RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/miltharris/2023/09/12/the-bluster-and-demise-of-sanctuary-cities-n1726403

There is a huge difference between true caring and indignant self-righteousness, a fact that the mayors of many sanctuary cities are now learning. It’s one thing to climb up on your soap box and declare that immigration makes communities stronger when you have no idea what you’re talking about. The truth is that these cities never had any intention of being sanctuaries for anyone. They never dreamed that the overflow would reach them. So they smugly smirked and ridiculed the governors and mayors of border cities and states, dismissing the immigration mess and open borders as someone else’s problem.

Now their holier-than-thou attitudes have dissipated into whining. Their smugness has been replaced with poor me syndrome, as they begin to understand the full weight of the issue.

Two shining examples of rhetoric over reality are, of course, New York and Chicago.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams trumpeted the fact that NYC would welcome and shelter immigrants. That was until both Texas and Florida began to send buses and planeloads of illegal aliens to his city. Soon — within weeks, actually — Adams was bemoaning his city’s fate. He went crying to the White House for financial help and threatened legal action against non-sanctuary cities if they wouldn’t help him by accepting some of the city’s overflow.

At a recent town hall, Adams was singing an entirely different tune while proving he was still a liberal by blaming everyone else. He whined that the raging migrant crisis would destroy New York City and even criticized Biden for ignoring his pleas for financial help. He accused Biden of providing no support for the thousands of asylum seekers arriving every month.

Adams went on to say, “I’m gonna tell you something, New Yorkers, never in my life have I had a problem that I didn’t see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.”

He then blasted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for having the nerve to send illegal aliens to a sanctuary city. “Go item-for-item on what Eric Adams ran for as a candidate and look at what we accomplished in twenty months: We turned this city around in twenty months, and then what happened? Started with a madman down in Texas who decided he wanted to bus people up to New York City.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/immigration/sinema-blasts-biden-administration-outrageous-lack-funding-migrant-crisis

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) lambasted the Biden administration on Friday as “outrageous” and “ridiculous” for failing to allocate sufficient funds to humanitarian organizations on the Arizona-Mexico border dealing with the migrant crisis.

“The government has shown a real inability to respond in real-time to the change in the patterns,” Sinema said, adding that the Biden administration has “completely shortchanged Arizona border communities” that are experiencing fluctuations in where migrants cross into the U.S.

In July, Border Patrol’s Tucson sector set a 15-year high for migrant encounters, making it the busiest along the Southwest border.

Arizona citizens, in particular, are frustrated with the insufficiency of the Shelter and Service Program, which provides federal assistance to social work organizations that assist migrants.

Under the prior apparatus, called the Emergency Food and Shelter Program, federal money for the migrant crisis was limited to border towns, but dollars under the SSP program are now being spread across the entire country.

New York City, which has received more than any border town under the SSP, has been given $106.8 million in funding, compared to the $56 million to be shared across state governments and non-profits in the four states that border Mexico.

Sinema told reporters that the lack of funding for humanitarian services along the southern border is creating a dangerous situation for both migrants and Arizonan communities as social workers and volunteers struggle to do their jobs with decreased levels of public support.

Sinema said she is working to get more funding from the administration that is “adequate to actually meet the needs of the border communities that are actually meeting the challenge.”

http://NYC Mayor Eric Adams Gripes About Mass Influx of Illegal Aliens; Says They ‘Will Destroy’ the City By Debra Heine

New York City Mayor Eric Adams predicted Wednesday that the nonstop influx of illegal aliens into the Big Apple “will destroy” the city and blamed “the madman in Texas” for busing many of them there.  More than 110,000 migrants have reportedly poured into the sanctuary city in the past year.

“What happened? It started with a mad man down in Texas, decided he wanted to bus people up to New York City,” the mayor said bitterly. “One hundred ten thousand migrants. We have to feed, clothe, house, educate the children, wash their laundry sheets, give them everything they need, health care. And this team here, we stated, let’s do everything possible before we have to push it out into neighborhoods and communities.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in March of 2021 to deal with the Biden regime’s manufactured border crisis. The governor announced on Tuesday that Texas has bused more than 35,000 migrants to sanctuary cities across the nation, including more than 13,300 to New York City since August 2022.

The federal government also relocates “asylum seekers” from the border to cities across the U.S., including  New York City. Stopping short of calling out the Biden administration by name, Adams griped that the city has been left to fend for itself without the help of federal assistance.

“Month after month I stood up and said this is gonna come to a neighborhood near you. Well, we’re here, we’re getting no support on this national crisis, and we’re receiving no support,” he said.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/01/bidens-border-crisis-fuels-massive-spike-in-retail-crime/

As retailers reported their quarterly earnings this month, a phrase that kept cropping up is one you probably never heard before – “organized retail crime.” It has spiked enough that it’s eating into profits.

Turns out that, by throwing open the southern border, President Joe Biden has created a booming business for Mexican cartels ripping off U.S. retailers – although you’d never know it based on the media blackout of this trend.

Target, Dollar Tree, Foot Locker, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nordstrom, and others recently disclosed that organized retail crime – or ORC for short – is hitting their bottom lines.

Dick’s Chief Financial Officer Navdeep Gupta said that the sports retailer lowered its profit outlook for the year in part because “the number of incidents and the organized retail crime impact came in significantly higher than we anticipated.”

Dollar Tree said it is keeping more of its items in locked cases or removing them altogether as organized theft climbs

Just last week, 50 criminals swarmed a Los Angeles mall and made off with $300,000 worth of stolen goods. A news report suggests that they were following orders from organized crime or gang members.

“There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of … criminal organizations behind this. Some of it involves gang members; some of it involves people that are what you would identify as professional retail thieves,” Deputy Los Angeles Police Chief Alan Hamilton told NBC News on Sunday. “It runs the gamut, and there is a black market for purchasing these items, unfortunately. … The same people [are] then turning around and committing these acts again, over and over again.”

The National Retail Federation says ORC cost retailers close to $100 billion in 2021 – a significant increase from the year before – and that money eventually comes out of consumers’ pockets.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/08/30/the-morning-briefing-however-bad-you-think-the-border-mess-is-its-worse-n1723058

Whenever we discuss the Biden administration’s monumental nightmare at the border it’s important to remember that they immediately got the mess in motion. President LOLEightyonemillion signed executive orders ending the construction of the border wall and strengthening Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on his first afternoon in office. Biden’s handlers couldn’t wait to begin undoing President Trump’s efforts to secure the border.

It’s truly stunning how quickly Biden was able to make the situation at the border worse than it’s ever been. Many have theorized that was the plan. Democrats have been known to deliberately create problems that they then hope to be able to take credit for fixing. It’s a flawed strategy that rarely works out, but bless their hearts, they keep trying.

Of course, Team Biden has yet to meet a problem it couldn’t make exponentially worse, and the border crisis remains Exhibit A in support of that claim.

Catherine wrote a post yesterday that has some sobering numbers in it regarding the border:

Here’s a fact the Biden administration would sure like to bury — 7,000 illegal aliens are reportedly entering the U.S. on a daily basis.

That’s from the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents.  And yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s still proper to say “illegal aliens” because, you know, that’s what they are.

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/dhs-not-releasing-monthly-totals-illegal-migrants-released-us
Who knows how many illegal immigrants are allowed to enter the U.S. after interdiction by CPB agents? The DHS does, but isn’t saying. “The only reason why ICE and OFO would refuse to disclose that information is to hide the fact that it is releasing more than 100,000 aliens per month into the United States,” says a former immigration judge.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is deliberately not releasing the monthly totals of all illegal migrants who wind up getting released into the U.S. after they are encountered by U.S. authorities at the border, a former U.S. immigration judge says.

Andrew Arthur, who served for eight years as an immigration judge at the now-closed immigration court in York, Pennsylvania, told Just the News that DHS does track the total number of migrants released after an encounter with border agents, but making that data available to the public would paint the Biden Administration in a negative light.

“The only reason why ICE and OFO [Office of Field Operations] would refuse to disclose that information is to hide the fact that it is releasing more than 100,000 aliens per month into the United States, and to conceal the effects of those migrant releases on communities across the United States,” he said.

Arthur also said that DHS should be required to release the information the same way that the monthly data on encounters of illegal immigrants is posted online. 

Arthur also said the “monthly court-ordered disclosures in Texas v. Biden,” the lawsuit over the Remain in Mexico policy, demonstrated DHS “can provide the American people with statistics on the tens of thousands of illegal entrants that CBP encounters at the southwest border whom DHS releases” into the U.S. The agency has “refused to do so since those orders were vacated in August 2022,” Arthur explained.  

U.S. immigration judges, formerly called “special inquiry officers'” are not part of the federal judiciary, but rather are employees of the United States Department of Justice and report to the Attorney General. 

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which describes itself as “a non-partisan, public interest organization” with  more than three million diverse members and supporters, said that the Biden administration is not being transparent with the public about how many migrants without U.S. legal status are being released into the U.S.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trying-to-derail-the-federal-immigration-gravy-train/

With no projected end to the chaos of illegal immigration, some Congressional Republicans have decided to confront the religious agencies aggravating the problem at the Mexican border — including Catholic Charities, which plays a pivotal role in that chaos, as FrontPage Magazine reported.

Even conservative Catholics organized to oppose their church’s support of open borders. The Deposit of Faith Coalition held a press conference July 20 in Washington, D.C. to demand that Congress stop giving funds for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The website Church Militant, one of the members, calls the coalition “a group of about a dozen Catholic or Catholic-led outfits.”

The coalition’s press conference represents growing public opposition to the Biden “Administration’s” apathy and religious agencies’ social irresponsibility.

In December, Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a letter for “immediate access to all records and communication relating to your department’s border practices and regulations.”

The letter accused DHS of “allowing non-governmental organizations the freedom to aid and abet illegal aliens.” Two other Republicans, Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany, another committee member, and Texas Rep. Jake Ellzey signed the letter.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/the-biden-border-crisis-rages-on

What little progress President Joe Biden made in bringing a semblance of order to the southern border in June was wiped out by a huge surge of immigrants in July, according to numbers released on Aug. 18 by the Department of Homeland Security.

The latest border encounter numbers reveal that the border crisis Biden created is not abating at all. It can be no surprise that Democratic cities and states, eight so far, are declaring emergencies because they are feeling the pain inflicted by Biden’s border policies that they supported.

There were 183,503 encounters at the border in July, 27% more than the 144,566 encountered in June. June’s number was an improvement from 206,701 in May. All three numbers dwarf the 25,019 encountered in July 2017.

Former President Barack Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson once testified that anything more than 1,000 encounters a day represented a “crisis.” Biden has overseen 29 straight months of encounters higher than the highest month under the previous administration.

It is no longer just Republicans sounding the alarm. Democratic mayors and governors have declared states of emergency in their jurisdictions to deal with the flood of immigrants overwhelming their communities.

“This influx of migrants, the unanticipated nature of their arrival, and our current space and staffing challenges have put an immense strain on city resources to the level where they’re on the verge of reaching a breaking point at this time,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, a Democrat, said in December.

“State employees and our partners have been miracle workers throughout this crisis,” Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA) said earlier this month. “But in recent months, demand has increased to levels that our emergency shelter system cannot keep up with, especially as the number of families leaving shelter has dwindled due to a lack of affordable housing options and barriers to securing work.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-problem-with-bidens-plan-to-house-illegal-aliens/

Faced with an unrelenting surge of foreign nationals coming to the southern border, the Biden Administration has devised a new plan: More comfortable housing for people in the country illegally.

The White House is requesting roughly $1 billion in funding to set up new housing for illegal aliens while their overwhelmingly illegitimate asylum claims play out in the courts. Under the administration’s plan, beneficiaries of this new program would be free to go where they wish during the day, but would have to check in and stay the night in their houses, according to Axios.

But, here’s the kicker. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the language of the White House’s proposal would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use any of its funding on housing for illegal aliens instead of enforcement. The use of the funds would be at the discretion of anti-borders Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. One can only imagine how Mayorkas is salivating at the potential opportunity to use his agency’s funding to further his anti-borders agenda.

As former Acting ICE Director and Immigration Reform Law Institute Senior Fellow Tom Homan put it, this program would “would serve as yet another enticement, another magnet that will bring more families to our borders.”

If this new housing program were to take effect, it would serve as further encouragement for foreign nationals to make the dangerous journey through Central America to the U.S. The Biden Administration spent the first half of 2023 concocting schemes to artificially lower the number of illegal crossings at the southern border, but those numbers still skyrocketed by more than 30 percent last month. The promise of new and improved housing for illegal aliens will surely cause those numbers to soar even higher, empowering the cartels, and causing many migrants to die in the process, while further disrupting border communities already overwhelmed by the crisis.