Warren Kenneth “Ken” Paxton Jr., is an American lawyer and politician who is the Attorney General of Texas since January 2015. Paxton won election to the state’s top law enforcement job in November 2014 as a champion of the Tea Party movement and conservative principles.
“On Tuesday, I filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily pausing the entry of foreign nationals from six terror-prone counties.Supreme Court review is needed because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit recently ruled against the valid executive order. I am leading a multistate coalition asking the Supreme Court to permit the president to exercise his lawful authority to protect the homeland.What the 4th Circuit completely missed is that the executive order is a tailored response to a very real threat to our national security.A pause on entry from countries with heightened security concerns—such as Libya, where authorities arrested suspects linked to the horrific attack in Manchester—is justified to ensure that new arrivals are thoroughly vetted.Liberal activists are upset that Trump is keeping his promise to secure our border, protect our country, and keep Americans safe from acts of terror.Unfortunately, it seems that some federal judges, like the majority of the court that opined against the president’s executive order, are now substituting their “politically desired outcome” for the law, to quote dissenting Judge Paul Niemeyer.
Once again terrorists have attacked and wounded and killed innocent civilians in London, England.
On June 3rd a terrorist attack at London Bridge and Borough Market was carried out by three apparent Jihadists who used a rented van to mow down pedestrians, whereupon the three emerged from that van and attacked still more victims with their knives.
The terrorists have applied to their attacks the principle behind Occam’s razor, that postulates that in attempting to understand how something is accomplished, the simplest solution is most likely the correct solution.
In the case of terrorists, using a simple strategy and crude weapons such as motor vehicles and knives that are readily available, decreases the likelihood that such plots can be discovered and prevented before they are carried out.
While the TSA, was created in the wake of the terror attacks of 9/11 and its FY 2017 Budget of $7.6 billion and more than 42,000 employees exist to safeguard transportation, with particular emphasis on airliners, most terror attacks do not involve airliners.
Continuing with the concept of Occam’s razor, the United States needs to do whatever is possible and reasonable to prevent international terrorists from entering the United States in the first place.
All vulnerabilities must, therefore be effectively addressed.
If an ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure, preventing the entry of such terrorists represents a ton of cure.
As I have noted in a recent article, Border Security Is National Security.
Many newcomers to Canada and Europe are demanding laws similar to those from which they claim to be seeking refuge.
Newcomers soon start demanding privileges. They ask for gender segregation at work and in educational institutions; they ask for faith schools (madrasas), and demand an end to any criticism of their extremist practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM), forced marriages, child marriages and inciting hatred for other religions. They call any criticism “Islamophobia”. They seek to establish a parallel justice system such as sharia courts. They are also unlikely, on different pretexts, to support any anti-terror or anti-extremism programs. They seem to focus only on criticizing the policies of West.
It is now the responsibility of Western governments to curb this growing turbulence of religious fundamentalism. Western governments need to require “hardline” Muslims to follow the laws of the land. Extremists need to be stopped from driving civilization to a collision course before the freedoms, for which so many have worked so hard and sacrificed so much are — through indifference or political opportunism — completely abolished.
Terror attacks and other offshoots of Islamic extremism have created an atmosphere of mistrust between Europe’s natives and thousands of those who entered European countries to seek shelter.
The situation is turning the Europeans against their own governments and against those advocating help for the war-torn migrants who have been arriving.
Europeans are turning hostile towards the idea of freedom and peaceful coexistence; they have apparently been seeing newcomers as seeking exceptions to the rules and culture of West.
In an unprecedented shift in policy after public fury about security, the German government decided to shut down the mosque where the terrorist who rammed a truck into a shopping market in Berlin, Anis Amri, was radicalized before hecommitted the crime.
The mosque and Islamic center at Fussilet 33 in Berlin had apparently also been radicalizing a number of other youths by convincing them to commit terror attacks in Europe and to join the terror group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The authorities had the mosque under surveillance for a time but did not make a move before 12 innocent civilians were butchered by Amri on December 19, 2016, while leaving around 50 others injured.
The police and counter terror authorities also conducted raids in 60 different German cities and searched around 190 mosques to target kingpins of another group called “The True Religion”.
Europeans appear to be seeking an alternative way to control this social disruption.
A recent headline blared: Secretary of Homeland Security head says terror situation is scarier than you know.
However, the situation at the Department of Homeland Security that the Trump administration inherited when it took office is so dire, that I refer to the DHS as the “Department of Homeland Surrender.”
Unquestionably the Obama administration did incalculable damage to the security of our borders and the enforcement of our immigration laws, however, for decades a series of administrations, led by presidents from both parties, have sought to undermine national sovereignty in their push for globalism.
In my judgement, many components of the immigration system have been rendered dysfunctional with the intentional purpose of flooding America with ever increasing foreign tourists, foreign students and a veritable army of cheap and exploitable labor that displaces Americans workers and drives down the wages of those Americans fortunate enough to keep their jobs.
This is not only in the economic bottom rung jobs but, increasingly, within the high-tech industries as well.
I support my claim by providing at the end of my article, outrageous findings of the Office of Inspector General who lays out, in has May 23, 2017 report, information about a level of dysfunction in a component of national security that could not be created by accident or incompetence.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, the very structure of the DHS, as implemented by the administration of President George W. Bush, in the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 appears to have been designed to hobble any efforts to secure our borders and/or enforce our immigration laws.
On May 5, 2005, approximately 44 months after the attacks of 9/11, the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims conducted a hearing on the topic, “New “Dual Missions” Of The Immigration Enforcement Agencies.”
There is a parallel that must be drawn in considering that the hearing was conducted 44 months after the attacks. It took the United States and its allies 44 months to defeat the Axis nations during the Second World War.
In order to achieve that incredible success our nation and its allies built fleets of aircraft of brand new designs that had not existed before. Fleets of ships and even nuclear weapons with brand new and un-proven technology.
On September 11, 2001 nineteen terrorists, barely out of their teens, were able to cause more casualties than did the Japanese fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Yet tracking the arrival and departure of aliens who were legally admitted into the United States is beyond the grasp of the nation that more than 40 years ago repeatedly launched astronauts to the moon and returned them all safely to the earth.
Trump quietly doubling number of refugees entering U.S. By Ed Straker (Absolutely appalling!!!!!rsk)
President Trump has decided to double the number of refugees admitted every week, but hasn’t made a major announcement about it. Why not? Won’t that help make America great again?
Despite repeated efforts by President Trump to curtail refugee resettlements, the State Department this week quietly lifted the department’s restriction on the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States.
The result could be a near doubling of refugees entering the country, from about 830 people a week in the first three weeks of this month to well over 1,500 people per week by next month, according to refugee advocates. Tens of thousands of refugees are waiting to come to the United States.
The State Department’s decision was conveyed in an email on Thursday to the private agencies in countries around the world that help refugees manage the nearly two-year application process needed to enter the United States.
Although it came the same day as an appeals court ruling that rejected government efforts to limit travel to the United States from six predominantly Muslim nations, the move by the State Department had nothing to do with the court ruling.
Refugee groups now predict that entries into the United States could increase so rapidly that the total number of refugees admitted by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, could exceed 70,000. That is well below the 84,994 refugees admitted in fiscal year 2016, but not by nearly as much as many advocates had feared.
Refugee advocates were delighted by the State Department’s decision.
The excruciating facts keep on coming in. Twenty-two are dead, many of them children. About five dozen others are wounded, such that the death-toll may climb. The Islamic State jihadist network, having exhorted its willing Western-based recruits to attack in place, has claimed responsibility. And now comes the revelation that the suicide-terrorist, Salman Abedi, is yet another known-wolf—a young Muslim man in Britain who was on the radar screen of security services as a potential threat.
The 22-year-old bomber was a British-born son of Libyan refugees, who grew up in the Whalley Range neighborhood outside Manchester—an area that became notorious when two girls, honor students at the local high school, moved to Syria to live under Islamic State rule. Abedi carried out the atrocious bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester with an improvised explosive device that sprayed high-speed nails at his victims. The bomb type is commonplace in what Muslim terrorists like to call “the fields of jihad”—Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and so on. It is too soon to tell what kind of paramilitary training Abedi may have had. What we do know is that he roamed free because he was judged by the British government not to pose an “immediate” peril.
Once a Western society is infiltrated by a critical mass of sharia supremacists, there are barely enough investigative resources to cover the immediate perils—especially when inquiries into their ideology are condemned as racist “Islamophobia.”
Sharia supremacism, which demands that societies be governed by classical, repressive Islamic law (sharia), is a totalitarian political ideology under a religious veneer. It should not be regarded as a merely religious belief system as that concept is understood in our law.
It was to confront head-on that self-defeating approach that, following the San Bernardino jihadist attack that killed 14 Americans, candidate Donald Trump announced his much-derided intention to impose a temporary ban on Muslim immigration. As night follows day, Trump was branded an Islamophobe―a classic demagogic slur developed by the Muslim Brotherhood precisely to thwart examination of sharia-supremacist ideology. But the candidate’s intention was never to bar all Muslims from entering the United States; what he had in mind was a temporary measure until a workable policy solution could be devised (“until our elected representatives can figure out what is going on,” as he put it).
The policy solution Trump arrived at was enhanced vetting (which he at times calls “extreme vetting”). I know this not just from the now-president’s plethora of statements on the matter; I served on the commission (put together by Trump campaign adviser Rudy Giuliani) that counseled Trump. The point was never to ban Muslims, as has been misrepresented in press coverage and legal arguments over Trump’s so-called “travel ban” orders. The point was to ban those beholden to what Trump has called “radical Islamic” ideology (I prefer the more precise description “sharia supremacism”).
The strategy is based on what should be a widely known fact but, after a generation of willful blindness, remains obscure: Sharia supremacism, which demands that societies be governed by classical, repressive Islamic law (sharia), is a totalitarian political ideology under a religious veneer. It should not be regarded as a merely religious belief system as that concept is understood in our law.
Once this core premise is accepted, the legality of heightened vetting is plain to see. The United States has a long history of barring admission to political radicals who seek to overthrow our constitutional system. Indeed, to this day the oath taken by naturalized citizens requires a pledge of loyalty to our Constitution.
Virtually all criminals lie.
Lying is a common tactic used by criminals to conceal their identities, their backgrounds and their crimes. They lie to cover their tracks, to evade detection and to escape from the reach of the “long arm of the law.”
This is why suspects who are taken into custody are fingerprinted and photographed, to attempt to make certain that the name the suspect provides is truly his/her name. Often criminals use multiple false identities whether by committing identity theft or fabricating altogether fictitious identities.
In point of fact, the 9/11 Commission found that in the aggregate, the 19 hijackers who participated in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, used more than 300 false identities or variations of false identities to conceal their identities and their movements as they went about their deadly preparations.
The 9/11 Commission also identified other terrorists who had entered the United States in the decade leading up to the attacks of 9/11 and found that the majority of all of these terrorists engaged in multiple forms of immigration fraud. This was the starting point for my recent article, Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill.
The act of lying is, itself, a crime when it is done in furtherance of other criminal activities. A section of federal law, 18 U.S. Code § 1001, addresses this crime. Here is how this statute begins:
Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years.
Please notice that the statute cited above noted the potential nexus between false statements and terrorism.
Getting back to immigration, aliens who enter the United States without inspection or who enter the United States legally but then violate the term so their immigration status may lie to authorities about their names, their countries of birth and/or countries of citizenship in order to evade detection by immigration law enforcement, to create the appearance that they are entitled to various public assistance programs or to be able to be employed in the United States and to achieve other illegal goals.
Such false claims to United States citizenship is a violation of 18 U.S. Code § 911. The description of this crime and the punishment for this violation of law is contained in this brief sentence:
Whoever falsely and willfully represents himself to be a citizen of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
The primary goal of illegal aliens is to not be arrested and deported (removed from the United States).
Two rogue federal judges have temporarily put President Trump’s immigration restrictions on hold, but the threat itself seems to be having an effect — not just on Mexico, but on inimical places like Somalia:
The pace of refugees arriving in Minnesota slowed markedly in recent months, even though President Trump’s executive order pausing resettlement remains mired in the courts.
Arrivals hit a low of 66 statewide in March, roughly one-fifth the level of a year ago, before rebounding slightly in April. Somalis, who last fall were a majority of refugees in the state, made up less than a quarter of last month’s arrivals, based on new data from the State Department.
For Minnesota’s resettlement agencies, the result has been layoffs and anxious calls from former clients worried about reuniting with family members still in the resettlement pipeline. For critics of refugee resettlement, the continued arrivals nationally — still in the thousands each month, including people from countries singled out for additional travel restrictions — are a disappointment.
The reasons for the slowdown are not entirely clear, and a bipartisan group of senators this month wrote Trump officials to demand an explanation.CONTINUE AT SITE
In an unprecedented move, Hamburg authorities confiscated six residential units in the Hamm district near the city center. A trustee appointed by the city is now renovating the properties and will rent them — against the will of the owner — to tenants chosen by the city. District spokeswoman Sorina Weiland said that all renovation costs will be billed to the owner of the properties.
Similar expropriation measures have been proposed in Berlin, the German capital, but abandoned because they were deemed unconstitutional.
Some Germans are asking what is next: Will authorities now limit the maximum amount of living space per person, and force those with large apartments to share them with strangers?
Authorities in Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, have begun confiscating private dwellings to ease a housing shortage — one that has been acutely exacerbated by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than two million migrants into the country in recent years.
City officials have been seizing commercial properties and converting them into migrant shelters since late 2015, when Merkel opened German borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Now, however, the city is expropriating residential property units owned by private citizens.
In an unprecedented move, Hamburg authorities recently confiscated six residential units in the Hamm district near the city center. The units, which are owned by a private landlord, are in need of repair and have been vacant since 2012. A trustee appointed by the city is now renovating the properties and will rent them — against the will of the owner — to tenants chosen by the city. District spokeswoman Sorina Weiland said that all renovation costs will be billed to the owner of the properties.
The expropriation is authorized by the Hamburg Housing Protection Act (Hamburger Wohnraumschutzgesetz), a 1982 law that was updated by the city’s Socialist government in May 2013 to enable the city to seize any residential property unit that has been vacant for more than four months.
The forced lease, the first of its kind in Germany, is said to be aimed at pressuring the owners of other vacant residences in the city to make them available for rent. Of the 700,000 rental units in Hamburg, somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 (less than one percent) are believed to be vacant, according an estimate by the Hamburg Senate.
Hamburg, Germany. (Images source: Morris MacMatzen/Getty Images)
Socialists and Greens in Hamburg recently established a “hotline” where local residents can report vacant properties. Activists have also created a website — Leerstandsmelder (Vacancy Detector) — to identify unoccupied real estate in Hamburg and other German cities.
It remains unclear why the landlord in Hamm left his apartments vacant for more than five years. Some have posited that, given the location of the properties, the renovation costs may have been too high and probably would not have been offset by the rental income.
Others are blaming city officials for not approving more building permits to allow for the construction of new residential units. A study conducted in 2012 — well before the migrant crisis reached epic proportions — forecast that by 2017, Hamburg would have a deficit of at least 50,000 rental properties.
In 2016, however, only 2,433 new residential units came onto the market, while only 2,290 new building permits were approved, according to statistics provided by the City of Hamburg. These numbers were up slightly from 2,192 new units and 2,041 new permit approvals in 2015.
According to figures released yesterday, the number of illegal aliens crossing the U.S. southwestern border has dropped by an astonishing 76% since President Trump took office.
More specifically, the number of minor children crossing the border with or without a parent has been cut even further.
Washington Times:
Illegal immigration across the southwestern border is down a stunning 76 percent since President Trump was elected, with the flow of children and families dropping even faster as analysts say the administration’s commitment to enforcing the law has changed the reality along the border.
Overall apprehensions by the Border Patrol dropped to just 11,129 in April, according to numbers released Tuesday, marking the lowest monthly total for any month in decades.
The number of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children nabbed at the border dropped below 1,000 – a level not seen since before the surge that bedeviled President Obama during most of his second term.
Even before a foot of Mr. Trump’s planned border wall is built or any more agents are hired, the threat of being sent home has forced would-be migrants to rethink making the journey, officials said.
“A lot of the discussion about changes in our enforcement policy and the way we are going about doing business, we believe that has deterred people,” said Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan. “When you get here, it is likely you are going to get caught. You are going to be returned to your country.”
That approach marks a major change from the Obama administration, which struggled to handle the flow of illegal immigrants from Central America.
Under Obama-era policies, hundreds of thousands of children and families from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were caught and then released into the interior of the U.S., where they often failed to show up for their deportations and instead disappeared into the shadows.
Mr. Trump has vowed quick deportations and has called for expanding detention facilities to hold illegal immigrants in the meantime, preventing them from slipping away.
“This is messaging, backed up by actual enforcement and policy changes that people are responding to,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “The continued drop suggests this is more than just a fluke.”
Border apprehensions are considered a rough yardstick for the overall flow of illegal immigration, so a drop in arrests is believed to reflect an overall drop in the flow of people.
