RUTHFULLY YOURS

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he’s itching to sign state legislation that could imprison county sheriffs in the Lone Star State if they refuse to cooperate with federal immigration law enforcement authorities.

Abbott is an avowed foe of the so-called sanctuary movement, which is a key component of today’s left-wing activist repertoire. Its supporters are the soft-headed souls who carry protest signs emblazoned with the red-herring of a slogan “no human being is illegal” and who apply all the usual smear-adjectives – including racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic – to anyone who supports having secure borders. The movement gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement.

Some left-wingers use the dreadful euphemism “civil liberties safe zones” to describe sanctuary jurisdictions. The phrase blurs the distinction between citizens and non-citizens by implying illegal aliens somehow possess a civil right to be present in the U.S.

Abbott, a Republican, is fed up with local governments refusing to hand over illegal aliens to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

One of the worst offenders is Travis County, home to the state capitol in Austin.

Citing a recent ICE report, Abbott has noted “there were 206 instances nationally during the first week of February where law enforcement agencies had declined ICE detainers, with 70 percent of the declines coming from Travis County,” according to Texas Monthly. This means Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez (D) refused to honor ICE detainers issued for 142 illegal aliens, whom the liberal magazine quite predictably describes as “unauthorized immigrants.”

The ICE report “is deeply disturbing and highlights the urgent need for a statewide sanctuary city ban in Texas,” Abbott said, adding:

The Travis County Sheriff’s decision to deny ICE detainer requests and release back into our communities criminals charged with heinous crimes—including sexual offenses against children, domestic violence and kidnapping—is dangerous and should be criminal in itself. Texas will act to put an end to sanctuary policies that put the lives of our citizens at risk.

A few days ago Abbott elaborated.

“We have been pushing a piece of legislation in Texas that is going to pass that I will be signing into law that imposes even sterner penalties on counties,” Abbott said on “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

It will include things such as further defunding them. It will impose fines. And it could impose jail time for these sheriffs to enforce the laws. Oddly enough these sheriffs could wind up behind the very bars they are releasing these criminals from.

It should be commonsense that a nation’s security begins and ends at its borders.

The primary mission of the military is to keep America’s enemies as far from its shores as possible.

There is a stirring Navy commercial “America’s Navy – The Shield” in which numerous members of the United States Navy from a wide array of divisions appear on screen and a voice says, “To get to you they’d have to get past us.”

Indeed, the valiant members of our armed forces from all five branches routinely go in harm’s way to defend America and Americans.

However, as we saw all too clearly on September 11, 2001, in this era of asymmetrical warfare, America’s enemies are likely to not come to our country in a warship but on an airliner.

Indeed, on that horrific day more than 15 years ago, 19 men from the Middle East carried out the deadliest terror attack ever mounted on American soil. The casualties of 9/11 surpassed the number of casualties that the Japanese fleet inflicted on the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The 9/11 Commission was convened to determine the vulnerabilities that the terrorists successfully exploited to attack the United States. Among the most fundamental vulnerabilities were those that pertain to the various components of the immigration system.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266260/sanctuary-cities-choose-criminals-over-citizens-joseph-klein

Attorney General Jeff Sessions warned on Monday that sanctuary jurisdictions risked losing federal grants if they persisted in obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Billions of dollars in federal law enforcement funding are at stake. “I urge the nation’s states and cities to carefully consider the harm they are doing to their citizens by refusing to enforce our immigration laws,” Attorney General Sessions said. “Countless Americans would be alive today and countless loved ones would not be grieving today if these policies of sanctuary cities were ended.”

Instead of heeding the Attorney General’s sound advice and taking care of their own citizens, city officials around the country are planning to sabotage federal law enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.

“We are going to become this administration’s worst nightmare,” said New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. On the same day that Attorney General Sessions issued his warning, she hosted a meeting with like-minded officials from other sanctuary cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, and Philadelphia, who prioritize the welfare of illegal immigrants over their own citizens. Ms. Mark-Viverito and her comrades threatened to block access by federal immigration authorities to city property and to city records that could help with the enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws. They are acting in the spirit of Alabama’s late Governor George Wallace, who stood in the schoolhouse door to defy federal enforcement of desegregation.

“The Trump Administration is pushing an unrealistic and mean spirited executive order,” tweeted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Spare us the tears, Mr. Mayor. We are not talking about innocent children caught up in vindictive mass deportation sweeps. Rather, President Trump’s so-called “mean-spirited executive order” is intended to rid this country of fiends like Estivan Rafael Marques Velasquez, a gang member from El Salvador with a criminal record, who was released from Rikers Island this year onto the streets of New York before U.S. officers from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit could pick him up for deportation proceedings. And there is Luis Alejandro Villegas, 31, who was released from local custody on Dec. 31, 2016, despite a detainer request from ICE. Villegas had previously been removed from the United States and has a prior conviction for forcible theft armed with a deadly weapon.

“Villegas is a criminal alien who was released back into our New York communities, posing an increased and unnecessary risk to those who live in this great city,” said Thomas R. Decker, field office director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York.

Fortunately, ICE agents were able to catch up with both Velasquez and Villegas on their own and place them into federal custody. If de Blasio has his way, we may not be so lucky next time. In the New York City suburb of Hempstead, two women and a 2-year old girl ran out of luck. A MS-13 street gang member, who had been deported back to El Salvador from the U.S. four times and had a number of prior arrests, stabbed the women and sexually assaulted the little girl.

It is not about the executive orders. When it comes to protecting the United States from the threats posed by radical Islam, it has never been about President Donald Trump’s executive orders: the first one that was torpedoed by the radical judiciary in January, and the new and improved version that was suspended this week — the Lawyer Left having conveniently managed to shop its challenge to Barack Obama’s fellow Hawaiian and Harvard Law School classmate Judge Derrick Watson.

The issue is vetting. Each executive order was conceived as a temporary step, a “hold in place” measure while the permanent solution, vetting, was carefully crafted and ultimately implemented.

Now, just as the Left hoped, the temporary step has not only overwhelmed the permanent solution. It has made the permanent solution much more difficult — perhaps impossible — to achieve.

The president’s first order was not invalidated because it was invalid. It was invalidated by an outrageous political maneuver disguised as a judicial decision by the Ninth Circuit federal appeals court. Yet government lawyers — especially the law-and-order, have-faith-in-the-system types — can’t help themselves. They see litigation as a high-minded chess game, winnable by reasoned strategy: Look at what the court said the infirmities were, address them, and then take another crack at persuading the tribunal.

But that’s not the game being played by the Ninth Circuit and the many progressive activists among the 300-odd lawyers President Obama placed on the federal bench (that’s life tenure, boys and girls). They are about winning the war, not the skirmish.

The Ninth Circuit struck down the first executive not order because it transgressed the theoretical constitutional rights of lawful permanent-resident aliens, immigrant visa holders, or state universities. The judges struck it down because they are the political Left. This had nothing to do with law. The Left has a policy objection to the notion of subjecting Muslims to heightened immigration scrutiny, because it has a policy objection to government recognition of the nexus between Islamic scripture and terrorism committed by Muslims.

For the Left, the law is not a corpus of constitutional and statutory principles to be applied. It is a pliable weapon for achieving policy goals, enabling will-to-power to masquerade as a “legal process.”

No tweaking of an executive order will overcome that.

President Trump’s new, narrowly tailored temporary ban on travel from select countries plagued by Islamic terrorism was put on hold at the eleventh hour yesterday by the latest in a series of soft-headed, left-wing federal judges determined to sabotage presidential efforts to secure the nation’s borders.

Lawyer Justin Cox of the George Soros-funded National Immigration Law Center, hailed the ruling, saying the judge in this case found that “the primary purpose of the executive order is to discriminate against Muslims.”

The temporary travel ban is “a shaming device” and “a dehumanizing device” that “perpetuates this myth, this damaging stereotype of Muslims as terrorists.”

Trump vowed to fight on at a high-energy rally in Nashville, saying the ruling was “terrible” and suggested it was “done by a judge for political reasons.” This was “an unprecedented judicial overreach,” he said, adding he would take the legal case “as far as it needs to go,” including the Supreme Court. “The danger is clear, the law is clear, the need for my executive order is clear.”

Trump critics like Cox deride the new executive order, falsely claiming it is a “Muslim ban,” even though it leaves out the vast majority of Muslim-majority countries on earth. Even if it did single out Muslims, it should still survive constitutional scrutiny, many legal experts say. The Constitution’s prohibition of so-called religious tests doesn’t apply to immigration policy, which is why no one raised a fuss during the Cold War when the U.S. set aside visas specifically for Soviet Jews escaping religious persecution.

And to make all of this even worse, it turns out the lawsuit ruled on yesterday was brought by a foreign-born Muslim cleric with ties to the international terrorist underworld. More on that in a moment.

The legal proceeding arose out of President Trump’s Executive Order 13780 which would have temporarily prevented visas from being issued to individuals from Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria to provide the government with an opportunity to implement Trump’s “extreme vetting” measures aimed at weeding out visa applicants who pose a threat to U.S. national security. The order was also to suspend refugee processing for 120 days. The new order differs from Trump’s previous, broader directive, Executive Order 13769, also enjoined by the courts, “in that it omitted Iraq from the list of affected countries, did not affect any current visa or green-card holders and spelled out a robust list of people who might be able to apply for exceptions,” according to a Washington Post summary.

To no one’s surprise, the judicial officer usurping the powers of both the executive and legislative branches of the government, Honolulu-based U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Kahala Watson, was appointed to his post by President Obama in 2013. Federal judges in Washington state and Maryland are also expected to rule on EO 13780 soon.

After Democratic lawmakers’ years of shrieking and televised temper tantrums over how shutting down the federal government somehow approximates treason, Democrats have suddenly embraced the tactic in their quest to keep the nation’s borders wide open for Muslim terrorists and illegal aliens.

Democrats are threatening to force a shut-down of the government after it runs out of operating funds after April 28.

Outnumbered in both houses of Congress, and facing a Republican in the White House for the first time in eight years, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other Democrats say they will oppose efforts to finance President Trump’s planned border wall in spending legislation needed to keep the government open for business. Adding favored projects to must-pass spending bills, instead of dealing with the projects as freestanding legislation outside the budget process, is a time-honored way of getting things done in Congress. Both parties do it when in the majority.

But Schumer is now a professional obstructionist committed to undermining the Trump administration so at long last he sees things differently.

“The border wall is impractical and unpopular,” said Schumer on Sunday, “a pointless burden that this administration is trying to pay for by taking money away from the programs that actually keep Americans safe.”‎

Democrats wrote to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Senate leaders warning that they will throw a wrench into efforts to appropriate funds for wall construction if the request is wrapped inside in a spending measure needed to keep the government’s doors open beyond April 28.

“Given these and other concerns, we believe it would be inappropriate to insist on the inclusion of such funding in a must-pass appropriations bill that is needed for the Republican majority in control of the Congress to avert a government shutdown so early in President Trump’s Administration,” the Democrats wrote.