Kamala’s Open Border Is an Attack on America By John Fonte
https://tomklingenstein.com/kamalas-open-border-is-an-attack-on-america/
Immigration, or specifically, the migration crisis, has emerged as a major issue in the 2024 presidential election. This crisis is not simply a traditional dispute over policy. It is one front in an ongoing “cold civil war” over the future of the American way of life.
On January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden issued a series of executive orders: stopping all deportations for 100 days; halting construction of Trump’s border wall; and phasing out the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) or “Remain in Mexico” program that required asylum-seeking migrants to stay in Mexico (instead of in the U.S. in violation of immigration law).
On the same day, President Biden also proposed massive new amnesty legislation for an estimated 11 million illegal aliens with no serious enforcement measures. During the first hundred days, the Biden-Harris administration issued 94 executive actions to gut Trump’s border policy. Not surprisingly, thousands of migrants began to pour across America’s open southern border every day. Two months later, on March 26, 2021, after a congressional visit to the border, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) declared, “Border Patrol is overwhelmed, overworked, and discouraged by the new [Biden-Harris] policies.” She recounted, “Agents took us through a dangerous path to the Rio Grande where we could hear the cartel members taunting us across the river. … Human trafficking, child abuse, and drug smuggling are rampant. This is a crisis.”
Two weeks later, the president of the National Border Patrol Council said the United States had lost operational control of the southern border to the cartels. He remarked, “I was asked last night,‘Who is controlling the border? Is it President Biden? Is it Kamala Harris, who is it?’ And my answer was, ‘It’s the cartels.’ The cartels control the border now. It’s not even the Border Patrol. It’s not even the U.S. government.”
Unlike any previous administration in American history (including even Barack Obama’s) the Biden-Harris administration has completely refused to obey immigration law. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, aliens seeking asylum are to be detained until their cases are decided. Instead, under Biden-Harris, the aliens are not only released but bussed and flown into towns throughout America without the knowledge or consent of the citizens of those jurisdictions. Officials in Westchester County, New York, complained that unwanted migrants were being flown in by government-funded NGOs in the middle of the night to avoid detection.
Over the past three and a half years, the Biden-Harris administration has implemented measure after measure that has weakened border enforcement, the safety and security of Americans, and that of the migrants themselves.
Biden-Harris ended the “first safe country” agreement. The Trump administration reached a diplomatic agreement with El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala that required asylum seekers to follow international law by filing for asylum in the “first safe country” instead of passing thorough several safe countries in order to get to the U.S. border. If they do not file for asylum in the “first safe country” they are clearly not legitimate asylum seekers but economic migrants who are not eligible for asylum. The Biden-Harris administration repudiated this first safe country agreement and, as a result, unprecedented numbers of migrants from (according to the New York Times) over 160 countries, who are not legally eligible for asylum, have poured into our country.
New Biden-Harris rules make it very difficult to deport criminal illegal aliens. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo requiring ICE agents to consider “mitigating factors” before arresting, detaining, or deporting a criminal illegal alien. The agent is required to consider the criminal alien’s age, family status, and physical and mental health. As a result, ICE agents have to worry about being second-guessed by Biden-Harris political appointees if they enforce immigration law. No wonder there has been a 44% drop in ICE agents’ requests to local authorities to detain criminal illegal aliens since the end of the Trump administration. Even more significantly, the new rules resulted in a 67% drop in deportations of illegal alien criminals since the Trump era.
Biden-Harris ended worksite enforcement. On October 12, 2021, DHS Secretary Mayorkas ordered ICE to end worksite enforcement operations that result in the deportations of illegal aliens. Since the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act (ICRA), it has been illegal for employers in the United States to hire illegal aliens. Mayorkas’s memo blatantly ignores this law. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, noted, “even under Obama, DHS has never openly disavowed the ban on hiring illegal aliens.”
Biden-Harris has violated immigration law regarding the parole of illegal aliens. Section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act states that illegal aliens may be granted parole only “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” Examples include an illegal alien needing a life-saving operation best performed in the United States or providing crucial testimony in a court of law. Instead of granting parole on a case-by-case basis, the Biden-Harris administration has provided mass parole to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.
Rep. Mark Green (R-TN),chairman of the House homeland security committee, charged that DHS Secretary Mayorkas has “utterly abused” the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) mobile phone application, CBP One. This program was originally created to assist legitimate frequent travelers. The Biden-Harris administration, however, created a system that encouraged illegal aliens from four countries — Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba — to use the app to make an appointment to apply for asylum in the U.S. while in any country in the world, including safe Western European countries like France. The House committee noted that, over a nine month period, 278,431 appointments were made by illegal immigrants over the CBP One app, and 266,846 of them were granted parole and released into the United States.
Why is the Biden-Harris administration implementing these policies? The self-declared purpose is to create a “fair, orderly, and humane” immigration system and to repudiate Trump administration policy. Biden said, “We’re going to work to undo the moral and national shame of the previous administration.” In official documents, the Biden-Harris administration castigated Trump’s immigration policies as “cruel and reckless” and “irrational and inhumane.”
In reality, the Biden-Harris administration’s pretensions of a humanitarian immigration policy ring hollow. In August 2024, a report of the DHS Inspector General revealed that the administration had lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children. Some of the children are now in the hands of transnational criminal organizations, “at risk of sex trafficking, forced labor, and other forms of exploitation,” the report admitted.
Reports of migrant crime are real and unprecedented. In a letter to Congress, the deputy director of ICE admitted that, as of July 21, 2024, there are over 600,000 convicted criminal aliens that have not been deported. These numbers include more than 13,000 aliens convicted of homicide, 5,811 convicted of sexual assault, 851 convicted of kidnapping, 14,301 convicted of burglary, 4,627 convicted of forgery, and 62,231 convicted of assault.
Some are in state and local custody. Many (most?) are free in our streets. Indeed, there are also over 1.9 million illegal alien ‘gotaways,’ migrants who escaped into our country. In other words, instead of simply turning themselves in to Border Patrol and asking for asylum, they are hiding from authorities. We have no idea where they are, or who they are.
In September 2024, New York City police told the New York Post that “as many as 75% of the people they have been arresting in Midtown Manhattan” for crimes are migrants. In Queens more than 60% of crimes are committed by illegal immigrants. The police complain that the city’s sanctuary policy (the NYPD is forbidden to work with ICE or track the criminals’ immigration status) makes their situation much worse. A former prosecutor in Queens said, “The sanctuary city law is pathetic. It’s disgusting. It’s crazy.”
At the same time, the vicious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has gained a foothold in New York City. It is responsible for hundreds of crimes, including the shooting of two police officers.
The Biden-Harris response to criticism of their immigration policy is to claim a proposed “Senate compromise” lacking majority support in Congress would “solve” the immigration crisis. Actually, it would make immigration enforcement much more difficult.
For a moment let us examine the Senate bill on its merits and put aside the obvious question of why the administration waited three and a half years to promote a bill that is supposed to solve a border problem they themselves created. As noted earlier, under current immigration law, asylum seekers are required to be detained until their cases are decided. The proposed Senate bill would allow Secretary Mayorkas to ignore the detention mandate and release the migrants into the general population based on “operational circumstances” that are determined by Mayorkas. In other words, the bill would gut longstanding immigration law and actually codify current Biden-Harris policy, making it much harder for any future administration to reform enforcement practices.
The proposed Senate bill would mandate “emergency authority” for the president to act if the number of illegal crossings reached 8,500 per day or a seven-day average of 5,000 per day. This would mean about 1.825 million more illegals in a year. The president does not need this “emergency authority.” He already has it (8 U.S.C. 1182(f)). This provision is absurd. Incredibly, the bill also requires that, at a minimum, 1,400 migrants per day (or 511,000 more illegal migrants per year) must be “processed” into the United States, even during a presidential emergency shutdown. In short, the proposed Senate bill changes immigration law for the worse.
Immigration Is One Front in the Cold Civil War
How do we best understand the Biden-Harris immigration policy?To begin with we should realize that this policy is not a “humanitarian,” good-faith effort to solve our “broken immigration system.” Nor is it a question of incompetence or stupidity. Biden, Harris, and Mayorkas know exactly what they are doing. Their policy is part of a deliberate strategy.
Immigration is one front (among many) in the ongoing revolutionary assault on the American way of life that seeks to “fundamentally transform” our nation. Other fronts include the promotion of racial and gender quotas, censorship, lawfare, the erasure of sex and gender distinctions, the agenda for net zero carbon emissions, the abandonment of cities to criminals, and wokeism in all its forms.
Massive, unvetted migration from all over the world assists the end goal of the revolutionary transformationists by expanding and reinforcing “marginalized” communities that not only provide millions of potential voters to swamp swing states and red strongholds, but also new “clients” for the Left’s cadre of DEI and social service professionals. Mass migration weakens immigrant assimilation and promotes ethnic and racial group consciousness and group loyalty. Eroding and diminishing the assimilation of immigrants into the American way of life is a strategic goal of the Left. It is no accident that, in April 2021, the Biden-Harris administration banned the term “assimilation” for use in federal agencies.
We are in a cold civil war between two irreconcilable ways of life (or two regimes). Tom Klingenstein argues on this website that one side wants to destroy America and the other wants to preserve and improve it. That, in sum, is the core issue of the 2024 election. Klingenstein calls the ideology of the destructive regime after its current leader, “Kamalism,” and he warns that “Kamalism wants to destroy America.”
Of course, the powerful forces supporting Kamalism don’t say they want to destroy America; they say they want to “fundamentally transform” our nation because America is now and always has been “systemically racist.” Klingenstein explains that, if a country is systemically racist, it is by definition an evil country, and evil countries should be destroyed. Thus, “whether they know it or not,” Kamalists are “calling for the destruction of the American way of life.”
I would argue the very concept of “fundamental transformation” gives the game away. The very phrase, first used famously by Barack Obama in the final days of the 2008 election, assumes there is something fundamentally wrong with the thing that needs to be transformed. In the United States, this would mean the root-and-branch transformation of all aspects of American life, our creed and culture, manners and mores, history, economic system, religious beliefs, laws, institutions, and the Constitution itself. The core American concept of the equality of individual citizenship would be replaced by “equity” in truth, an oppressive group quota regime based on race, ethnicity, and gender.
One thing is clear: the Kamalists in general, and Kamala herself, portray America (past and present) as an essentially evil, racist country. On August 29, 2020, Kamala Harris declared: “The reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.” Never? Really, Barack Obama? Lloyd Austin? Kamala Harris? On November 15, 2018, Senator Harris compared ICE to the Ku Klux Klan. During the recent summer of deadly riots, on June 1, 2020, Kamala Harris urged people to post bail for protestors in Minnesota, including a man arrested for attempted murder of a policeman, a woman accused of second degree murder, and a twice-convicted rapist charged with kidnapping and sexual assault. A few weeks later, on June 17, 2020, she openly endorsed the insurrectionary rioters, trumpeting:
[block/]They’re not gonna to stop before election day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up—and they should not. And we should not.[/block]
Since both Kamalism and Kamala herself aim to “fundamentally transform” — that is to say, to ultimately destroy — America, Klingenstein’s moniker of “Destructive Kamala” is more accurate than alarmist. We must understand that the much-discussed major issues of the 2024 presidential campaign (the economy, immigration, crime, abortion, health care, etc.,) are merely different fronts in one war, and all subordinate to the overarching question. Do we choose Kamalism or America?
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