RUTHFULLY YOURS

In order to minimize the dangers posed by aliens who run our borders and evade the inspection process, open borders / immigration anarchists insist that such illegal aliens are simply entering “Undocumented.” However, the unmistakeable truth is that these aliens are, in the parlance of immigration enforcement personnel, “Entering Without Inspection” (EWI).

For decades, beginning with the duplicitous efforts of President Jimmy Carter: Originator Of The Orwellian Term ‘Undocomented Immigrant’ to blur the distinction between lawful immigrants and illegal aliens, globalists inside as well as outside our government, have sought to undermine the enforcement of our immigration laws.

Recently, many journalists have whined that illegal aliens who purportedly have no “serious criminal histories” have been arrested by ICE under the Trump administration, ignoring that aliens who enter the United States illegally or violate the terms of lawful admissions are subject to arrest and removal (deportation) irrespective of whether or not they violated any other laws.

An alien who enters without inspection violates Title 8 U.S. Code § 1325 – Improper entry by alien and may face up to 2 years in prison if he/she has done this more than once.

Furthermore, an alien who has been previously deported and subsequently reenters without authority commits a felony that may, if the alien has a serious criminal history, carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison under Title 8 U.S. Code § 1326 – Reentry of removed aliens.

Congressional Democrats and some Republicans such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham have attacked President Trump for his plans to secure the U.S./Mexican border and effectively enforce our immigration laws.

McCain and Graham have aligned themselves with Senator Chuck Schumer likely because of their shared globalist views on immigration. They were, after all, members of the “Gang of Eight” or, as I have come to refer to them, “The Eight Gangsters.”

If President Donald J. Trump’s critics are correct, he is arranging for illegal aliens — especially those with criminal convictions — something nearly as excruciating as the Bataan Death March.

“I.C.E. MEN COMETH,” warned the front page of Wednesday’s New York Daily News.

“New immigration guidelines are about cruelty, not safety,” the San Francisco Chronicle wept.

The American Civil Liberties Union’s Joanne Lin told the Associated Press that Trump’s immigration enforcement stance is one in which “due process, human decency, and common sense are treated as inconvenient obstacles on the path to mass deportations.”

But where were these trembling voices during the Obama years?

An official report from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) suggests that Trump will struggle to match the pace at which Obama booted immigrants.

According to a document titled “FY 2016 ICE Immigration Removals,” the federal government deported 2,749,706 aliens between fiscal years 2009 and 2016 — on Obama’s watch. This averaged 343,713 deportees annually.

In fiscal year 2016 alone, Obama’s ICE kicked out 240,255 aliens, including 136,669 criminal convicts. However, the report says, “101,586 aliens removed . . . had no criminal conviction.” Furthermore, “the leading countries of origin for removals were Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.” Obama’s disproportionately Hispanic deportees included 2,057 “suspected or confirmed gang members.”

“ICE also continues to focus on criminal aliens,” the report explains, “as 58 percent of overall ICE removals, including 92 percent of ICE removals initiated in the interior of the country, were of convicted criminals.” This echoes Trump’s promise to banish alien lawbreakers before others. “Our enforcement priorities will include removing criminals, gang members, security threats,” Trump said August 31.

Perhaps Trump echoes Obama.

America has no monopoly on deportation. Governments practice this basic function worldwide, even in countries that make American liberals swoon with social-justice fervor.

Take Mexico, a nation allegedly victimized by Trump and other gringos. It deported some 173,000 Central Americans in 2015, 70 percent more than in 2014, according to Mexico’s National Migration Institute. Why? “The government came under intense pressure from the U.S last year [2013] to crack down on migrants after waves of children from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala began arriving at the U.S.–Mexico border,” the Los Angeles Times observed.

Team Obama applied that pressure, and Mexican officials jumped.

Some 5,000 federales rolled into Chiapas, on the Guatemalan frontier. They opened border checkpoints, arrested migrants, and blocked them from a northbound train nicknamed “The Beast.”

Americans overwhelmingly approve of President Trump’s efforts to clamp down on so-called sanctuary cities, according to the results of a Harvard–Harris poll. The Hillreported the poll’s finding that “80 percent of voters say local authorities should have to comply with the law by reporting to federal agents the illegal immigrants they come into contact with.” One of the key measures that President Trump has directed his Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to explore is cutting off some federal funds to cities which continue to defy federal immigration laws. “The American people are no longer going to have to be forced to subsidize this disregard for our laws,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said.

There are at least 400 sanctuary cities and counties in the United States, which could lose some federal funding as President Trump’s executive order to withhold some federal funding from sanctuary localities is implemented. The nation’s 10 largest cities alone could lose as much as $2.27 billion in annual federal funds if they choose to remain sanctuary cities, according to a Reuters analysis of federal grants.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is running for re-election this year, is among the bullheaded city leaders around the country who are willing to sacrifice the safety and welfare of their own citizens to protect illegal aliens – even some with criminal records. De Blasio threatened to take the Trump administration to court if the Trump administration follows through with funding cuts. And the mayor declared his intention to set aside $250 million a year in a reserve fund for four years because of the “huge amount of uncertainty” created by President Trump’s follow-through on one of his key campaign promises. This is money that should be used to pay for vital municipal services such as hiring more police, which would certainly come in handy if illegal aliens with criminal records continue to be allowed to roam the streets of the city.

Going back to the Harvard-Harris poll, its co-director Mark Penn explained, “The public wants honest immigrants treated fairly and those who commit crimes deported and that’s very clear from the data.” De Blasio and his cohorts, however, could not care less.

Illegal immigrants make up approximately 3.5 percent of the U.S.’s total population. A significant number of illegal aliens living in the United States have committed crimes while residing here unlawfully in the first place. Even the immigration friendly Migration Policy Institute estimated in a 2015 report that “about 690,000 (6.3 percent) of resident unauthorized immigrants have previously been convicted of a felony or a serious misdemeanor.” The number is probably considerably higher than that, but even 690,000 criminals remaining here illegally is bad enough. According to data compiled from the U.S. Sentencing Commission for fiscal year 2015, illegal immigrants were responsible for 30.2 percent of convictions for kidnapping/hostage taking, 17.8 percent of convictions for drug trafficking, 11.6 percent of convictions for fraud, 10.4 percent of convictions for money laundering, 6.1 percent of convictions for assault, and 5.5 percent of convictions for murder.

Activists portray illegal immigration solely as a human story of the desperately poor from south of the border fleeing misery to start new, productive lives in the U.S. — despite exploitation and America’s nativist immigration laws.

But the truth is always more complex — and can reveal self-interested as well as idealistic parties.

Employers have long sought to undercut the wages of the American underclass by preference for cheaper imported labor. The upper-middle classes have developed aristocratic ideas of hiring inexpensive “help” to relieve them of domestic chores.

The Mexican government keeps taxes low on its elite in part by exporting, rather than helping, its own poor. It causes little worry that some $25 billion in remittances sent from Mexican citizens working in America puts hardship on those expatriates, who are often subsidized by generous U.S. social services.

Mexico City rarely welcomes a heartfelt discussion about why its citizens flee Mexican exploitation and apparently have no wish to return home. Nor does Mexico City publicize its own stern approaches to immigration enforcement along its southern border — or its ethnocentric approach to all immigration (not wanting to impair “the equilibrium of national demographics”) that is institutionalized in Mexico’s constitution.

The Democratic party is also invested in illegal immigration, worried that its current agendas cannot win in the Electoral College without new constituents who appreciate liberal support for open borders and generous social services.

In contrast, classically liberal, meritocratic, and ethnically diverse immigration might result in a disparate, politically unpredictable set of immigrants.

La Raza groups take it for granted that influxes of undocumented immigrants fuel the numbers of unassimilated supporters. Measured and lawful immigration, along with rapid assimilation, melt away ethnic-based constituencies.

Immigration activists often fault the U.S. as historically racist and colonialist while insisting that millions of foreigners have an innate right to enter illegally and reside in such a supposedly dreadful place.

Undocumented immigrants themselves are not unaware that their own illegal entry, in self-interested fashion, crowds out legal immigrants who often wait years to enter the U.S.

On Tuesday, John Kelly, President Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, published a six-page, single-spaced memorandum detailing new guidance on immigration enforcement. Thereupon, I spent about 1,500 words summarizing the guidance in a column at National Review. Brevity being the soul of wit, both the memo and my description of it could have been reduced to a single, easy-to-remember sentence:

Henceforth, the United States shall be governed by the laws of the United States.

That it was necessary for Secretary Kelly to say more than this — and, sadly, that such alarm has greeted a memo that merely announces the return of the rule of law in immigration enforcement — owes to the Obama administration abuses of three legal doctrines: prosecutorial discretion, preemption, and separation of powers (specifically, the executive usurpation of legislative power).

To the extent President Obama declined to enforce immigration law (notwithstanding his constitutional obligation to execute the laws faithfully), he did so under the guise of prosecutorial discretion. In the pre-Obama days, prosecutorial discretion was an unremarkable, uncontroversial resource-allocation doctrine. It simply meant that since resources are finite, and since it would be neither possible nor desirable to prosecute every crime, we target law-enforcement resources to get the most crime-fighting bang for the taxpayer buck. That means prioritizing enforcement action against (a) the worst offenders and (b) the unlawful causes of the activity.

This is easily illustrated by federal drug enforcement. There are comparatively few federal narcotics agents, compared, say, to police in a major city. But while both feds and cops have authority to arrest traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs, only federal jurisdiction is interstate and international. Consequently, the best use of finite federal enforcement resources is to limit them to prosecutions of significant felony importation and distribution offenses, leaving it to the states and municipalities to handle street pushers and misdemeanor violations involving the use of drugs.

Significantly, the fact that federal enforcement policy, which is made by the executive branch, does not target lesser felons or users does not mean this policy effectively repeals federal drug laws, which are written by Congress.

The non-targeted crimes are still crimes, and the feds reserve the right to prosecute them in appropriate cases (e.g., if they encounter these offenses in the course of carrying out other criminal enforcement missions).

In the area of immigration enforcement, Obama contorted this resource allocation doctrine into a de facto immunity scheme. That is, the Obama Homeland Security Department announced what it labeled enforcement “priorities.” If an illegal alien did not fit into the priorities, it was as if the alien were insulated against prosecution — effectively, it was as if there was nothing illegal about being an alien unlawfully present in the United States; it was as if Obama’s policies were a legal defense against Congress’s duly enacted laws.