapons), we are at risk of oblivion. Will we follow the path of other nations that no longer exist or have become shadows of their former selves?
Former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan blasted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a “Fox & Friends First” interview on Monday, arguing that Mahorkas is misleading Americans regarding the border crisis.
On Sunday, Mayorkas faced questions from “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace about the mass of Haitian migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border at Del Rio, Texas, that have dominated the latest headlines about the Biden administration’s illegal immigration debacle.
And one particular aspect of Mayorkas’ answers stood out to him: That many of the migrants are in “immigration court proceedings.”
“When you say 12,000 are in immigration proceedings, they are not,” Homan said.
“That’s what the secretary leads you to believe, but many of them were released on notice to report. On the notice to report, it clearly says at the bottom of the form, ‘You are not in immigration proceedings. You will not be detained. ICE will not detain you for humanitarian reasons. You are released.’
So, they’re only going to be in immigration proceedings if they chose to voluntarily show up and turn themselves in, which most won’t. So the secretary is misleading on what he told Chris Wallace,” he added.
Homan also disputed claims that many Haitian migrants had returned to Mexico.
According to The Washington Times, Mayorkas’ DHS estimated on Friday that 8,000 Haitans had gone voluntarily back to Mexico.
“[Mayorkas] realizes they went one or two miles down the line and came into the United States because they surged so many resources to Del Rio that they left 224 miles of border unguarded,” Homan said.
“So those 8,000 didn’t just go to Mexico and they’re going to live there. They went down to cross illegally. Those a8,000 are now in the United States, you know, living here illegally,” he added.
The Biden administration has reported about 2,000 Haitians have been deported.
Approximately 30,000 Haitian migrants crossed at Del Rio in September, according to NPR.
Earlier in September, Sen. Ted Cruz visited Del Rio when more than 10,000 migrants were awaiting processingm and called the situation a “manmade disaster” due to President Joe Biden’s political decisions.
“Joe Biden’s policies are encouraging this staggering rush of illegal aliens,” the senator said on Twitter.
Joe Biden’s policies are encouraging this staggering rush of illegal aliens:
208,887 encountered in August including 103,129 single adults (up 134% from 2020), 18,847 unaccompanied children (up 507% from 2020), & 86,487 individuals in a family unit (up 3,086% from 2020).
“208,887 encountered in August including 103,129 single adults (up 134% from 2020), 18,847 unaccompanied children (up 507% from 2020), & 86,487 individuals in a family unit (up 3,086% from 2020),” Cruz added.
Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii said President Joe Biden was “absolutely wrong” to condemn Border Patrol agents without waiting for the facts.
Gabbard was interviewed Saturday by Fox News host Jesse Watters on the show “Watters’ World.”
Last week, a photo of a Border Patrol agent on horseback showed the agent using what appeared to be a whip as Haitian illegal immigrants accumulated near the international bridge in Del Rio, Texas.
However photographer Paul Ratje said that what many eyes thought was a whip was in fact the rein of the horse the agent was riding.
“I’ve never seen them whip anyone,” Ratje said, according to Fox News. “He was swinging it, but it can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
“[I]t was horrible what — to see, as you saw — to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay. They will be — an investigation is underway now, and there will be consequences. There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment. But beyond an embarrassment, it’s dangerous; it’s wrong,” he said. https://www.youtube.com/embed/nA8N7oXU5DU?feature=oembed
For comments that were based on anything but the facts, Gabbard said, “He’s absolutely wrong and he needs to apologize to the American people for saying what he said.”
“What he essentially did was act as judge, jury and executioner for these Customs and Border [Protection] agents on horseback,” she said.
“How can they expect to have any kind of fair outcome to an investigation when the president of the United States has already declared their guilt and that they will be punished?” she said.
Gabbard said the incident is troubling because it is part of a larger problem of issuing judgment before the facts.
“If we are no longer a country of laws, if we are no longer a country where we know we will be presumed innocent unless proven guilty, then we don’t have a democracy,” she said.
“That’s the increasing feeling that a lot of us have, is that we are losing our democracy and moving closer and closer to what essentially is an autocracy,” she said.
I was hoping that Biden would keep his promise to try to unite our country, but instead this admin has used race and identity politics to divide us, our freedom of speech and civil liberties are under assault, inflation is going through the roof, and we’ve got open borders. pic.twitter.com/uFOxutndho
Gabbard said snap judgments that become media dogma are dangerous, noting that those who condemn police officers and others when it fits a political narrative “are getting away with it.”
“They are unwilling to sacrifice their interests for the interests of the country,” she said.
“They have no business being in positions of leadership at any level in our society because who suffers as a result of this? It’s the American people. It’s our democracy. And they don’t care about the cost and the toll that that takes,” Gabbard continued.
“And this is why leadership that puts service above self, that puts the interest of the American people in our country first, is so critical and essential — especially now.”
California is a mess. But it doesn’t use the word “alien” in official state codes anymore.
The state is in the midst of a homelessness crisis. It has the highest gas prices in America. Its COVID lockdowns and mask restrictions have decimated small businesses. Its leaders don’t feel bound by it — least of all Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose infamous dinner at the French Laundry has become emblematic of how our ruling class doesn’t play by their own rules.
But at least it doesn’t use the word “alien” in state code anymore.
Last week, U.S. Labor Department data revealed unemployment claims in California had skyrocketed, reaching their highest level since April. The state is dealing with an epidemic of shoplifting thanks to a 2014 law that turned theft into a misdemeanor provided under $950 of items were stolen. The state is currently in the midst of a spate of wildfires which are threatening its sequoias.
But, thank heavens, they’re not using the word “alien” in state code anymore. I was getting worried there.
Proving that neither he nor the rest of California’s Democrats learned anything from the recall election other than he won by a sizable margin, Newsom signed legislation Friday which, yes, struck the word “alien” from the state’s code.
The bill, AB 1096, “removes the derogatory term ‘alien’ used to describe foreign-born individuals,” according to a media release from Newsom’s office.
“As the nation’s most diverse state, we are stronger and more vibrant because of our immigrant communities,” Newsom said in the statement.
“This important legislation removes the word ‘alien,’ which is not only an offensive term for a human being, but for far too long has fueled a divisive and hurtful narrative. By changing this term, we are ensuring California’s laws reflect our state’s values.”
Wait, how is widely accepted legal terminology “an offensive term for a human being”? Let Newsom’s office explain.
“The term ‘alien’ has been used to identify individuals who were not born in the United States by the federal government since 1798 and in California since 1937,” the statement read.
“In the 1990s, the word ‘alien’ began to be used as a political dog whistle to express bigotry and hatred without using traditionally racist language. By 2015, the term was officially replaced with ‘noncitizen,’ however ‘alien’ is still widely used in many aspects of California law.”
Ah, yes, the old “dog-whistle” feint. In case you haven’t encountered this liberal tactic, if the left wants to declare certain language off-limits, one easy way to do it is to call it a dog-whistle.
For instance, “undocumented migrant” sounds a lot nicer than “illegal alien.” The latter gets to the heart of the matter: It’s a foreign-born individual who’s not legally in this country. The former sounds almost like someone who lost a few immigration papers.Related:
Ergo, “alien” is a dog-whistle. No evidence needs to be presented. Just stop using it.
Even the media release demonstrated Newsom’s misplaced priorities. In addition to AB 1096, his office announced, he’d “signed a series of bills to protect the health and safety of immigrants, including legislation to clarify safety standards at detention facilities, ensure rights and protections for unaccompanied undocumented minors, and cement protection for immigrants under hate crime legislation.”
Each one of those is more substantive than removing the word “alien” from California’s state code. Whether or not you agree with those things is beside the point — they have a tangible effect.
What did Newsom’s office tout right at the top of the release? Extirpating a “dog-whistle” word from the books because it’s “fueled a divisive and hurtful narrative.”
Newsom may have won the recall election by a reasonable margin, but he still fails to understand why there was a recall in the first place — and why the polls were reasonably close until his campaign started raising and spending huge amounts of cash on the race.
California’s COVID policies paralyzed the state’s economy. The state remains as unaffordable as ever. Homelessness is rampant. Its leaders are hypocrites. The state is going to pot.
What needed fixing? That word, apparently.
California had its chance to stop this madness in 2021. It has another chance in 2022. If its citizens don’t avail themselves of the opportunity, they have only themselves to blame for their problems.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said on Sept. 26 that a significant number of Haitian illegal immigrants who had amassed along the U.S.—Mexico border last week are being released into the United States.
About 12,400 of 17,000 Haitians are having their cases heard by immigration courts, Mayorkas said, adding that some 5,000 are being processed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Only about 3,000 are in detention, he said.
“Approximately, I think it’s about 10,000 or so, 12,000,” Mayorkas told “Fox News Sunday” when he was asked about the number of Haitian illegal aliens who have been released into the interior of the United States. The number could rise as 5,000 more cases are processed, he said.
Mayorkas said the number of those being released “could be even higher” and that the “number that are returned could be even higher.”
“What we do is we follow the law as Congress has passed it,” Mayorkas said, adding that the U.S. “immigration system is broken.”
“Legislative reform is needed.”
The Department of Justice estimated in 2017 that about 43 percent of illegal aliens released into the United States miss their immigration court hearings. When asked about what will happen to those of the 12,000 who were released in the past week and miss their hearings, Mayorkas said that “it is our intention to remove” those aliens.
“We have enforcement guidelines in place that provide that individuals who are recent border crossers who do not show up for their hearings are enforcement priorities, and will be removed,” he said.
Last week, more than 15,000 Haitians congregated underneath a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, and essentially constructed a shantytown before numerous local officials sounded the alarm that a humanitarian crisis was brewing.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas updates reporters in Washington on the effort to resettle vulnerable Afghans in the United States on Sept. 3, 2021. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo)
DHS officials, including Mayorkas, said on Sept. 24 that the encampment under the bridge had been cleared out. A day later, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said that the Texas border crossing will be partially reopened.
The agency also said it’s planning to continue flights to Haiti throughout the weekend, ignoring criticism from Democratic lawmakers and some progressive groups.
The number of people at the Del Rio encampment peaked last weekend, as migrants driven by confusion over the Biden administration’s policies and misinformation on social media converged at the border crossing. While Mayorkas and other White House officials have asserted that the border is closed, Republicans have said that the administration’s decision to rescind a number of Trump-era immigrant orders has triggered a surge of illegal immigration.
Mayorkas and other senior officials have also dedicated a significant amount of time in news conferences condemning some Border Patrol agents who were seen on horseback near Haitians who had crossed the border illegally. The photographer who shot those pictures last week said that the agents weren’t whipping the migrants, as some officials and Democratic lawmakers had claimed.
“Some of the Haitian men started running, trying to go around the horses,” photographer Paul Ratje told local station KTSM, explaining the situation on the ground.
“I’ve never seen them whip anyone. He was swinging it [the reins], but it can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
With the recent flood of Haitian illegal immigrants a constant reminder of the precarious nature of border safety in Joe Biden’s America, Texas is calling for volunteers to help secure its border.
Officials of the Texas Military Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety have issued a call for National Guard members to volunteer to protect Texas through Operation Lone Star, a state-funded effort launched this spring by Gov. Greg Abbott to pick up the slack when federal officials allowed the border to become a sieve.
“We are still looking for Texas Guardsmen to support Operation Lone Star. Please help us stop human trafficking, smuggling, and illegal border crossings while we are #securingtexas Lodging and per diem included,” the department wrote in a Twitter post last week.
We are still looking for Texas Guardsmen to support Operation Lone Star. Please help us stop human trafficking, smuggling, and illegal border crossings while we are #securingtexas Lodging and per diem included.
“Texas continues to work diligently to secure our southern border under the leadership of Governor Abbott,” DPS Director Steven McCraw said, according to a news release posted on the department’s website.
He said that there is “tangible evidence of how combined local and state operations being conducted are protecting communities across the nation.”
McCraw said, “Operation Lone Star is preventing crime despite the federal government’s failure to provide the brave men and women of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection [with] the infrastructure, technology and personnel needed to secure the border.”
Through Operation Lone Star, Texas forces are “confronting the crisis and cracking down on the cartels and human traffickers daily. Texas Guard soldiers provide boots on the ground, and other valuable assets, to help identify illegal activity and apprehend illegal immigrants,” he said.
“The Texas Military Department is made up of Texans who come from communities across our great state; we are always ready and always there to support our partner agencies in protecting our home and preventing criminal elements from entering Texas,” Maj. Gen. Tracy Norris, the adjutant general of Texas, said in the news release.
“We have a long history of enduring relationships with local, state and federal agencies in conducting Homeland Security missions that dates back more than 100 years and we are proud to continue this legacy as Texans serving Texas.”
Through early September, Operation Lone Star referred 64,900 illegal immigrants to federal officials, according to Breitbart.
Texas law enforcement has also made more than 5,000 criminal arrests and seized more than four tons of illegal drugs, Breitbart reported.
DPS Lt. Christopher Olivarez said the work is not easy, according to KVEO-TV in Brownsville, Texas.Rela
“Troopers that work along the border, they deal with this day in and day out,” Olivarez said.
“But the numbers that we are seeing this year have been historic, just the surge of migrants that have been coming across, the criminal activity, the increase in vehicle pursuits, we have never seen that before in prior years.”
Texas DPS Regional Director Victor Escalon told KVEO that children are often used by smugglers.
“The adults were getting away with driving the narcotic but more so driving the human smuggling, the migrants,” Escalon said.
“And we’re seeing juveniles, we’re still seeing juveniles being more aggressive and wanting to fight with our personnel.”
“The federal government needs to help Border Patrol and provide them with more resources because right now they are being stretched thin,” Olivarez told KVEO.
“We’re the ones filling those gaps along the border because they are being taken away from the field and processing all the migrants that are coming across.”
Escalon said constant vigilance is essential.
“We’ve got to be out there every day, we have to be visible, they’ve got to see us in those areas of interest,” Escalon told KVEO.
“The airplanes, your helicopters, your boats that are in the water, that is a great deterrence, and having fencing, that is a great deterrence.”
To WOAI-TV in San Antonio, Texas, the Israelite School of Universal and Practical Knowledge’s appearance at the Del Rio International Bridge migrant camp in order to hand out food to illegal immigrants, mostly from Haiti, was a sob story.
Headline: “EXCLUSIVE: Group of Americans go through extreme measures to help Haitian migrants.” The outlet mentioned that some people call the group controversial, but the majority of the report focused on Border Patrol turning them away at Del Rio.
The group’s 12-vehicle caravan ended up going into Mexico through Eagle Pass.
“We got together in San Antonio went to Costco and Sams, got food, water, diapers, and toiletries. We went to Del Rio, when we got there, Border Patrol told us we could only give it to a church,” group member Yatazaq Ban Yahawadah said. “We told them we did not want to do that because the people are not at a church, they are under a bridge.”
“We came around through the Mexico side, now we are in Mexico to give our brothers the resources we have for them,” he added.
The report from WOAI’s Yami Virgin again mentioned that the group was controversial, but not why. That’s somewhat important, because the ISUPK is considered an extremist group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others.
The ISUPK is one of a number of groups that believe black people and other people of color are “true Israelites” and that Jews are imposters. Unless you live in a major city and have been subject to the group’s incessant sidewalk proselytizing, the last time you probably thought about the movement was the Nick Sandmann case, where a black Israelite’s hate-preaching was a catalyst for the events of that day.
As Breitbart noted, the SPLC — usually considered the gold standard in determining hate groups by the media despite its raging leftist bias — deems the ISUPK and similar groups to be anti-Semitic, homophobic and racist.
“The [Black Hebrew Israelite] hate groups listed by the SPLC believe in ideas of black supremacy and bigotry against Caucasians, Jews and members of the LGBTQ community. They believe that, as members of the 12 Tribes of Israel — consisting only of African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans — they are God’s ‘chosen people.’ Jews are considered ‘imposters,’” the SPLC’s write-up reads.
“Caucasians and members of the LGBTQ community are deemed ‘devils.’ Extreme Black Hebrew Israelites believe that individuals outside the movement are deserving of slavery or death. The most numerous of the BHI groups in the United States are under the banners of Israel United in Christ, the Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge and Great Millstone.”
The ADL also notes the “ISUPK sells clothing under the brand UPKFRESH. Their products include a t-shirt depicting a slave ship and the Middle Passage of the slave trade with the words ‘True Holocaust.’”
They may look like street preachers dressed in outfits professional wrestlers would turn down for being too outlandish, but keep in mind this is can be an extremist ideology that spreads hate. Lest we forget, Black Hebrew Israelites were behind a 2019 anti-Semitic shooting spree in Jersey City, New Jersey, which killed four people, three of them in a kosher supermarket.
The WOAI report, meanwhile, did little but lionize the ISUPK.
Here’s another quote from Yahawadah, when asked about traveling through an area of Mexico that’s subject to a level 4 warning for violence by the State Department: “Being in a dangerous situation that is being black, Hispanic or Native American. Our lives are dangerous, we live in the most dangerous communities, we live in the worst dangerous conditions.”
There were no questions about motives involved. There’s been a border crisis going on for months now. You would think it might occur to local media to ask a black nationalist group known for hate-preaching why its members decided to show up for Haitian migrants when they hadn’t gotten involved previously.
Rest assured, if the Proud Boys showed up with supplies for anyone, no matter what their race, the headline wouldn’t be “EXCLUSIVE: Group of Americans go through extreme measures to help [insert group here].” This isn’t a complaint, mind you; that’s what media is supposed to do.
An extremist group known for aggressive proselytizing shouldn’t be given a chance to use the chaos at the border as an opportunity to spread its message under the auspices of providing food and supplies to migrants. If it is, local media shouldn’t be amplifying it. Period.
A photographer who captured images of Border Patrol agents on horseback near an influx of Haitians who illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border said he didn’t see the agents whip anyone.
“Some of the Haitian men started running, trying to go around the horses,” photographer Paul Ratje told local station KTSM, explaining the situation. “I’ve never seen them whip anyone,” he said. “He was swinging it, but it can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
The images of agents on horseback drew criticism from Democrats, pro-immigration activists, and White House officials this week, with some claiming that the agents were whipping the Haitians. However, a union that represents Border Patrol agents said that claim is false, while some officials said the agents were merely controlling the horses with their reins.
President Joe Biden, during a news conference Friday, promised an investigation into the incident and declared that the agents’ actions were “wrong” and “will pay.” Biden didn’t make any reference to the pushback against the claims that agents were whipping illegal immigrants.
“I promise you, those people will pay,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment. But beyond an embarrassment, it’s dangerous. It’s wrong.”
Thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly Haitians, live in a primitive, makeshift camp under the international bridge that spans the Rio Grande between the U.S. and Mexico while waiting to be detained and processed by Border Patrol, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 21, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
A top Border Patrol union official, Brandon Judd, told The Epoch Times this week that agents were not whipping their reins at the illegal aliens.
“Agents have to keep the migrants away from the horses for their own protection. And so they will use the reins, to twirl the reins, so that they will stay away from the horses. But they do not use those reins to lash out, to try to strike people. Those agents did not use those reins in any way, shape, or form to try to strike anybody,” he said, adding that horses are used as a “deterrent technique” to prevent illegals from entering the country.
Regarding comments made by White House officials, Judd said Border Patrol officials feel abandoned in the wake of a burgeoning crisis.
In recent weeks, more than 15,000 Haitian illegal aliens camped underneath an international bridge spanning Del Rio, Texas, and Mexico, prompting humanitarian concerns.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday said that horse patrols around the border will be suspended following the images having gone viral.
“Which the president feels, we all feel, was inhumane, immoral, ineffective, wasn’t operationally working. And because of the disfunction of it, we have led to a very broken system that we’re dealing with today,” she said in a comment at the White House.
The tragic mess on the Texas border and the huge influx of Haitians (FYI: who aren’t fleeing Haiti; they left Haiti quite a while ago for Latin America) has created a dangerous and unhygienic situation that has been compared to the third world.
Events are moving so fast, it’s impossible for us to track them all in a newsletter, but here are some of the most recent reports from Fox News’ Bill Melugin.
Melugin is doing a great job of covering this story that the White House is outright lying about while much of the mainstream media studiously ignores it.
One of the more striking revelations is that despite the White House’s toothless claims that the border is closed and every illegal crosser will be sent home, Melugin reports that they’re actually being given “requests” (not orders) to appear at an ICE office within the next 60 days.
I’m sure they’ll all comply with those requests.
When called out in the Senate for his disastrous handling of the border, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas got snippy, and instead of answering the question, he snapped that he works 18 hours a day (imagine how bad the crisis would be if he worked 24/7 at it!).
His latest move that suggests a sleep-deprived mind is to take the mounted Border Patrol agents off their already impossible duty and put them on desk jobs, despite the woeful lack of personnel we’re already suffering and the fact that the wild accusation against them is both bogus and idiotic.
The left needs a constant stream of fake news to make their opponents look racist because otherwise, Americans might focus on real news and realize these people should never be trusted with any public office above the rank of assistant dog catcher.
The latest example is the continuing brouhaha over photos they claim showed the Border Patrol whipping Haitian illegal immigrants when those were actually their leather reins flying.
They don’t carry whips, and they didn’t strike anyone with their reins, which they spin to keep people back for their own safety and to prevent anyone from grabbing the reins and taking control of their horses.
This is standard procedure for cops on horseback.
But never mind that: Leftists who know even less about cowboy skills than they do about math skills are continuing their outrage fest even after the “whipping migrants” narrative was debunked all the way to the bunkhouse.
Leave it to Rep. Maxine Waters to have the craziest take on the story, not only accusing the agents of using (nonexistent) whips on migrants but saying, “What we witnessed was worse than what we witnessed in slavery.”
“I’m unhappy, and I’m not just unhappy with the cowboys who were running down Haitians and using their reins to whip them. I’m unhappy with this administration,” Rep. Maxine Waters says at a news conference on the situation at the U.S. southern border. https://t.co/tUeqoESHTPpic.twitter.com/BuWTMs8ilf
That’s as offensive as downplaying the Holocaust by claiming your political opponent is “literally Hitler,” which is also something the left does regularly. But supposedly more responsible officials were almost as bad.
Even the president and vice president, desperate for any distraction from their cascade of tragic disasters, pointed fingers at the Border Patrol cavalry, with Biden calling the (false) accusation disturbing, Jen Psaki declaring it “obviously horrific” and Kamala Harris saying it’s “horrible” and demanding a “thorough investigation.”
Uh, Vice President Harris? If you really want a thorough investigation of what’s happening on the border, might I suggest you start by actually going there?
Despite claims made by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the majority of those entering the U.S. illegally are not being deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the head of the Border Patrol union, Brandon Judd, told The Center Square.
Mayorkas, who traveled to Del Rio, Texas, where nearly 15,000 Haitian migrants gathered this past week, warned illegal immigrants at a news conference, “If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life.”
Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that DHS, Border Patrol, ICE, and the U.S. Coast Guard were moving individuals from Del Rio to other processing locations in order to take individuals into custody, process them and remove them from the country.
It added that DHS was securing additional transportation to accelerate the pace and increase the capacity of removal flights to Haiti and other destinations in the hemisphere within the next 72 hours. But the agency hasn’t confirmed how many flights, and how many Haitians have been deported.
A few days later, at another news conference in Del Rio on Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, when asked about the Biden administration’s deportation flight plans, said, “They have shown no capability of being able to process these migrants by the end of this week. The only thing they’ve shown is an incapability of dealing with this crisis, candidly, in a way they pretend it doesn’t even exist. And we’re here to tell you it exists.”
The Associated Press reported that Haitians have been released on a “very, very large scale” in recent days, with one official estimating the number of those releases is in the thousands.
“The first three [deportation] flights that went to Haiti included family units” who were deported, Judd said. But deportations are on a case-by-case basis, he added, and inconsistent.
For example, “if the flights focus on deporting people to Haiti, the flights to Guatemala stop and those people are released,” he said. “So, all you’re doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul. You’re shifting resources to handle one segment and you’re releasing the other segment. Not all the people from Haiti are being flown back; not all the people are being expelled from under Title 42. A good number of them are in fact being released with an NTA (Notice to Appear) or NTR (Notice to Return),” notices related to the immigration court process.
Border Patrol agents make official arrests and transfer individuals to ICE facilities. ICE then determines whether they are released with an order to reappear for court hearings to go through the process to remain in the U.S. or be deported.
Haitians already processed and released into the community were observed boarding buses at the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition in Del Rio. Roughly 50-60 Haitians at a time boarded a large commercial charter bus, and smaller groups were shuttled in a grey rundown minivan to the local bus station. With brown envelopes in hand, a mix of families and individuals also carried with them food, cash and papers to help them reach their next destination.
When asked where the bus was going, the first stop was San Antonio, with a final destination of Houston, The Center Square was told. Officials wouldn’t confirm if the Haitians were boarding planes to another destination or if San Antonio or Houston were their final destinations. This group of Haitians had already been processed by Border Patrol and released into the general population.
Meanwhile, a steady flow of people continued to cross the Rio Grand River farther upstream from the bridge, crossing onto private property on a heavily trafficked area on Vega Verde, where Texas Department of Public Safety officers were waiting to detain them and call Border Patrol for pickup.
DHS has also been busing Haitians to El Paso, Laredo, and cities in the Rio Grande Valley for processing, also adding them to flights to Tucson, Arizona, the Associated Press reported.
Judd said of the roughly 200,000 apprehensions that Border Patrol makes, “they are probably dealing with 120,000 people because sometimes the same person or people are apprehended more than once. Of those, it’s right about 60-68 percent are being released [into the community] with NTAs. The vast majority are not being expelled or deported. The majority are being released into the United States.”
When asked if this ratio applied to Haitians under the Del Rio Bridge, he said, “If we go off, historically speaking, the majority of the ones under the bridge will be released.”
But this number can shift depending on which segment of the population ICE chooses to deport, he added. ICE “can say we’re going to send all the Haitians back but then we’re going to release all the other people from another country. Or we can release the Haitians.”
In response to being asked if there’s consistency in this process, he replied, “Zero consistency.”
Facebook Inc. has been revealed to be an enabler in the humanitarian crisis at the southern border by permitting information about illegally crossing the border to spread on WhatsApp.
Roughly 14,000 Haitian migrants arrived at the border this month, coming through Mexico into the Rio Grande Valley community of Del Rio, Texas, according to the Associated Press.
The outlet reported that since President Joe Biden took office, migrants had been informed through social media to arrive in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, before coming to the United States.
The community borders Del Rio and is generally considered safer than other nearby towns.
The AP highlighted the story of a Haitian migrant named Fabricio Jean, who is now in the migrant encampment along the Del Rio International Bridge, and how he was able to arrive in the U.S.
“You will need about 20,000 pesos (about $1,000 U.S. dollars) for the buses. You need to take this bus to this location and then take another bus,” Jean said, citing tips sent to him by his brother through WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook.
Another woman who arrived with her two teenage children told the outlet her cousin sent her audio messages on the app, which guided them to the U.S.
“Wait in Mexico until this month is over. They will pick up everyone under the bridge. After that, they will give me the contact to enter Miami,” her cousin said in the recording.
According to the report, Facebook’s current policy does allow for information about migration to be communicated through its platforms, even if it is information about illegal immigration.
The Big Tech company does draw the line when it comes to sending information requesting money for human smuggling activities and bans all posts of that nature.
Last week, instructions on getting through Mexico, including routes to avoid and specific bus companies to use, were posted by a member of a Facebook group for Haitians in Chile.
“Good luck and be careful,” a translation of the post said.
Migrants have also been using YouTube to share information on how to get into the U.S.
The AP also highlighted the story of Robins Exile, who left Brazil after losing his job, and his pregnant wife. On their way to Ciudad Acuña, the couple changed course and went to Tijuana, Mexico, after other migrants shared warnings on YouTube and WhatsApp.
“A lot of Haitians are advising now not to come to Acuña,” he said. “They say it’s no longer a good place.”
In the spring, temporary protections were offered to Haitians escaping social unrest, however, those protections were limited to those in the U.S. before July 29.
Many of the social media posts did not include that information, leaving many Haitians still seeking to enter the U.S. with the impression that they would also be eligible for the protections.
“[W]e are very concerned that Haitians who are taking the irregular migration path are receiving misinformation that the border is open,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said this week.
The administration also worried the migrants believed “they qualify for protected status despite the expired deadline.”
“I want to make sure it is known that this is not the way to come to the United States,” Mayorkas said.
Those who made it to Del Rio are facing a variety of outcomes, drawing bipartisan criticism.
Many conservatives are frustrated that migrants are being released into the U.S. and given court papers, whereas liberals are furious about some migrants being deported back to Haiti via repatriation flights.
Daniel Lewis Foote, who the Biden administration appointed in July to be the U.S. special envoy to Haiti, resigned from his position Wednesday due to the decision to deport the refugees.
“I will not be associated with the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs in control of daily life,” he said in his letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“Our policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed, and my recommendations have been ignored and dismissed, when not edited to project a narrative different from my own.”
SCOOP: Special Envoy for Haiti, Amb Daniel Foote, a career member of foreign service, has RESIGNED. In his letter of resignation, he says he will not be associated with the U.S.’s “inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees.” Letter attached. pic.twitter.com/KlW5GoTF3u
The Biden administration’s immigration policies have been primarily responsible for the crisis, and it has now been revealed that Big Tech added fuel to the fire by allowing people to get details about the dangerous and often illegal journey across the southern border.
The executive branch is going back on its word about releasing Haitian migrants into the United States, according to an Associated Press report.
Two officials told the AP there have been roughly thousands of migrants who have been sent on a “very, very large scale” from Del Rio, Texas, to cities such as Tucson, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas.
The report explained that the migrants are being given immigration hearing dates instead of being expelled from the U.S. and sent back to Haiti, as they entered the country illegally.
Furthermore, the federal government has been using Coast Guard planes and transportation contractors in order to transport people away from the large encampment to other cities with more resources.
This directly contradicts comments made by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas at a Monday news conference, where he ensured that those coming across the border will not be allowed to remain in the U.S.
“If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life,” Mayorkas said.
Obviously, that has been determined to be a lie, which should be no surprise to those who have been watching the border crisis from the start.
DHS published a statement Saturday that also went against the current actions of the government in its desperate attempt to solve the humanitarian disaster within a crisis.
“The Biden Administration has reiterated that our borders are not open, and people should not make the dangerous journey,” the department said.
“Individuals and families are subject to border restrictions, including expulsion. Irregular migration poses a significant threat to the health and welfare of border communities and to the lives of migrants themselves, and should not be attempted.”
Haiti is currently recovering from a major earthquake and political instability, which was highlighted by the assassination of former President Jovenel Moïse in July.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, along with several other Republican governors, has criticized Biden’s mishandling of the border as epitomized by the Haitian migrant situation.
“When you have an administration that is not enforcing the law in this country, you see the onrush of people like what we saw walking across this dam that is right behind me, because the Biden administration has been promoting and allowing open-border policies,” Abbott said at a Tuesday news conference.
“It has been the state of Texas that had to step up,” he added.
As Biden continues to create chaos, Texas has taken the lead on securing the border, not just for border communities, but for communities across Texas & the U.S.
We will continue surging state resources to save lives & keep Texans safe.
Regardless of what the administration says, the decision to send massive numbers of migrants into the U.S. puts a significant strain on both local governments and the public.
The choice should be clear: Prioritize the safety and stability of America’s border and its nearby communities.
Biden’s team lied, and now Americans will have to face the consequences.
Texans are doing the job America won’t do. At least, what the Biden administration won’t do.
The state Department of Public Safety and the National Guard used hundreds of state-owned vehicles — most of them apparently SUVs — to create a barrier to help stop the surge of illegal immigrants into Texas, according to the KXAS-TV in Fort Worth.
Gov. Greg Abbott said during a news conference Tuesday afternoon that Texas must use “unprecedented” measures to stop the influx. The SUV barrier appeared outside Del Rio, where about 15,000 migrants, mostly Haitians, have entered the U.S. from Mexico in recent days.
“They have created a steel barrier preventing people from being able to cross the border,” the Republican said, according to KXAS.
“One day there were countless people coming across the border, then the DPS put up all these DPS vehicles, and suddenly, in an instant, people stopped crossing the border in this location,” he said. “That strategy is working.”
Abbott was critical of the Biden administration for not securing the border and said Texas is putting up $2 billion more for border protection, The Washington Post said.
“When you have an administration that is not enforcing the law in this country, when you have an administration that has abandoned any pretense of securing the border and securing our sovereignty, you see the onrush of people like what we saw walking across this dam that is right behind me,” the governor said in Val Verde County, according to KTVT-TV in Dallas.
Initially, there were 14,600 Haitians in Del Rio, according to Abbott, the number eventually declining to about 8,600.
The Daily Mail, citing a Department of Homeland Security source, said 1,083 of them had been returned to Haiti and more deportation flights were scheduled Wednesday.
Up to 5,000 Haitians were released into the United States, Abbott said. That’s contrary to a Biden administration pledge to prohibit Haitian entry into the U.S. from Mexico.
“If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said at a Monday news conference, according to The Associated Press.
Despite the statement that the migrants would immediately be deported, many were released and told to report to an immigration office within 60 days, according to Abbott.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s desire to project a kinder-gentler image regarding immigration (especially against the profile of its villain, former President Donald Trump) hit a snag with pictures of Border Patrol agents on horseback using whips to round up migrants — according to many establishment media outlets, at least.
The “whips” were actually long reins on the horses.
HORSE LESSON FOR NOVICES: The horse-mounted Border Patrol guys down in Del Rio are riding “western” style so they are using what’s known as a “split rein” to control the horse. It’s where the reins are attached to the bit but aren’t attached to each other. (1)
The reins are held in the rider's hands. They are usually long enough to perhaps APPEAR whip-like and occasionally a rider will use it to spur the mount a bit. But reins are not whips. Border Patrol doesn't carry whips. (2-END)
But image is everything with some people, and some Democrats were aghast that while their party is in charge, border agents could be seen acting like … acting like … well, Republicans or something.
Actually, border agents were just doing their jobs, using horses, long known to law enforcement as effective in crowd control.
And nobody was being whipped.
Except the sovereignty of the nation.
Republicans, by the way, expressed some sympathy toward the Haitians, according to the Daily Mail, because the migrants were led to believe they would receive asylum in the U.S.
And why not?
In May, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Haitians could receive Temporary Protected Status in the country, meaning they wouldn’t be deported and could apply for authorization to work.
In July, Haitian President Jovenel Moise was assassinated, and in August, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Haiti killed some 2,000 people.
Late last week, 12,000 migrants showed up at Del Rio; some had been refugees in Brazil and Chile following a 2010 earthquake.
On Monday, the Biden administration said they couldn’t come in. Some were deported, but by Wednesday — no surprise — there were reports that thousands had been released into the U.S.
The great tragedy of U.S. immigration policy — such as it is — is its ongoing inconsistency. Obey our laws, we say, but if we need Democratic votes, or cheap labor, or whatever, we can always (wink, wink) make some special arrangements.
Oh, and no matter what the Biden crew says, it’s always wise to trust your lyin’ eyes.
That’s just what Abbott’s people did.
Which is why they created a steel barrier to protect the southern border.
The following is an installment in a weekly series of commentary articles by Cameron Arcand, founder of the conservative commentary website Young Not Stupid and a contributor to The Western Journal.
Are you shocked by the flood of Haitian refugees at the border? You might not be.
In fact, 14,000 illegal migrants camped out underneath a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, hardly even feels newsworthy anymore.
These people made the perilous journey through Mexico to escape the poverty and political instability in their own country, and the Biden administration was not up to the challenge.
Local law enforcement described the conditions at the encampment as “third world-like,” according to Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin.
“Really hard to believe this is the United States of America,” Melugin added.
Fox News’s @BillFOXLA: “Local law enforcement out here are on-the-record describing this [migrant] camp as ‘third-world-like conditions'” and “really hard to believe this is the United States of America.”
That’s a major problem, yet President Joe Biden’s handling of the border has numbed the public to chaos and tragedy.
There is a humanitarian crisis happening on American soil, and it’s nothing more than we’ve come to expect.
Illegal migrant encounters are at a 21-year high, with nearly 200,000 in July alone, according to Pew Research Center.
That is unacceptable. The Biden administration has clearly lost control of the border despite having had several months to get this “seasonal uptick” under control.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is saying there will be “dramatic results” in Del Rio in the coming days, Politico reported; but don’t hold your breath.
The President just addressed the UN— not one mention of the crisis at the border where roughly 15,000 people surged into the US (mostly Haitians) from Mexico.
More than 9,000 remain here in Del Rio waiting to be processed by @CBP
Haitian immigrants being deported back to the Caribbean nation bit Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on a flight bound for Port-au-Prince from Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, according to the Washington Examiner.
The Monday incident saw two Haitian immigrants leave their seats as the aircraft taxied to the runway and attack ICE agents by biting them, forcing takeoff to be delayed, the report said.
Federal assault charges will be brought against the two Haitian attackers, the Examiner reported.
“[The Haitians] all realized they were going back to Haiti and lost it,” a senior federal law enforcement officer told the newspaper.
Last month, Haiti was hit by a powerful earthquake resulting in thousands of deaths.
The devastating temblor came just weeks after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
A second deportation flight was reported canceled by the U.S. government because Haitian migrants on board were “being disruptive and not complying” while the plane was on the tarmac, the Examiner reported.
Meanwhile, in another incident, three ICE officers were injured during a Tuesday assault at the Port-au-Prince airport when a group from a plane carrying single adult men stormed another recently arriving flight carrying deported families, according to NBC News.
The three ICE agents suffered non-life-threatening injuries, the report said.
CNBC video from the scene showed the chaotic incident at Haiti’s main airport, with returnees reacting angrily to spending large sums of money on arduous journeys attempting to reach the United States after learning the Biden administration had stopped deporting Haitians. https://www.youtube.com/embed/cgmu0ZGbjSc?feature=oembed
“On Tuesday, Sept. 21, some adult migrants caused two separate disruptions on the tarmac after deplaning in Port-au-Prince, Haiti,” a Department of Homeland Security representative said in a statement, according to NBC News.
“Haitian crowd control officers responded to both incidents and resolved the situations. ICE fully respects the rights of all people to peacefully express their opinions, while continuing to perform its immigration enforcement mission consistent with our priorities, federal law and agency policy.”
Some 10,000 migrants, mainly Haitians, have set up an impromptu camp under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, after wading across the Rio Grande separating Mexico and the United States.
NEW: This is what it looks like under the international bridge in Del Rio this morning. Latest numbers as of 6 AM.
6,722 migrants 4,742 family units 1,489 single adult men 418 single adult females 73 family “groups”
300+ pregnant women here as of yesterday. @FoxNews
Border agents have begun expelling planeloads of mostly Haitian migrants from the sprawling makeshift camp.
Optics for the Biden administration worsened on Monday after viral footage from the U.S.-Mexico border showed officers on horseback trying to push Haitians back across the border.
“We are increasing the frequency and number of the repatriation flights each day,” he said. “And we’re hoping that what we are doing now serves as a deterrent because it backs up the words that we have spoken since the very outset: that irregular migration is not the way to enter the United States. It will not work.”
Deterrence is the ancient ability to scare somebody off from hurting you, your friends, or your interests—without a major war.
Desire peace? Then be prepared for war. Or so the Romans believed.
It’s an easily understood concept in the abstract. But deterrence still remains a mystical quality in the concrete since it is only acquired with difficulty and yet easily forfeited.
The tired democracies of the 1930s learned that lesson when they kept acquiescing to Hitler’s serial aggressions.
Hitler’s Germany foolishly later attacked a far stronger Soviet Union in 1941, given Moscow’s lost deterrence after its lackluster performances in Poland and Finland, its pact with the Nazis, and its recent purges of its own officer corps.
Deterrence is omnipresent and also applies well beyond matters of war and peace. The current crime wave of murder and violent assault in our major cities is the wage of loud efforts to defund the police and contextualize crimes as somehow society’s rather than the criminal’s fault.
As a result, lawbreakers now believe there is a good chance that robbing people or hurting or killing them might result in monetary gain or at least bloody satisfaction. They no longer fear a likely sentence of 30 years in prison. So, they see little risk in hurting people. And innocents suffer.
With a border wall, an end to catch and release, and tough jawboning of the Mexican and Central American governments, a new American deterrent stance in 2019–20 discouraged once unstoppable waves of migrants.
Northern bound migrants knew that even if they reached and crossed the border, there was a good chance all such effort would be for naught, given quick apprehension and deportation.
So, in their rational calculations, migrants waited at home for less deterrent times. And they found them when Joe Biden stopped construction on the wall, renewed catch and release, and eased pressures on Mexico to interrupt caravans headed northward.
Abroad, Donald Trump restored the strategic deterrence lost by his predecessor.
Barack Obama had dismissed the murderous ISIS as “JVs”—and they thrived. He shrugged when China stole territory in the South China Sea to build military bases. He dismantled missile defense in Europe to coax Vladimir Putin to behave during his own 2012 reelection campaign.
Obama loudly announced redlines in Syria while never intending to enforce them. He gave the Taliban back their incarcerated terrorist leaders in exchange for the return of the American deserter Bowe Bergdahl. And he sent the Iranians nocturnal cash to coax them to conclude an appeasing Iran deal. Aggression followed as U.S. deterrence eroded.
As an antidote to all that, Trump destroyed the ISIS “caliphate.” He obliterated an attack of Russian mercenaries in Syria. He took out terrorist masterminds like Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and the ISIS cutthroat Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
To dangerous actors, an unpredictable Trump appeared likely to strike back if provoked. As a result, America’s enemies become fearful of challenging the United States. And its friends and neutrals were more ready to join a power again deemed not just reliable, but willing to take reasonable risks to assist in their safety.
Key to deterrence is for all parties to know beforehand the relative power of each and the likelihood that it may be used. When strong powers unfortunately transmit signals of weakness, whether deliberately or inadvertently, then weak powers are confused and come to believe their rivals may not be so strong as their armed forces appear. Often, unnecessary wars are the unfortunate result.
These are quite dangerous times because Joe Biden has cut the defense budget. He withdrew recklessly from Afghanistan, leaving behind American citizens, our Afghan allies and friends, and tens of billions of dollars worth of modern weaponry and equipment.
He angered our NATO partners who were abandoned with some 8,000 troops, in a country that the United States had once implored them to enter. He has politicized the military into a caricature of an elite woke top brass at odds with traditionalist enlisted soldiers.
The result is that our enemies—Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Chinese Communist apparat, the Iranian theocrats, the lunatic North Koreans—are now pondering whether Biden’s reckless laxity is an aberration. Or is it now characteristic of his administration? Or does it even signal a new weaker and confused America that offers enemies strategic openings?
Like the would-be felon, or the potential border crosser, our enemies know the United States has the power to deter unwanted behavior, given its vast military, huge economy, and global culture.
But they may have contempt that with such strength comes such perceived confusion. And thus, in the manner of an emboldened criminal, or migrant, they try something that they would otherwise not.
In sum, deterrence at home and abroad is now dangerously lost. And it will be even scarier trying to recover what was so rashly and foolishly thrown away.
Security at the United States’ southern border has fallen sharply since President Joe Biden took office, the former chief of the U.S. Border Patrol says.
Rodney Scott was part of the border enforcement agency for nearly 30 years before being ousted in June. In a new letter penned to top senators, Scott said he witnessed an “unprecedent[ed] seismic shift in border security and immigration policy” after Biden was sworn in on Jan. 20.
“I believe this policy shift and the associated public statements created the current border crisis. Of greater concern, I also witnessed a lack of any meaningful effort to secure our borders,” he added.
The United States made advances in border security following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks after finding out that some of the attackers illegally entered the country from Mexico. But Scott said this year, under Biden, that security has rapidly disintegrated.
Biden administration officials are ignoring common-sense recommendations and seem “laser-focused on expediting the flow of migrants into the U.S.” while downplaying “the significant vulnerability this creates for terrorists, narcotics, smugglers, human traffickers, and even hostile nations to gain access to our homeland,” Scott wrote.
He accused Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of providing factually incorrect information to Congress and letting illegal immigrants who, by law, should be expelled from the country remain here. He urged top senators, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), to request detailed information on the situation from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of their oversight responsibility.
Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol, declined to comment. DHS, which includes both, did not respond to a request for comment.
Then-President Donald Trump speaks with then-Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott (R) as they participates in a ceremony commemorating the 200th mile of border wall at the international border with Mexico in San Luis, Arizona, on June 23, 2020. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
The letter was written in mid-September and released this week by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
“It’s a devastating letter. It should be a bombshell,” Johnson told The Epoch Times.
Johnson quoted from the letter in a congressional hearing on Tuesday that featured, among others, Mayorkas.
Of the over 1.3 million apprehensions at the southern border this year, Johnson asked, “how many immigrants have been released into the United States?”
Mayorkas said he did not have those numbers but promised to provide them later to the senator.
Biden and his administration have radically altered immigration enforcement from the previous administration, which had cut down on illegal immigration through tools like the Migrant Policy Protocols, a program that forced many asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their claims were heard. Mayorkas ended that program.
Mayorkas claimed that the administration’s strategy is working, pointing to a slight drop in apprehensions in August from July. He and other officials have said it will take time for the overhaul to show results.
Johnson, though, alleged that what’s currently happening is what Democrats want to happen.
“They’ve got a plan. It’s called completely open borders, and they’re executing that plan, and from their standpoint, he was working swimmingly well,” he told The Epoch Times. “I’m hoping the rest of America realizes what an unmitigated disaster and the serious consequences [and] the homeland and national security impact of this.”
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki struggled to answer questions from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy on Wednesday about President Joe Biden’s border crisis, including whether Biden has ever even been to the southern border.
“Just following up on this very basic, but very important question, you’re telling us that the DHS chief has the most recent numbers about how many of these Haitians under the bridge have been sent back and how many have been released into the U.S.,” Doocy said. “The DHS chief is telling us that he doesn’t know. So, who else can we ask?”
“You can certainly ask the Department of Homeland Security,” Psaki said.
“The chief says he doesn’t know,” Doocy responded.
“I am confident he wanted to have the most up-to-date numbers, and we will venture to get you those, I promise you, this afternoon,” Psaki claimed.
WATCH:
DOOCY TIME: “You’re telling us that the DHS chief has the most recent numbers about how many of these Haitians….have been sent back and how many have been released into the U.S. The DHS chief is telling us he doesn’t know, so who else can we ask?” pic.twitter.com/4rRipqGIbJ
“Is this an issue of not knowing, or is this an issue of a lot more people are being released into the U.S. than are being sent out?” Doocy pressed.
“That is certainly not the issue,” Psaki claimed without evidence. “First, I think it’s important to reiterate what I conveyed earlier about what the actual process is: Individuals are expelled under Title 42. If they can’t be expelled under Title 42, they are put into a removal process. If they’re put into a removal process, they’re either transported to an ICE facility or released with a legal document. That legal document includes fingerprints, photos, phone numbers, an address in the United States, and a background check.”
WATCH:
Doocy: “Is this an issue of not knowing or is this an issue of a lot more people are being released into the U.S. then are being sent out?”
“Has President Biden ever been to the southern border?” Doocy pressed.
“In his life?” Psaki asked.
“Yes,” Doocy answered.
“I will have to get — look back in my history books and check the times he’s been to the southern border. I’d be happy to,” Psaki claimed.
“We have been looking all morning, and we cannot find any record of him visiting the border as president, vice president, senator, or even as a concerned citizen,” Doocy responded. “Why would that be?”
“I can check and see when the last time or when he may have been,” Psaki claimed.
WATCH:
Doocy with the question of the day: “Has President Biden ever been to the southern border…We have been looking all morning and we can not find any record of him visiting the border as President, Vice President, senator, or even as a concerned citizen. Why would that be?” pic.twitter.com/JJF5NasUy6
“But tell me more about why you’re asking,” Psaki continued.
“Because this is a president who makes a point when there are disasters in this country, like a wildfire or a hurricane, to go and see for himself firsthand what the needs are of the local community so that he can have an informed POV to make policy,” Doocy answered. “Why doesn’t he do that — why doesn’t he go down to Del Rio, Texas, and see what’s going on?”
“Well, first of all, Peter, I think the situation at the border is the result of a broken system,” Psaki claimed. “And the president certainly relies on his experience.”
Psaki claimed that Biden relies on “all of his experiences and his time in office” to deal with the problem, even though she could not name a single time that Biden has ever been to the border.
WATCH:
Doocy: “This is a President who makes a point when there are disasters in this country, like a wildfire or hurricane…so that he can have an informed POV to make policy. Why doesn’t he do that? Why doesn’t he go down to Dell Rio, Texas and see what’s going on?” (6/6) pic.twitter.com/fFj04LkTA9
Move comes as Biden administration faces an influx of illegal immigrants in Del Rio, Tex.
The Biden administration is tapping a left-wing attorney who has publicly endorsed sanctuary laws for illegal aliens to serve as Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s top prosecutor, according to an internal memo obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
ICE announced the hiring of Kerry Doyle, a longtime partner at the Boston-based law firm Graves & Doyle, as the agency’s new principal legal adviser, a role that oversees 25 field locations and 1,250 attorneys. The office serves as ICE’s representative in all removal proceedings and litigates cases against illegal aliens and terrorists.
“Throughout her legal practice in Boston, Ms. Doyle worked closely with the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition and Massachusetts Law Reform Institute providing technical assistance and public testimony and various immigration-related policy issues before the state legislature and Boston City Council,” the ICE memo reads.
A spokesman for ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Doyle’s appointment comes as the Biden administration faces an influx of Haitian refugees, who are overrunning the border city of Del Rio, Texas. After reversing a bevy of Trump-era immigration rules, an uptick in illegal migration across the Southern border has strained resources and presented a political problem for the president, who repudiated Trump’s hardline approach to policing the border but risks political blowback from an influx of illegal residents.
Doyle’s LinkedIn profile spotlights her work as co-counsel in a case that pushed for — and won — a temporary restraining order against then-president Donald Trump’s 2017 travel ban. The attorney also spoke in favor of a Massachusetts bill called the “Safe Communities Act” in early 2020 arguing that ICE was “out of control.” . The measure would have applied sanctuary city laws nationwide and sharply limited the state’s cooperation with the federal government on the deportation of illegal immigrants.
“The Safe Communities Act limits state cooperation … [with ICE]: don’t ask about immigration status; don’t pay for sheriffs to act as ICE agents; tell people their rights,” a description of the bill by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts reads. In June, Doyle told a local news outlet that the state must pass the bill, saying state Democrats should not trust “the Biden administration’s more supportive tone as an excuse not to do what our state needs to do.”
Doyle, who did not respond to a request for comment, has also helped represent illegal aliens convicted of crimes in the past. In March, she filed a petition with ACLU Massachusetts to release two criminal aliens with medical conditions, citing the COVID-19 pandemic. Doyle’s name has since been scrubbed from her previous law firm’s website.
One of President Joe Biden’s first executive orders in office was to suspend arrests, deportations, and investigations of most criminal aliens for 100 days. Deportations under Biden have hit a record low. U.S. immigration judges ordered just 25,000 deportations by the end of August, compared to 152,000 in August 2020. The total number of cases completed by immigration courts are at a 28-year low, even as Border Patrol apprehensions hit a 21-year high.
Doyle will succeed John Trasviña, who assumed the role in January.
DEL RIO, Texas—The United States has deported more than 1,000 Haitians who streamed into the small border city of Del Rio, Texas, although officials are refusing to say how many others have been released into America’s interior.
The number of illegal immigrants, primarily from Haiti, rapidly grew under the international bridge near the border last week, at one point topping 14,000. The quick jump sparked the deployment of more than 600 agents and officers, as well as repatriation flights to Haiti.
U.S. officials have since moved more than 6,500 people from Del Rio to other parts of the border in an attempt to alleviate pressure. Approximately 1,083 have been deported back to Haiti on nine flights through Sept. 21, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
Others are being released into the interior. How many is unclear, because DHS officials aren’t saying.
The same spokesperson declined to answer questions about those being released, while Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, both offices within DHS, referred The Epoch Times to DHS.
Border Patrol dropping Haitians off at local NGO Border Humanitarian Coalition after processing them. NGO gives them food, water, etc, and loads into buses to interior of United States. pic.twitter.com/TuWxF7163w
White House press secretary Jen Psaki refused to give the data during a briefing in Washington and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has twice this week declined before Congress to share data about the number of illegal immigrants being released. On Sept. 21, he told senators in Washington he didn’t have the precise numbers and wanted to wait so he could provide accurate information; on Sept. 22, he again said he didn’t have the data.
“Yesterday, you were asked exactly the same question and you gave exactly the same answer. You would think you would be a little better prepared now that you’ve been asked that question. … You don’t have that information?” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) said.
“I work 18 hours a day. So when I returned from yesterday’s hearing, I actually focused on the mission,” Mayorkas responded. “We will get that data both to the senator who posed it yesterday and to you, congressman, today.”
The Biden administration is dealing with an unprecedented surge in illegal immigration, a surge critics say stems from his administration’s policies. The number of illegal immigrant apprehensions at the southern border is on track to set a new record for the calendar year. And the administration has refused to shift its strategy, claiming it’s working.
Part of the strategy is releasing illegal immigrants into the country’s interior, which has been described by some as “catch and release.” Some 600,000 illegal aliens have been released into the United States since President Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, told The Epoch Times in a text message.
Haitian nationals collect their belongings after U.S. authorities flew them out of a Texas border city after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico, at Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Sept. 21, 2021. (Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters)
That’s about half of the aliens who have been stopped by border agents since the inauguration. They’re released with a Notice to Appear, which gives a future court date to kick off their immigration proceedings, or a Notice to Report, a new phenomenon that requests the alien reports to a local ICE office within 60 days of being released.
Two U.S. officials told The Associated Press that many Haitians are also being freed, undercutting Mayorkas’s claims that Haiti nationals shouldn’t travel to the United States because they won’t be able to stay. One official said many of those being freed are being told to report to an immigration office within 60 days, as opposed to receiving a notice to appear in court.
A Border Patrol source told The Epoch Times that 3,843 illegal immigrants were apprehended in the Del Rio Border Sector in Texas between Sept. 20 at midnight and Sept. 21 at 11:45 a.m., with another 1,125 immigrants evading capture. Another 2,435 were apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley sector, in addition to 301 “got-aways.”
An ICE spokesperson told Fox News that the agency has, over the past several weeks, “released numerous immigrants who transferred from the border after determining they could safely be released into the community under alternate forms of supervision.” One independent reporter spoke with Haitian nationals on a flight out of Texas headed to inland destinations.
Roughly 8,400 illegal immigrants remained in the makeshift Del Rio camp as of late Sept. 21. Mayorkas told senators on Sept. 21 that the goal was to clear the litter-ridden camp in the next 10 days, with “dramatic results” expected in the next two to four days.
That could prove difficult if more keep crossing the border illegally.
Thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly Haitians, live in a primitive, makeshift camp under the International Bridge, which spans the Rio Grande between the United States and Mexico, while waiting to be detained and processed by Border Patrol, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 21, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said on Fox News that lawmakers were briefed on Sept. 21 that 40,000 to 60,000 more Haitians are amassing in Central America “and are on their way in a caravan up to the southwest border.”
Katko said some Haitians are being deported but some aren’t.
“Why? We don’t know,” he said. “The lack of consistency is feeding the frenzy to come across the border, the Southwest border. It’s making our country a lot less safe.”
While Republicans call for more deportations, some groups and Democrats are calling to stop them altogether.
“Deportation flights to Haiti must stop, and those seeking safety at our borders must be granted their legally assured chance to seek asylum,” a coalition of 39 groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote to Biden on Sept. 21.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who rarely criticizes Biden, took him to task on the Senate floor in Washington.
“The policies that are being enacted now—and the horrible treatment of these innocent people who have come to the border—must stop immediately,” Schumer said.
Rep. Maxine Waters was a national disgrace when Donald Trump was in the White House.
Nine months into President Joe Biden’s administration, the spite-spewing Democrat from Southern California is showing she hasn’t lost a step.
A Waters Twitter post on Tuesday – about the widespread lie that Border Patrol agents were using whips on illegal immigrants — proved that.
“Haitians fleeing violence & the lack of a credible government in Haiti are being treated like animals,” Waters wrote. “U.S. government cowboys on horses used whips on Haitians as they sought refuge.”
Naturally, she found a way to blame Biden’s predecessor – without a shred of evidence, or even a conjured rationale: “Why are we following the Trump policies? This horrendous treatment of Haitians must STOP NOW.”
Haitians fleeing violence & the lack of a credible government in Haiti are being treated like animals. U.S. government cowboys on horses used whips on Haitians as they sought refuge. Why are we following the Trump policies? This horrendous treatment of Haitians must STOP NOW.
The problem for Waters is that the post is dead wrong — and anyone who follows the news would know it.
“Why are we following Trump’s policies?” she asked. The fact is, the country is not following the policies Trump put in place during his presidency. Those policies — a “remain in Mexico” rule that made border crashing less attractive for would-be immigrants, plus construction of a much-needed border wall — actually restored a semblance of order to the U.S.-Mexico border.
And as to the latest bogus “horrendous treatment” tale, by the time that Waters was published, the truth about the alleged whips had been widely circulated.
The story that started Sunday with a mistaken description of Border Patrol agents on horseback using whips against illegal immigrants near Del Rio, Texas, had already been debunked.
Anyone who cared to know the truth of the matter could have with just a few minutes of Google searching. The “whips” the agents were wielding were long reins used to control horses.
Even the video posted by one of the main promulgators of the “whip” hoax — Democratic operative Sawyer Hackett, who runs a political action committee founded by Obama-era House and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro — never really backed up the main accusation.
As National Review’s Brittany Bernstein and Isaac Schorr noted on Monday, the videos show the agents “wielding their reins — not whips — as they try to contain the flow of migrants across the river. And, while the agents can be seen swinging their reins menacingly, none of the available video evidence shows border patrol agents striking migrants with their reins.”
Twitter being what it is, of course, Waters had plenty of supporters who evidently don’t care to learn the facts or don’t care what they are. But there was some pushback.
You do know how horses work, right? They use the whips to get them to move. They’re not whipping the people!
Do better.
— Irene Armendariz-Jackson For Congress (@ArmendarizDis16) September 21, 2021
They are not using whips. Get the facts. Follow the law!!!
They seem to be Bidens policies, considering he’s been in office for 8 months on the promise to change how immigration is done in the U.S. The only thing I see is the level of brutality has been increased along with the number of deportation UNDER BIDENS POLICIES…
Administration officials such as Vice President Kamala Harris also took the lie and ran with it. (Harris demanded a “thorough investigation” of a simple fact.) White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the footage “horrific.”
With the Biden administration being buffeted by continuous crises largely of its own making — the border disaster, the continuing fallout from the disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan, disarray in its latest plan to fight COVID-19 — administration officials and top Democrats are desperate for anything that can make them look like the good guys again.
And the Democratic Party has proved over and over again that it’s perfectly willing to betray law enforcement — whether its local police departments or Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers or Border Patrol agents — to build its own political power.
To name just a few examples: Democrats (with the help of the mainstream media, of course) peddled lies about a police officer in the 2014 Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, that helped make Black Lives Matter a national movement. The George Floyd case in Minneapolis gave them license to peddle more lies about American police officers’ allegedly homicidal hatred of blacks.
For years, they’ve been attacking ICE and the Border Patrol for trying to protect American sovereignty – remember New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bogus story about illegal immigrants being forced to drink from toilets?
Now, with a demonstrably incompetent Biden in the White House and disastrous Democratic control over both houses of Congress, the party needs to do something — anything — to distract American voters from the chaos they’ve caused. Midterm elections might be a year away now, but they’re getting closer all the time.
For lunatic lefties like Waters (the chairwoman of the House Finance Committee, God help us), that distraction is Donald Trump — and blaming him for the crises Joe Biden has caused must be an easy lie compared with the countless others Democrats have told.
The presidency changed in 2021, but Maxine Waters hasn’t. She’s still a disgrace.
The fact that she’s a powerful member of what is now the party in power in the United States is even worse.
More than 6,7000 mostly Haitian migrants remain under the Del Rio International Bridge along the Texas border, including more than 300 pregnant women, according to a new report.
Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin tweeted the new information Wednesday morning from Del Rio.
“NEW: This is what it looks like under the international bridge in Del Rio this morning. Latest numbers as of 6 AM.
“6,722 migrants 4,742 family units 1,489 single adult men 418 single adult females 73 family ‘groups’
“300+ pregnant women here as of yesterday,” Melugin tweeted.
The Biden administration has said it plans to send many of the migrants back to Haiti. However, “family units” will be excluded. This will include thousands of the up to 15,000 migrants who have crossed the Mexican border across the Rio Grande into Del Rio.
“We are releasing family groups (couples who claim female is pregnant). Family units (Families w/ children). All a woman has to do is claim she is pregnant and she will be released. They’re asked to please report to immigration within 60 days,” Melugin reported from a Border Patrol source.
From BP source in Del Rio: “We are releasing family groups (couples who claim female is pregnant). Family units (Families w/ children). All a woman has to do is claim she is pregnant and she will be released. They’re asked to please report to immigration within 60 days.”@FoxNews
Independent journalist Ali Bradley reported that at least one of the Haitian women from Del Rio has already given birth.
“While I was boarding my flight out of Texas, I talked with migrants, all from Haiti getting ready to head to: Florida (Orlando), New York, and Maryland,” Bradley tweeted on Wednesday.
“Baby Mateo was born 5 days ago in Del Rio,” he added.
While I was boarding my flight out of Texas, I talked with migrants, all from Haiti getting ready to head to: Florida (Orlando), New York, and Maryland.
KTRK-TV in Houston reported on Wednesday that Haitian migrants from Del Rio have been bused to the area. The report noted thjat “volunteers from a coalition of churches are preparing them for the next part of their journey in America.”
In addition, “The migrants staying there are reportedly families who came to escape violence or persecution. They’ll eventually be taken to Bush Intercontinental Airport or the bus station to meet up with their sponsors in other states.”
Even when President Joe Biden tries to get the situation under control at the border, things still seem to spiral out of hand.
Last week, after letting a camp of mostly Haitian migrants build up at the border in Del Rio, Texas, the Biden administration ordered the prompt removal of the illegal immigrants back to their country of origin. According to The Associated Press, there would be seven expulsion flights planned daily beginning Wednesday.
Three flights Sunday carried over 320 migrants back to their country of origin after they crossed the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.
Roughly 3,300 migrants were moved from the Del Rio camp between Friday until Sunday, according to the AP, which cited Border Patrol Chief Raul L. Ortiz. Of the 12,600 migrants that remained, Border Patrol hoped to have 3,000 of them removed in another day and the encampment gone within one week.
This was at least a sign that the Biden administration was trying to get the situation under control, even if the migrant camp in Del Rio was more of a symptom of a larger problem than the problem itself. However, even in the decision to remove the migrants from the camp and return them to Haiti, there was another sign of the administration’s inability to handle the crisis: A transport bus was overtaken by illegal immigrants about to be deported.
According to the Washington Examiner, a bus bound for San Antonio, Texas, from the Del Rio International Bridge was hijacked by migrants on Monday afternoon during the two-and-a-half hour trip on the contracted private vehicle. Several migrants then escaped from the bus, although they were later taken back into custody
“They did break out of the bus, and they did escape,” a senior law enforcement official told the Examiner.
Brownsville, Texas-based KVEO-TV, reported Monday evening that “several non-citizens attempted to flee the contracted bus.”
All individuals who escaped were back in custody as of 7:15 p.m. No one was hurt.
SOURCES: Haitian migrants revolt while in custody and seize control of privately contracted bus, escape federal custody https://t.co/uDr5hWZidg
The bus was under contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, WVEO reported.
“The safety of our personnel and the people in our custody is of utmost priority, the … noncitizens are all back in our custody,” an ICE representative told the outlet.
This is probably something the administration should be defending itself over. Instead, it’s focused on investigating a wildly false accusation that Border Patrol agents on horseback have been using whips on Haitian migrants.
Border patrol is mounted on horseback rounding up Haitian refugees with whips.
This is unfathomable cruelty towards people fleeing disaster and political ruin. The administration must stop this. pic.twitter.com/BSjT91NSj0
This is Sawyer Hackett, executive director of former Obama-era Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro’s political action committee People Future First.
Vice News also ran a story titled “US Border Agents Are Removing Haitian Migrants Using Horses and Whips.”
Some outlets ran a version of the story in which the agents were using lassos, instead. None of this was true, naturally; the pictures show horse reins flying, not whips cracking.
But never mind that. White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the images “obviously horrific,” according to a White House transcript of Tuesday’s news briefing.
WH Secretary Jen Psaki on footage appearing to show border patrol agents using whips against Haitian migrants coming into the United States from Mexico: “I have seen some of the footage. I don’t have the full context. I can’t imagine what context would make that appropriate.” pic.twitter.com/83O2bjZCyp
“I have seen some of the footage. I don’t have the full context,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a media briefing on Monday.
“I can’t imagine what context would make that appropriate, but I don’t have additional details … I don’t think anyone seeing that footage would think it was acceptable or appropriate.”
Except the footage Psaki is so worried about is being grossly misinterpreted and the country is having a national debate over something that never happened. Vice President Kamala Harris called the images “horrible” and wants a “thorough investigation,” as the Daily Caller reported.
Meanwhile, Haitian migrants hijacking an ICE-contracted bus passes by with almost no notice whatsoever. Oh, our media seem to be saying, they commandeered the transport that was taking them to the airport for deportation? Well, gosh — all’s well that ends well, right? Let’s talk about that Border Patrol agent again. Now, if you look at those reins in just the right light, it could be a lasso, right?
According to a New York Post report, over 6,000 Haitians had been removed from the encampment between Sunday and Tuesday. Given there were nearly 15,000 migrants at the camp at its height, that still means there’s plenty of work to be done.
The administration will be lucky if it doesn’t end up with another bus hijacking like this one. God forbid it turns out to be worse.
Then, the media might start asking questions that don’t have to do with chimerical Border Patrol agents with whips on horseback.
Border Patrol agents who were insulted by Vice President Kamala Harris following erroneous reporting from the establishment media have fired back to defend themselves, with one of them calling those who run our country — people such as Harris — “idiots.”
Leftist Democrats and corporate media liars don’t know an awful lot about rural life, law enforcement or horses, among other things which are so common for many Americans. They certainly, most of them anyway, don’t know anything about corralling a horse with reins in a high-stress situation.
Naturally, when these people saw viral images of Border Patrol agents on horseback on Monday, they arrived at the absolute worst conclusion possible: Cops were out in the desert whipping Haitian migrants.
Reuters apparently knew better, so the agency’s social media managers resorted to using language which was intended to deceive people. A harmless horse rein was called a “whip-like cord” in a headline used by the wire service.
The White House criticized the use of horse reins to threaten Haitian migrants after images circulated of a U.S. border guard on horseback charging at migrants near a riverside camp in Texas https://t.co/g6x1sHyCt6
Brandon Darby, a Breitbart News reporter who has spent years covering drug cartels and illegal immigration in Texas, assisted those who could not understand what they were seeing in the viral images that sent the establishment media into its predictable meltdown.
“Let me help you be more accurate. First photo appears to show Border Patrol using ‘whip-like cord’ on migrant. Second photo of same event shows it’s just the horse reins slinging around and agent is not whipping migrant,” Darby tweeted.
Let me help you be more accurate. First photo appears to show Border Patrol using “whip-like cord” on migrant. Second photo of same event shows it’s just the horse reins slinging around and agent is not whipping migrant. pic.twitter.com/wfFB2Dgweg
Harris apparently never saw the message. She did revert to the standard Democratic Party line which is used any time not all the facts are in, but law enforcement is involved in controversy: She attacked embattled police officers, and said she was “troubled” by their inhumane behavior.
“What I saw depicted about those individuals on horseback treating human beings the way they were is horrible, and I fully support what is happening right now, which is a thorough investigation,” she said on Tuesday. “Human beings should never be treated that way.”
VP HARRIS: “What I saw depicted about those individuals on horseback treating human beings the way they were is horrible…Human beings should never be treated that way.”
“…As a member of the Western Hemisphere, we’ve gotta support some very basic needs…” pic.twitter.com/Q8l5S6W8gi
What an absolute halfwit. Is it really any wonder that people don’t like this woman? At least her take wasn’t as bad as that of CNN contributor and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa:
Some of our country’s fine border enforcement people fired back at Harris and her establishment media comrades to correct the record. Upset Border Patrol agents who have been working 10 hours a day, six days a week to protect a border Harris refuses to do anything about explained the situation to Fox News.
Undersupplied and outmanned, agents have resorted to using horses to get around. This is because as many as 15,000 illegal aliens have descended on Del Rio, Texas, thanks in large part to Harris.
“This whole situation is blowing up and even liberals are turning on this administration,” one unnamed Border Patrol agent told the network. “[Harris] is placing blame on agents to deflect because she and Biden are not going to change how they are handling this.”
Another agent who remained anonymous said the dustup “proves what absolute idiots [those in charge] are.”
“With basic knowledge and two brain cells, anyone knows those agents use split reins. They do use them as a whip, on their horses,” that agent added. “This helps get a quicker response from the horse to move out when needed, especially when the horse may be hesitant with groups of people or other animals.”
“Again it is clear that those ‘in charge,’ a term that is disgusting to use, have no clue about our operations and frankly operate by ignorance and unhinged emotions,” the agent concluded.
Harris, in all fairness, probably doesn’t know a great deal about horses. We know she doesn’t know a lot about policing — which, if this were anyone else, would come as a surprise. She was once California’s top law enforcement agent as the state’s former attorney general, after all.
Of course, if she ever wanted to educate herself about policing, or even horses, there are probably lots of people who would be more than willing to show her the ropes down at the southern border. She would even be in a position to solve a crisis or two while there.
Border Patrol agents say they have uncovered part of a human smuggling operation in Texas after discovering illegal immigrants packed into a hotel room.
As part of the investigation, Rio Grande Valley Sector Border Patrol agents found that illegal immigrants were using a storm drain to illegally cross the border and slip into Edinburg, Texas, according to a news release posted on the Customs and Border Protection website.
The investigation began on Friday with a tip that illegal immigrants were being warehoused in one room at a local hotel, according to the release.
When agents went to see what was going on, “agents observed two individuals enter the suspect room carrying several jugs of water and groceries. Their ongoing surveillance identified other factors indicating that the room was being used to harbor migrants.”
The Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office then used its authority to conduct a welfare check and found 16 people in the small hotel room.
#HumanSmugglers#Texas Chief Patrol Agent Brian Hastings: Hotels near Highway 281 used for illicit activities!
RGV agents and Hidalgo County Seriff’s Office arrested 16 migrants, who claimed they were held for nearly 30 days by human smugglers. pic.twitter.com/0FWnpHGFMf
The group, made up of illegal immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico, said they had been parked in the room for almost 30 days, the news release stated.
The next day, McAllen Border Patrol Station agents watching a storm drain in Hidalgo, Texas, saw several people emerging from it.
In cooperation with the Hidalgo Police Department, seven people, including one unaccompanied child, were arrested. The illegal immigrants were from Honduras and Mexico, the release said.
But the day was not over. That night, four illegal immigrants, from Mexico and Honduras, were arrested after popping out of the storm drain.
Border Patrol agents have been dealing with a spike in human smuggling ever since President Joe Biden took office, especially in the Rio Grande Valley.
A tip from the community led Weslaco agents to a human smuggling stash house in McAllen, TX, resulting in the apprehension of 10 migrants.
In Hidalgo, TX, agents encountered a group of 147 migrants. This is RGV’s 60th large group of 100 or more people smuggled this year. pic.twitter.com/jBDmrrgg9R
— Chief Patrol Agent Brian Hastings (@USBPChiefRGV) June 14, 2021
The flood of illegal immigrants into the U.S. during the Biden presidency was the subject of biting commentary from two Fox News hosts.
“Imagine we shipped thousands and thousands of migrants into Delaware and they’re fishing on the bay or they’re riding Amtrak, packed in unvaxxed, with little English and no skills,” Jesse Watters, co-host of “The Five, ” said Monday as he noted that Biden is insulated from the reality taking place along the border in Texas.
“Where are they going to live? In tents? Are they going to live on the beach? Are we going to put them in starter homes? You’ll have to double every classroom size of every public school district. You’re going to have to raise taxes to pay for the social services,” he said.
“Hannity” host Sean Hannity echoed the thoughts Monday night.
“Biden’s border crisis is worse than ever: Seven months after it started and eight months after he lifted nearly all of President Trump’s border protections,” he said.
“President Trump gifted President Biden with a secure border. But Joe screwed it up,” Hannity said.
The wife of a U.S. Border Patrol agent told Fox News on Monday that the border crisis is so severe in her community, Del Rio, Texas, that she’s been finding footprints underneath her daughters’ bedroom windows.
Alison Anderson appeared on the network to share a story of just how close to home the Biden administration’s border dysfunction is hitting. The area she lives in is currently the epicenter of a humanitarian crisis and an embarrassing display of government ineptitude.
Stunning images shared online over the past several days showed thousands of migrants, most reportedly from Haiti, had ignored the federal government’s weak language advising them not to travel to the United States.
NEW: We’ve learned that the FAA just implemented a two week TFR (Temporary Flight Restrictions) over the international bridge in Del Rio, TX, meaning we can no longer fly our FOX drone over it to show images of the thousands of migrants. FAA says “special security reason”. pic.twitter.com/aJrjAPO2Pz
NEW: From our @FoxNews drone, a look at the migrant camp under the international bridge in Del Rio this morning, where thousands migrants remain after they crossed into the US illegally. pic.twitter.com/06sUY2XCi5
In fact, so many people had amassed under an international bridge in southern Texas that action is finally being taken to fly many of those people back to Haiti.
But according to an account Anderson shared, people crossing the border aren’t just staying put on the banks of the Rio Grande River. Illegal immigrants are crossing through her property just feet from where her three daughters sleep, she said.
NEW: From our @FoxNews drone, a look at the migrant camp under the international bridge in Del Rio this morning, where thousands migrants remain after they crossed into the US illegally. pic.twitter.com/06sUY2XCi5
In fact, so many people had amassed under an international bridge in southern Texas that action is finally being taken to fly many of those people back to Haiti.
But according to an account Anderson shared, people crossing the border aren’t just staying put on the banks of the Rio Grande River. Illegal immigrants are crossing through her property just feet from where her three daughters sleep, she said.
“We had illegals running through the back end of our property towards our house. … We’ve had footprints from illegals, because there is nobody else on our property walking around in the middle of night, underneath our daughters’ bedroom windows,” Anderson said.
She also went after President Joe Biden and those around him for refusing to acknowledge the terrible situation on the border, which she said is “out of control.”
“We would like to hear this actually get called what it is, which is a crisis,” Anderson said. “It is a border crisis. It’s a humanitarian crisis. It’s a health crisis. And, I mean, it’s a security crisis right now.”
She also rightly accused the federal government of abandoning American citizens who are left to deal with the aftermath of its disastrous immigration policies in Texas. Anderson said property owners are on their own, as are the Border Patrol agents, like her husband, who are dealing with a morale crisis as they’ve been forced to sit and watch their country suffer through an invasion.Related:Host of ‘Meet the Press’ Finally Hits His Breaking Point on Biden’s Disastrous Presidency
“It would be great to have some support and, unfortunately, our town, our community, our citizens and our agents, our DPS [Texas Department of Public Safety], our troops, nobody is getting that support,” Anderson told Fox News.
The Biden administration doesn’t care about securing the border, even as its officials ramble on elsewhere about the coronavirus pandemic. Nor does it care about stopping criminals or preventing people from becoming crime victims.
Anderson has lived near the border amid Biden’s historic surge in illegal migration. She would like, at the very least, for the president and his advisers to call the entire mess what it is: a crisis. That is something they still refuse to do.
I asked Sec. Mayorkas if he will publicly admit the situation at the border is a crisis since he was recorded last month privately admitting there is a crisis and it’s unsustainable.
Sadly for people who live in areas dealing with waves of illegal immigration, the federal government apparently is more concerned with hiding what is happening than anything else. The Federal Aviation Administration last week instituted a temporary ban on drones over the border in Del Rio.
The FAA’s conveniently placed a ban on drones flying over the international bridge where 10K+ illegal aliens are waiting to be processed – preventing media from covering the scene.
Biden doesn’t want you to see what a disaster he’s created.
Nobody in the White House or the Department of Homeland Security will have to answer for a crisis if people outside of the affected area don’t know what is going on.
DHS plan calls for hundreds of agents to be reassigned to deal with influx from Haiti
The Department of Homeland Security’s plan to send hundreds of Border Patrol agents to Del Rio, Texas, is leaving large swaths of the U.S.-Mexico border wide open, according to interviews with officials from both agencies.
In response to the surge of mostly Haitian nationals swarming the southern border, DHS committed to moving “400 [Customs and Border Protection] agents and officers” to the Del Rio sector in order to accelerate processing and deportations. DHS will not disclose where those extra agents are coming from, although one Border Patrol agent who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon said DHS requested 30 agents from his outpost in the southwest to be transferred to Del Rio. The plan threatens to exacerbate the existing border crisis in other parts of the country.
“We’re already so stretched thin,” the individual, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said. “This puts so much more strain on our normal border patrol work.”
A spokesman for CBP said he did not have an exact breakdown of where officers would be coming from and referred the Free Beacon to a public memo from DHS, which laid out its “new comprehensive strategy to address the increase in migrant encounters in the Del Rio Sector of South Texas.” The effort to address the 13,000 and growing migrants in Del Rio comes at the cost of leaving hundreds of miles along the U.S.-Mexico border unpatrolled, said one senior DHS official. Another official went on to say that the agency is already creating “processing facilities on the fly,” distracting staff from anti-cartel and other security operations.
The official went on to blame the Biden administration’s decision to exempt most migrant families from Title 42—a Centers for Disease Control power that allows the U.S. government to turn away migrants before they can apply for asylum.
“Releasing families on notices to appear [before an immigration judge] is pretty much telling them to go back and kidnap someone, grab a bunch of kids, or lie about any random person with you being your family,” the official said. “It’s just extremely stupid.”
Bruno Lozano, the Democratic mayor of Del Rio, is pleading with the Biden administration to do more to curb the influx of migrants into his town.
“This is something that really needs to be brought to light,” the mayor said in a statement posted on Twitter. “We need quick action from the administration. We need quick attention to this. We need a response in real-time.”
In his statement, Lozano emphasized the potential security and health threats caused by the thousands of migrants. A Sept. 10 Report released by the DHS inspector general criticized the Biden administration for the lack of disease safety protocols, including the fact that only migrants who show symptoms of illness are tested for COVID-19.
More than 1.5 million migrants have crossed the southern border in 2021. The month of July saw the most migrant encounters in more than two decades. August saw 208,887 encounters, a slight dip from the previous month but still a 317 percent increase from August 2020.
DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas traveled to Del Rio on Monday and told migrants that the U.S. border, contrary to the beliefs of many attempting to cross into the country, is not open.
“I want to make sure that it is known that this is not the way to come to the United States. That is false information,” Mayorkas said. “Irregular migration poses a serious security risk to the migrants themselves. Trying to enter the United States illegally is not worth the tragedy, the money, or the effort.”
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas traveled to Del Rio, Texas, on Monday to address the recent crossing of the southern border by thousands of mostly-Haitian migrants, but refused to say the border is in crisis.
Townhall reporter Julio Rosas published a video on Twitter that included a portion of Mayorkas’ remarks, with a reference to comments Mayorkas made that were leaked to a Fox News correspondent in August.
“I asked Sec. Mayorkas if he will publicly admit the situation at the border is a crisis since he was recorded last month privately admitting there is a crisis and it’s unsustainable,” Rosas wrote.
“He did not, instead saying DHS is focused on ‘meeting the challenge.’”
I asked Sec. Mayorkas if he will publicly admit the situation at the border is a crisis since he was recorded last month privately admitting there is a crisis and it’s unsustainable.
Mayorkas arrived in Del Rio earlier on Monday, when he visited the migrant camp under the Del Rio International Bridge where approximately 12,000 people remained after the Rio Grande crossing was closed on Sunday.
BREAKING: DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is on the ground here in Del Rio. He just flew into the international bridge area via helicopter. He is now getting a tour of the migrant camp and is receiving an operational update. He will then have a press conference. @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/ToZ38uBbWc
In a video Rosas published to Twitter on Sunday, Del Rio Mayor Bruce Lozano, a Democrat, said he has still not heard from President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.
“He feels the White House needs to be transparent about the border crisis in real time,” Rosas wrote with the video.
Del Rio Mayor Lozano (D) says he still has not heard directly from Biden or Harris after getting a briefing with DHS Sec. Mayorkas today.
He feels the White House needs to be transparent about the border crisis in real time. pic.twitter.com/AdGOMHxNDH
Democratic Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano has called out President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for failing to make an appearance at his town as it battles with an overwhelming illegal immigrant crisis that has left Border Patrol agents struggling to process thousands of people.
More than 15,000 illegal immigrants, including Haitian, Cuban, and Venezuelan nationals, have illegally entered the United States in recent days and taken shelter underneath the border bridge connecting Del Rio, a Texas town of about 35,000 people, to Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.
While numerous official figures and congressmen, including Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), have visited the town, shared images, and urged the Biden administration to take action, both Biden and Harris have been noticeably absent.
Del Rio now: US on the left, Mexico on the right. Constant stream back and forth as the illegal immigrants get supplies in Mexico.
Law enforcement preparing against a rush for the border fence as the aliens find out they might be deported. pic.twitter.com/TgxK5Sdrv1
On Sept.18, as Pfluger warned that the situation has “reached boiling point,” Harris made an appearance at Howard University where she led a coin toss at the university’s football event.
Questioning why the vice president, who in March was tasked with handling the border crisis, had not yet visited Del Rio, Lozano asked on Twitter on Saturday, “The VP is able to visit the fun events across the country, while American communities continue to grapple with failed immigration reform. Where is the visit to Del Rio, TX?”
In a separate post alongside aerial footage showing thousands of immigrants surrounding the overcrowded bridge in makeshift tents, the mayor wrote, “We need you to visit Del Rio, Texas.”
Migrants stand by the International Bridge between Mexico and the U.S., in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 16, 2021. (Office of U.S. Congressman Tony Gonzales/via Reuters)Haitians who were deported from the United States deplane at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport, in Port au Prince, Haiti, on Sept. 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn)
Lozano also responded to a Twitter post shared by Harris on Saturday that read, “The U.S. is falling behind, on a global scale, on investing in childcare. We invest fewer public dollars in early childhood education and care relative to GDP than almost all other developed countries. With our Build Back Better Agenda, @POTUS and I are determined to change that.”
Questioning Harris and Biden’s failure to visit Del Rio again, he asked, “The US is failing to protect its borders. Why aren’t you here? @POTUS.”
The Del Rio Mayor also engaged the president, responding to a Twitter post that Biden shared on Saturday regarding his plan not to raise takes for anyone making under $400,000 a year.
Lozano replied, “The President has a plan for taxes. Where is the plan to protect our southern border?”
The mayor also asked Biden directly, “Where is your plan to protect American communities at the southern border? I spoke to Governor Abbott today. We have developed a temporary plan, we’d like to see yours.”
On Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it will start expelling adult male illegal immigrants who have entered the United States at Del Rio. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz told Fox News that single adult men will be expelled under the federal government’s Title 42 rule.
However, most family units who have crossed the border illegally will be processed and released into the United States with a notice to appear in an immigration court.
Ortiz said at a Sept. 19 news conference that deportation flights sending some illegal immigrants back to Haiti have already begun.
Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough on Sunday ruled that Democrats can’t include in their $3.5 trillion spending bill a provision aimed to give millions of illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship.
MacDonough in her guidance said that the Democrats’ provision is “by any standard a broad, new immigration policy,” and that it does not meet the stringent requirements of what can be included in the budget resolution.
“The policy changes of this proposal far outweigh the budgetary impact scored to it and it is not appropriate for inclusion in reconciliation,” she wrote, referring to a parliamentary procedure that allows certain budget bills to pass through the deliberative upper chamber with only a simple majority, bypassing a likely filibuster by opponents altogether.
First used by Congress in 1980, the process allows for expedited consideration of certain tax, spending, and debt-limit legislation. Ultimately, what is allowed under this process is up to MacDonough, whose job it is to protect independent due process.
Earlier this month, Democrats proposed to include in their plan immigration reform measures that would grant amnesty to four groups of nearly 8 million illegal immigrants—former President Barack Obama “Dreamers,” temporary protected status (TPS) holders, agricultural laborers, and essential workers, among others.
“Dreamers” entered the United States illegally as children and were granted amnesty under Obama’s controversial executive order Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
In a statement, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats were “deeply disappointed in this decision but the fight to provide lawful status for immigrants in budget reconciliation continues.”
Schumer added that Senate Democrats have prepared alternate proposals and hope to schedule additional meetings with MacDonough.
In a statement, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) described Democrats’ provision as “inappropriate” and “radical,” adding that he is “glad it failed.”
“Senate rules never contemplated a majority circumventing the filibuster by pretending that sweeping and transformational new policies were mere budgetary changes. Tonight’s ruling confirms that principle,” he said.
“Democrats will not be able to stuff their most radical amnesty proposals into the reckless taxing and spending spree they are assembling behind closed doors,” McConnell added. “This just illustrates how radical Democrats’ aspirations are and how unmoored their far-left wish list has become from the procedures they want to use to ram it through.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment.
Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas) is sounding alarm after after spending a day in the border town of Del Rio, Texas, where the illegal immigrants crisis, he said, “has reached a boiling point.”
Pfluger posted on Twitter new photos showing the makeshift campsite full of individuals who illegally entered the United States and took shelter underneath the border bridge connecting Del Rio to Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. He noted that there the crowd has grown to 15,000 on Saturday from 12,000 just the day before, with “hundreds more gathering every hour.”
Devastating scenes from Del Rio today.
I’ve talked to local leaders and seasoned law enforcement officers—the number 1 thing I’m hearing is this the worst they have ever seen it.
“Most were military aged males between the ages of 18-35. The majority of migrants were Haitian, but I talked to migrants from 6-7 countries including Cuba, Venezuela, Honduras, and more,” he wrote.
According to Pfluger, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have been overwhelmed by the influx of illegal crossings, as undeterred migrants were “being pushed over the border.” The CBP has already closed the port in Del Rio, making Eagle Pass, which is located 60 miles southeast, the nearest port of entry.
“400 more CBP agents are being sent to Del Rio and CBP is utilizing flights to repatriate Haitians back to their home country, but based on what’s happening on the ground, this is not nearly enough to tamper the chaotic situation,” he added. “This crisis has reached a boiling point—Del Rio officials are not equipped to handle nearly 15,000 migrants pouring into their community.”
Pfluger’s visit comes as Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano called out President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, demanding that they pay attention to what is happening in his town.
Harris, who in March was tasked with handling the border crisis, on Saturday made an appearance at Howard University, where she led a coin toss at the university’s football event.
“The VP is able to visit the fun events across the country, while American communities continue to grapple with failed immigration reform. Where is the visit to Del Rio, TX?” Lozano, a Democrat, commented on Harris’ post of her coin toss.
He also responded to another post by Harris where she said, “The U.S. is falling behind, on a global scale, on investing in childcare. We invest fewer public dollars in early childhood education and care relative to GDP than almost all other developed countries. With our Build Back Better Agenda, @POTUS and I are determined to change that.”
“The US is failing to protect its borders. Why aren’t you here? @POTUS,” Lozano wrote.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has urged President Joe Biden to deploy the National Guard to help deal with the illegal immigrant surge along the southern border, insisting the situation is a national security crisis and blaming the Biden administration for a “failed response.”
McCarthy made the remarks in a Sept. 17 statement that came as thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly from Haiti, were congregating under the Del Rio International Bridge in Texas while they await processing by Border Patrol.
“The Biden Administration must recognize this for what it is: A National Security Crisis. As such he must fully deploy the National Guard to the southern border to help our Border Patrol agents with more resources to control the situation,” the Republican leader said.
“Recently, over 10,000 migrants have surged to the border in Del Rio. It is no coincidence this is happening as Democrats in Congress are moving to pass legislation that would grant immediate citizenship for up to 10 million illegal immigrants. This is a wakeup call to Democrats that their policies are putting American lives in danger and must be abandoned,” McCarthy said.
Thousands of illegal immigrants amassing in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 16, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
The number of individuals gathering at the Del Rio bridge has skyrocketed in less a week, from only a couple of hundred on Sept. 9 to around 9,000 by Sept. 16, according to Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez. Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano confirmed that another 20,000 are on their way.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who on Thursday traveled to the border, called the scenes at the Del Rio bridge “the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.”
“There are right now, as we’re speaking, there are 10,503 people under that bridge. It is packed in as a mass of humanity,” Cruz said. “They take your breath away because it just goes on and on and on—infants, little children, people struggling enormously.”
Being briefed by @CBP on the escalating #BidenBorderCrisis while yards away from over 10,000 illegal aliens.
This is a manmade disaster. And it is a direct result of Joe Biden’s political decisions. pic.twitter.com/gLUFq4LTjw
Cruz, too, blamed the Biden administration for the situation and called for deportation flights to Haiti to resume.
“It’s a political decision that Joe Biden could end tonight by simply following the law and saying we’re going to send people back to Haiti, which is what federal immigration law requires,” Cruz said.
The Biden administration paused deportation flights to Haiti after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake devastated the country on Aug. 14. There has been media speculation that the Biden administration was working on plans to start deporting people back to Haiti, though these reports remain without official confirmation. The Associated Press cited anonymous administration officials as saying that deportation flights were to resume next week, while NBC News cited internal documents to that effect.
Illegal immigrants board a bus to be transported to a Border Patrol station for processing, under the international bridge, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 16, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
More than 50 Democrat lawmakers urged Biden in a Sept. 16 letter (pdf) to extend the deportation pause indefinitely “for noncitizens who pose no threats to public safety or national security.”
The mayor of Del Rio said that it’s not clear who the illegal immigrants are and that he is concerned about security.
“I’m deeply frustrated. The thing that I worry about is a stampede. The thing I worry about is terrorism,” Lozano said, adding, “We don’t really know who they are.”
The United States recorded more than 208,000 illegal immigrant arrests at the border in August, one of the highest months on record. Under the Biden administration, the country is on pace to set records for the highest number of fiscal year and calendar year encounters.
Charlotte Cuthbertson and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
“I believe that the reason that they’re limiting drone usage is because they don’t want the American public to know, and I think this is illegal,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said on “Fox & Friends.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) also questioned the drone ban, which he said has grounded drones that were being used by news organizations to cover the border crisis.
“Any government stifling of First Amendment activities is unacceptable,” Johnson wrote to Troy Miller, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
The ban was imposed on the same day that Fox News flew a drone in the area and captured aerial footage of the immigrants.
The FAA said in announcing the ban that it was driven by “special security reasons.” Johnson asked what those reasons were. The agency told The Epoch Times in an email that Border Patrol requested the restrictions “due to drones interfering with law enforcement flights on the border.” Johnson asked for more details on the alleged interference.
Illegal immigrants board a bus to be transported to a Border Patrol station for processing, under the international bridge, in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 16, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Other Republicans also questioned the ban, including Reps. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.), Brian Babin (R-Texas), and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio.).
“The FAA’s conveniently placed a ban on drones flying over the international bridge where [10,000 plus] illegal aliens are waiting to be processed—preventing media from covering the scene,” Babin wrote on Twitter.
President Joe Biden “doesn’t want you to see what a disaster he’s created,” he added.
CBP and the White House did not respond to early morning requests for comment. The FAA declined to say under what authority the agency issued the flight zone restrictions.
The White House did not hold a briefing on Friday and Biden traveled to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware for the weekend without speaking to reporters. He has no public events scheduled.
The FAA said Friday in a statement that Fox applied for and received clearance to operate drones in the restricted airspace and directed any other media organizations wanting to apply for exemptions to the restrictions to its website.
“As with any temporary flight restriction, media is able to call the FAA to make requests to see if it is possible to safely operate in the area,” the agency told The Epoch Times.
While Fox’s drones were still grounded, correspondent Bill Melugin went up in a helicopter with the Texas Department of Public Safety and recorded fresh aerial video footage and photographs.
