RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/23/fixing-the-biden-border/

Joe Biden, to the degree he was cognizant, has always reflected the Obama-era utopia dream of a borderless world, and thus millions of poor have illegally entered the United States. On numerous occasions, he offered clear warnings of what he would do if he ever had power over immigration policy.

Do we remember this 2020 Biden boast to let in millions and offer blanket amnesties?

“But I will send to the desk immediately a bill that requires the access to citizenship for 11 million undocumented folks, number one. Number two, in the first 100 days of my administration, no one, no one will be deported at all. From that point on, the only deportations that will take place are commissions of felonies in the United States of America.” In Biden’s world, if no illegal alien is ever to be deported unless a criminal, then there is at last no border.

Earlier Biden had also bragged, “We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre.”

After 2020, we found out what Biden really meant was that a few thousand privileged and rich people in Martha’s Vineyard, Malibu, and Rehoboth, Delaware, certainly could not absorb even a few hundred in “desperate need”—but the millions of poor in inner-city Chicago, in the Rio Grande Valley, and the Central Valley of California most certainly could absorb “another two million” illegal aliens.

Most infamously, in 2019, Biden gave explicit outlines of the very open border that he has now institutionalized: “I would, in fact, make sure that there is, that we immediately surge the border all those people are seeking asylum. They deserve to be heard. That’s who we are. We’re a nation that says if you want to flee, and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come. (emphasis added).”

Again, Biden assumed that “you should come” applied to downtown New York, South Central LA, or El Paso, but under no circumstances to Kalorama, Kailua, or the empty summer dorm rooms of Stanford or Harvard.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-coming-deportation-war/

Expect a liberal implosion when Tom Homan, President-elect Donald Trump’s new Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director — or “border czar” — begins mass deportations of illegal aliens immediately after Inauguration Day.

Homan has promised to target all aliens who entered the country illegally, regardless of criminal status.

The Left has already sounded the alarm bells, predicting concentration camps, screaming children as they are pulled from frantic parents, ICE storm troopers entering houses and workspaces with guns drawn in search of illegal migrants who only wanted a better life for themselves but who are now being hunted down like wounded animals — or so the legacy media will report.

This highly dramatic Democrat scenario is meant to pull at the heartstrings and to get Americans to have a Hallmark Card moment and say, “Enough, let these people stay…if only for the sake of the children.”

Speaking of the children, a federal judge—U.S. District Court Judge J. Campbell Barker—struck down a Biden administration program (“Keeping Families Together”) shortly after the November 5 election. The Biden program would have allowed illegal aliens married to American citizens to stay in the country and obtain legal status; as a bonus it offered them a fast-track to U.S. citizenship.

Barker declared “Keeping Families Together” violated U.S. immigration law. Similar challenges were successful in more than a dozen other Republican states.

The Homan policy, however, will not separate children from families but deport children and parents together. Homan, Trump’s former acting U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement director, also has plans to cut funds to “sanctuary states” like California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/02/yes-mexico-knows-exactly-what-it-is-doing/

President-elect Donald Trump recently had a “talk” with newly elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum about the millions who have crossed through Mexico to enter the U.S. illegally.

Afterwards, Trump reported that their conversation went well, and supposedly both had agreed to secure the U.S. border.

But given long-standing, de facto Mexican policy to rely on and profit from an open U.S. border, it was not long afterwards that Sheinbaum claimed she had not been so accommodating.

Or, as she now put it of the Trump conversation, “I give you the certainty that we would never—and we would be incapable of it—propose that we would close the border.” And of course, she is right: Mexico never would wish for a secure U.S. border, although it is wrong that she is incapable of guaranteeing one should she choose to do so.

What, then, is going on?

Over the last half-century, Mexico has gradually, even insidiously, developed both a one-sided, asymmetrical relationship with the U.S. based on professed mutual benefit and yet sought to leverage America by claiming it is supposedly guilty for two centuries of oppressive treatment.

How does the strange U.S.-Mexico supposed co-dependence seem to work?

The Mexican government has traditionally seen the U.S. as an endlessly wealthy country, liberally governed, and more or less willing to listen to Mexico’s grievances of the sort that are common in asymmetrical partnerships.

About 60 percent of the Mexican people traditionally in polls have voiced a positive view of the United States, yet a surprisingly low number when considering the millions who try to cross its border illegally each year.

Nonetheless, Mexico for decades has conveniently explained the vast influxes across the border, unaudited and illegal, as largely in America’s interests—and mirabile dictu even to Mexico’s disadvantage. Polls tell, however, a vastly different and far more accurate story.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/largest-illegal-alien-county-prepares-resistance-to-trump/

Eight percent of Los Angeles County is illegal. This is where 800,000 illegal aliens out of an estimated 3 million statewide (the real numbers are likely much higher) have been harbored.

And that may be about to change.

In no county and state has the political power of the Democrats been as closely tied to open borders as in Los Angeles County and California. Flipping California convinced the Democrats to tie their national fortunes to mass migration and for a while it seemed to be working.

Biden’s open borders team, from Border Czar Kamala Harris to Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and USCIS director Ur Mendoza Jaddou, were not only Californians, but typical products of its diverse checkbox political class who rejected the idea of national borders.

California deportations had sharply dropped off after the state began implementing pro-illegal and pro-crime laws in 2014, falling from a high of nearly 100,000 to less than 4,000 in 2024. With the California Values Act (SB 54) blocking law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities in place, the first Trump administration struggled to bring deportations up to around 30,000 a year and under Biden deportations effectively disappeared in California.

But the 2024 election may be about to crack the nation’s worst sanctuary state, county and city.

If Kamala had won, she would have been the first White House Democrat from California, but instead California Democrats in the largest illegal alien county in the country are panicking.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/25/the-immorality-of-illegal-immigration/

Donald Trump will not be president for almost another two months.

Yet Democrat politicians, both federal and local, vie to be the most strident in denouncing his plans to begin deporting millions of foreign nationals who, over the last four years, have entered the U.S. illegally. Trump pledges to focus initially only on the 400,000 to 500,000 current felons and some 1.4 million additional aliens who have ignored legal summons for their deportation.

Weekly we read of thousands of illegal immigrants arriving from areas controlled by violent Mexican cartel gangs or failed, strife-torn South American countries that have emptied their jails to send their felons northwards. Hundreds of thousands of them have been committing violent crimes while demanding still more free housing and support from strapped American taxpayers.

Big-city left-wing mayors and city councils boast that they will do all their best to nullify federal immigration laws, even as their cities face near insolvency housing, feeding, and monitoring the influx. More specifically, they brag they will continue to order local and state authorities to resist all efforts of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. They scream about possible “massive deportations” to come under Trump, callously ignoring that their own advocacy has fueled rising crime waves of unaudited illegal aliens. And they appear absolutely indifferent to the social costs imposed by illegal immigration upon their own poor and middle-class constituents.

Virtue-signaling Democratic governors and mayors have so far not dared to utter a word of criticism about what has been the Biden administration’s truly historic “massive importation” of illegal aliens into the U.S. over the last four years.

Why?

Largely because these political grandees and media demagogues have the money, connections, zip codes, and influence to be immune from the fallout of their own performance-art advocacy of illegal immigration. They take for granted that the baleful consequences of open borders always falls upon the distant and vulnerable Other.

Again, consider the left-wing logic: it is deemed moral to dismantle the border, disrupt the social fabric of the country, and destroy federal immigration laws. But it is immoral to restore U.S. sovereignty, secure the border, stop the flux of lethal cartel-supplied fentanyl and child sex trafficking, and follow the law?

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mass-deportation-criminal-aliens

Who said the following?

Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.

Donald Trump? Stephen Miller? Incoming “border czar” Tom Homan?

No—civil rights icon Barbara Jordan in 1995.

Jordan, the first Black congresswoman from the South and a star of the Watergate hearings, was named by President Clinton to head an immigration commission some 30 years ago. It is precisely because her recommendations were ignored that we are where we are today. The lack of credibility that Jordan bemoaned is how you get a man like Trump.

The bottom line is that a large-scale program to make illegal aliens leave doesn’t require soldiers breaking down doors, cattle cars, or concentration camps. This is law enforcement, not war. And it is imperative in light not just of the past four years of immigration mismanagement, but the past four decades of dishonesty.

Decades of unwillingness to enforce immigration laws were driven by the desire of some for cheap, controllable labor, and of others for a new client class that would shift political power to the Democratic Party. The culmination of that process under Biden became entwined with the identity of the party and its ideological activists who sincerely believe that national borders are an expression of racism and that turning away foreigners who want to move here illegally is immoral. The belief in unlimited, lawless immigration has become a litmus-test issue for the activist left, like hostility to the existence of law enforcement itself.

And because most voters naturally consider that insane, we now see broad public support, including among first-generation migrants, for “mass deportation” and an electoral mandate for what the president-elect has promised will be the “largest deportation effort in American history.”

Restoring credibility after decades of deceit will take time, cost money, get tied up in courts, and inevitably involve an unfortunate measure of human suffering, the images of which will be ruthlessly exploited for political purposes by the media and the interests they serve. But it’s neither the Manhattan Project nor the D-Day landings—it’s simply a matter of enforcing existing law consistently and without apology, which is the legal and popular mandate the American people have given the incoming administration.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-plans-to-enforce-the-law-against-illegals/

President-elect Donald Trump’s landslide victory over the Democrats’ hapless nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has given him a clear mandate to vigorously pursue his policy priorities. These include strong immigration law enforcement, lowering prices and reinvigorating domestic manufacturing to create more good paying jobs, U.S. energy dominance, strengthening national security, conducting foreign policy that puts America first, and protecting free speech.

Mr. Trump emphasized these policy goals repeatedly during his campaign. He left no doubt with the American people what he would do if elected. The American people responded with overwhelming approval in a fair, transparent election – across demographics, classes, ages, and geographical regions.

But the hypocritical left-wing progressives, who have continually smeared Mr. Trump as an existential threat to democracy, are proving that they are the real threats to democracy. They refuse to accept the majority of voters’ verdict on the direction they want the country to follow.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is plotting with his Democrat colleagues to block President-elect Trump’s achievement of his policy agenda priorities, or at least to slow them down as much as possible. Members of the Progressive, Black, Hispanic, Asian Pacific American and Equality caucuses are the most vocal advocates in Congress of this obstructionist strategy. Governors in Democrat-run states such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker are planning to fight Mr. Trump every step of the way. This includes shielding illegal immigrants who reside within their sanctuary jurisdictions from federal law enforcement officers.

https://www.thefp.com/p/immigration-is-a-mess-heres-how-to

In 2018, I published Melting Pot or Civil War?, a short book on immigration. Despite its provocative title, the book offered a cautious, careful, almost hilariously mild case for immigration restriction. Having closely followed how countries around the world had handled, and more often mishandled, immigration, I laid out a road map for Making Immigration Great Again. Among other things, I called for rebalancing immigrant admissions toward the young and skilled; rejecting identitarian ideologies that undermined immigrant assimilation and sowed racial resentment; embracing labor-saving automation as an imperfect substitute for low-wage migrant labor; and investing in low-income youth.    

If this sounds like a boringly centrist Davos Man manifesto, I don’t disagree.

Keep in mind, though, that I wrote the book in the thick of the Donald Trump–era immigration wars, when the rhetorical temperature was high and public opinion was as pro-immigration as it had ever been. Against a backdrop of family separations, attempted Muslim bans, and anxious Dreamers, it felt taboo to even suggest that Steve Bannon and friends might be half-right about the wisdom of opening our borders, especially in my small, hyper-educated, blue state–parody world. 

As I was labeled a fascist by anonymous trolls, and my arguments were called “completely off the rails,” a vocal minority on the right was growing ever more extreme in its opposition to immigration. By making a moderate case, my arguments weren’t restrictionist enough for the hardcore restrictionists or cosmopolitan enough to satisfy enlightened opinion.

But I came by my position honestly. My parents, immigrants from Bangladesh, settled in Brooklyn in the mid-1970s. They were part of a larger wave of newcomers that helped revitalize New York and other cities that had fallen on hard times. I had seen all that immigration can do to enrich urban neighborhoods up close. Yet I also recognized that mass immigration wasn’t a free lunch, and that open borders romantics were inviting a backlash that risked slamming our borders shut for a generation. 

By offering a middle course, my hope was that some number of moderates would read my book and be convinced that the reaction to Trump’s shock-and-awe restrictionism must not be to heedlessly dismantle immigration enforcement altogether.

Instead, a few years later, the Biden administration came in and did just about everything I warned against, torching Democrats’ credibility on the most important issue facing the country. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/tren_de_aragua_gang_terrorizes_american_cities.html

Joe Biden’s border policies are disastrous for communities nationwide, including cities that are nowhere near United States borders.  There have been at least 10.8 million encounters with illegal aliens nationwide since the start of Fiscal Year 2021 (FY2021), according to Rep. Mark Green’s September “Startling Stats” report on the border crisis.  The same report indicates that 2 million more aliens have entered as “known gotaways.”  According to former chief of Border Patrol Raul Ortiz, the total number of gotaways “could be underreported by as much as 20 percent.”  

The devastating numbers fail to tell the whole story, however. Embedded in those historic numbers are criminal gangs like Tren de Aragua, whose members have taken root in communities nationwide.  Tren de Aragua is terrorizing communities, forcing the Biden administration’s U.S. Treasury to label the gang as a U.S.-designated transnational criminal organization (TCO).

The Treasury’s announcement states that the gang has “opportunistically infiltrated local criminal economies.”

From its origins as a prison gang in Aragua, Venezuela, Tren de Aragua has quickly expanded throughout the Western Hemisphere in recent years. With a particular focus on human smuggling and other illicit acts that target desperate migrants, the organization has developed additional revenue sources through a range of criminal activities, such as illegal mining, kidnapping, human trafficking, extortion, and the trafficking of illicit drugs such as cocaine and MDMA.

Tren de Aragua poses a deadly criminal threat across the region. For example, Tren de Aragua leverages its transnational networks to traffic people, especially migrant women and girls, across borders for sex trafficking and debt bondage. When victims seek to escape this exploitation, Tren de Aragua members often kill them and publicize their deaths as a threat to others.