False Choice: Ending DACA or Building the Border Wall President Trump doesn’t have to choose. And he shouldn’t. Michael Cutler
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267721/false-choice-ending-daca-or-building-border-wall-michael-cutler
Though there is no shortage of “fake news” appearing in the mainstream media, there are a number of reports claiming that members of the Trump administration are attempting to convince President Trump to renege on his campaign promise to rollback the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in exchange for funding for the construction of the border wall.
Before we consider this news, let’s be clear about the absolute need to secure the dangerous U.S./Mexican border. I have frequently compared securing that border with a wing on an airplane. Without a wing an airplane will not fly. However, a wing by itself goes nowhere. Though it has been estimated that nearly half of all illegal aliens did not run the southern border, and instead were admitted through America’s 325 ports of entry, securing that border is nonetheless a vital element of our immigration law enforcement system and national security.
The U.S./Mexican border is particularly dangerous because of endemic corruption of the Mexican government on all levels and the extreme level of violence in Mexico, both attributable to the Mexican drug cartels. Mexican government officials are given the choice of “silver or lead.” Either take a bribe (silver) or expect to be shot (lead).
That violence and potential for corruption flows across our border: The majority of violent crimes in the United States have a connection to the drug trade and drug addiction.
For years I have written about how the most reliable metric to determine the level of border security for the United States is not the arrest statistics by the Border Patrol, but the price and availability of heroin and cocaine in the United States since those substances are not produced in the country. Every gram of those narcotics is smuggled into the United States.
Today the United States is experiencing unprecedented levels of heroin addiction that wreaks havoc on lives and our communities. Drug smugglers also engage in human trafficking and smuggle transnational gang members into the United States.
While not all drug smuggling involves the U.S./Mexican border, a huge amount of narcotics does enter the United States along that dangerous corridor that stretches roughly 2,000 miles.
Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission made the compelling case for making border security a cornerstone of national security policy. This conclusion, in point of fact, was laid out in the preface of the official report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.”
Now let’s consider the wrong-headed program created by the Obama administration, DACA.
The mainstream media and immigration anarchists have, since the inception of the illegal implementation of the DACA program on June 15, 2012 by the Obama administration, provided blatantly false and misleading statements about this program, duping Americans into believing that DACA is for alien children.
While President Obama sold this program to the American people as providing lawful status for young aliens, in reality aliens as old as 31 years of age could qualify if they claimed to have entered the United States prior to their 16th birthdays.
The program additionally required that these aliens continuously resided in the United States since June 15, 2007, up to the present time. Again, without face to face interviews and no field investigations, there would be absolutely no way to determine if these aliens met these requirements.
Unfortunately, there were no interviews and no field investigations to verify any of the claims made in the applications. This created an open invitation to fraud. Because of a dearth of resources, and the hundreds of thousands of applications that were filed, fraudsters are not likely to be caught.
To underscore this concern, a review of the Statistics for DACA from 2012 though June 30, 2016, as posted by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), shows that hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens benefited from this program and that a very small percentage of the applications were denied.
Immigration fraud is not a “victimless crime.” In fact, immigration fraud was identified by the 9/11 Commission as the key entry and embedding tactic of terrorists. DACA’s integrity is undermined by an abject lack of personnel and resources.
Furthermore, while not generally reported in the media, adjudications officers can approve an application for DACA in mere minutes while a denial of an application may require hours or days to perform, in anticipation of an appeal being filed by the attorneys representing the aliens in question. This placed enormous pressure on the adjudications officers to approve the great majority of the applications so that these beleaguered officials can meet quotas that were established to achieve productivity goals.
It must also be noted how the DACA program undermines the crucially important inspections process conducted at ports of entry of aliens seeking to come into the United States.
Open-borders immigration anarchists claim that illegal aliens enter the United States “undocumented.” That term is an artifice of language that could have been created by the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”
In reality, aliens who run our borders, evading the U.S. Border Patrol and the inspections process, enter the United States without inspection.
Obviously no record of entry is created when illegal aliens enter the United States without inspection. Therefore, without an actual field investigation, there is no reliable way to know when, where or how such illegal aliens actually entered the United States. There may also be no reliable way to determine the true identities or criminal histories of these illegal aliens. This was much the case when, in the name of “compassion,” the Obama administration encouraged the flood of unknown “Unaccompanied Minors” across the U.S./Mexican border. This led to the influx of members of the violent and vicious gang members including MS-13.
The MS-13 problem in the has become so acute that it has been the subject of multiple congressional hearings, including the June 20, 2017 the House Homeland Security Committee, Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence field hearing on the topic “Combating Gang Violence On Long Island: Shutting Down The MS-13 Pipeline,” and the June 21, 2017 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “The MS-13 Problem: Investigating Gang Membership, its Nexus to Illegal Immigration, and Federal Efforts to End the Threat.”
Advocates for immigration anarchy have become adept at providing false choices and justification for absurd policies. One of their favorites is to claim that if we cannot deport 11 million illegal aliens we should “solve the problem” by legalizing them to get them “out of the shadows.”
Of course, in reality, there are likely 30 or 40 million illegal aliens in the United States and because of the same lack of resources and lack of integrity in the administration of the DACA program, there would be no way to interview those millions of illegal aliens or conduct field investigations or even search for illegal aliens who refuse to emerge from the shadows.
These ridiculous arguments are never used where drunk driving or other such crimes are concerned. However, where immigration law enforcement is concerned, the arguments have gotten successively more absurd. Many Americans have been duped by anarchists who repeat these false arguments as frequently as possible.
The truth is that our borders must be made truly secure and, consequently, DACA must be allowed to fade out.
President Trump needs to order that when the period for aliens granted temporary lawful status under DACA expires, no action be taken to extend their authorizations, leaving them vulnerable to removal (deportation).
America has the most generous immigration policies of any country on this planet. Massive amnesty programs not only undermine national security and public safety, but insult the million lawful immigrants who are admitted into the United States each year and abide by the rule of law and the spirit of our laws. It can only be hoped President Trump recognizes his obligation with respect to DACA.
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