RUTHFULLY YOURS

One should not be surprised at the Media-Democrat complex’s attempt to manufacture a scandal over a draft executive order on the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants that the Trump White House refuses to avow. After all, nothing united the Left and fueled the Democratic political ascendancy of 2005 through 2009 like the anti-torture crusade. It had all the necessary elements of a successful campaign: outsized progressive indignation, the collusion of influential Republicans (especially John McCain, whose personal history imbued him with a moral authority that deflected the incoherence of his contentions), and an enfeebled Republican administration too exhausted and too worried about the press to defend itself effectively.

Factor in some of now-President Trump’s most outrageous statements on the campaign trail — such as suggesting that he would have the families of terrorists killed and would employ interrogation techniques harsher than waterboarding — and it became a ripe dead certainty that the Left would mobilize at the first hint of policy deliberations over the handling of captured terrorists.

For now, however, it is much ado about nothing.

At most, what we’re seeing is another iteration of a problem I alluded to Wednesday in addressing President Obama’s negotiations over the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership: the need for confidential deliberations versus the determination of the press (and of Democrats during any GOP administration) that there shall be no secrets.

The Trump administration has not yet announced a policy on the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. Critics should hold their fire until that happens. The draft executive order is just that, a draft — even if we assume, based on reported indications from unidentified administration leakers, that it is part of the discussion in Trump’s national-security team.

It is not just a commonplace — it is an inevitability that major policy decisions and the memoranda that memorialize them go through numerous iterations before they are finalized. The Left’s tired playbook depicts all Republican presidents as imbeciles and their advisers as amateur hour. Thus, much is being made of the fact that the draft executive order gets the date of the 9/11 attacks wrong, placing them a decade after the fact, on September 11, 2011. Put aside that this mistake is clearly a typo. (I’ve done it myself a number of times; plus, the date of the 9/11 attacks is rendered correctly on page 2 of the document.) The error also occurs in the very first paragraph (near the beginning, on the fifth line). To a sensible, objective analyst, that would suggest that wherever this draft comes from, it must be a document produced very early in the deliberation process. It must not have been perused by too many people before the New York Times “obtained” it.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/01/26/miami-complies-with-president-trumps-executive-order-cracking-d/21701318/ President Trump is making it much riskier to be an undocumented immigrant in Miami. Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez said the county will comply with Trump’s executive order forcing all so-called “sanctuary cities” to turn over undocumented immigrants who are arrested. Sanctuary cities or counties are areas where local officials decline federal requests to […]

President Donald Trump is doing something incredibly rare for a politician in Washington, D.C. He is keeping his word. Two of the most important of his campaign promises were to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into this country and to suspend the admission of “refugees” from countries prone to terrorism until a system of “extreme vetting” is put into place. On Tuesday night, President Trump tweeted out a teaser: “Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall!”

After eight long years of Obama administration policies that endangered the security of the American people, President Trump is placing Americans first — before illegal aliens and self-declared “refugees” from terrorist prone countries.

The president began fulfilling his promises on immigration by signing two executive orders on Wednesday at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), whose responsibilities include overseeing immigration and border security. Mr. Trump also took part in a ceremony installing his new Secretary of Homeland Security, retired Marine General John Kelly. In his remarks following the signing, President Trump emphasized that DHS is a “law enforcement agency.” He added that “beginning today, the United States gets back control of its borders.”

The first executive order he signed redirected funds already appropriated by Congress towards paying for the construction of the border wall he has promised between Mexico and the United States. Additional funding appropriations will be required from Congress for completion of the project. However, President Trump still intends that Mexico will ultimately reimburse U.S. taxpayers for the expenditures through one means or another, including possibly redirecting monies presently slotted for foreign aid to Mexico or using revenue from border taxes. President Trump’s action came on the same day that Mexico’s foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, was due to arrive in Washington to help prepare for the visit of Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto later this month.

The order would end the “catch-and-release” policies the Obama administration utilized, under which illegals awaiting removal hearings were released. More detention facilities along the border are planned for construction. According to Immigration and Custom Enforcement figures cited by Fox News, 179,040 of the 925,193 illegal immigrants who have evaded a scheduled deportation had criminal convictions.

The Trump administration is anticipating roadblocks put in its way by legal challenges, including activists’ exploitation of environmental laws to block construction of the wall. However, the administration should be able to prevail and move forward expeditiously. The REAL ID Act of 2005 gives the Secretary of Homeland Security “the authority to waive all legal requirements such Secretary, in such Secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads” along U.S. borders. Federal district courts have exclusive jurisdiction to hear challenges to the Secretary of Homeland Security’s determination, but a “cause of action or claim may only be brought alleging a violation of the Constitution of the United States.” Melinda Taylor, an environmental law professor with the University of Texas, said, “The new administration has a wild card they can pull and it’s in this law. The language in this law allows them to waive all federal laws that would be an impediment to building any type of physical barrier along the border, including a wall.” Actually, “the authority to waive all legal requirements” in the statute would extend to state and local laws and regulations, as well as federal laws. The president’s constitutional authority derives from his fundamental constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” – in this case, the nation’s existing immigration laws.

President Trump signed a second executive order addressing the so-called “sanctuary cities,” which have been openly defying federal immigration law enforcement. They may face the loss of certain federal funding if they continue their 21st century version of segregationist Governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door” in opposition to federally mandated school desegregation.

In September, Donald Trump laid out a ten-point plan for immigration, emphasizing border security, the enforcement of immigration laws, and the removal of criminal aliens. The president’s latest executive orders — one directing the construction of a wall on the U.S.–Mexico border, the other stripping federal grant money from sanctuary cities — are a first step toward making good on those promises.

On Wednesday, the president ordered Executive Branch agencies “to deploy all lawful means to secure the Nation’s southern border,” which includes the “construction of a physical wall on the southern border.” The rough terrain along parts of the U.S.–Mexico border likely militates against the “big, beautiful wall” that Trump envisions, but erecting physical barriers along further stretches of the 2,000 miles dividing the U.S. from its southern neighbor is an obvious and long-neglected tool to help clamp down on America’s ongoing illegal-immigration problem.

The second order, focusing on “enhancing public safety in the interior of the United States,” directs the attorney general and secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to deny federal grants to jurisdictions that refuse to comply with federal immigration law, insofar as they can do so within their legal authority.

These orders are a good start toward reorienting American immigration policy so that it favors the interests of American citizens over their foreign counterparts. However, they are only a start.

While the construction of a wall, and the potential deployment of technology such as below-ground sensors at the border, will be a helpful impediment to would-be lawbreakers, the crucial work will continue to be done by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agencies, which are woefully understaffed. Trump’s executive orders suggest bolstering these organizations with 10,000 and 5,000 new hires, respectively, and Trump has also announced the end of the catch-and-release policy that characterized the Obama administration’s approach to border security. Congress should work with him to secure both of those plans.

Radical currency speculator George Soros is scheming to profit from the illegal immigration crises in the United States and the European Union that he was instrumental in creating.

Soros traffics in revolution and human misery. His devious business deals have brought the financial systems of the United Kingdom and Malaysia to their knees. Soros helped finance the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” in then-Czechoslovakia. He acknowledged having orchestrated coups in Croatia, Georgia, Slovakia, and Yugoslavia.

Soros hates America. “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States,” he has said. Soros praises Communist China effusively and has said the totalitarian nation—which cuts babies in unauthorized pregnancies from the wombs of their mothers, tortures and kills religious dissenters, and runs over eminent domain resisters with steam-rollers—has “a better-functioning government than the United States.” In the U.S. he has financed the violent, politically destabilizing Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements.

Now the preeminent funder of border-busting campaigns in the U.S. and overseas has entered into a partnership with credit card giant MasterCard Inc. to create something called Humanity Ventures.

In recent years Soros has focused on making grants through his Open Society Foundations to various nonprofits, but this new project has for-profit goals.

“Humanity Ventures is intended to be profitable so as to stimulate involvement from other businesspeople,” Soros and MasterCard said in a joint press release.

The claimed objective is to make the lives of “migrants” better through spending on education, health care, and economic development.

“Migrants are often forced into lives of despair in their host communities because they cannot gain access to financial, healthcare and government services,” they said, ignoring the veritable minefield of taxpayer-funded assistance available to illegal aliens in the U.S.

“Our potential investment in this social enterprise, coupled with MasterCard’s ability to create products that serve vulnerable communities, can show how private capital can play a constructive role in solving social problems.”

Any profit Soros and his billionaire buddies in the left-wing donors’ consortium, the Democracy Alliance, extract from the operations of Humanity Ventures can be used to fund more projects aimed at destroying Western culture, rule of law, individual rights and limited government. Perhaps the money can be used to finance the future presidential runs of Keith Ellison and Chelsea Clinton.

This new venture comes as countries like Soros’s native Hungary and Macedonia are threatening to kick his operations out.

President Donald Trump is set to announce plans to expedite construction of a wall along the Mexican border, and is preparing orders that ban people from countries deemed a terror risk from entering the U.S. as well as suspend the U.S. refugee program.

Mr. Trump plans to travel Wednesday to the Department of Homeland Security, where he said he would be announcing his border-security plans. He will also include an order aimed at punishing so-called sanctuary cities where law-enforcement officials limit cooperation with federal immigration agencies and add 5,000 border agents, according to a person familiar with the planning.

“Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter Tuesday evening. “Among many other things, we will build the wall!”

Other executive actions involving the refugee program and immigration from nations deemed terror risks are expected Thursday, people familiar with the planning said.

Mr. Trump has given few details about his promise for a border wall, a project that is estimated to cost as much as $10 billion and possibly much more. Congressional Republicans have been considering appropriating funds in spending legislation that must pass by April to keep the government funded.

In hopes of beginning work sooner, Mr. Trump is expected to divert tens of millions of dollars in unspent allocations, said a second person familiar with the planning. Congressional leaders pointed Mr. Trump and his team to the money that may be available to be spent on border security, the person said. CONTINUE AT SITE