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IMMIGRATION

Largest Illegal Alien County Prepares ‘Resistance’ to Trump Can you guess how many illegal aliens live in this ‘sanctuary county’? by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/largest-illegal-alien-county-prepares-resistance-to-trump/

Eight percent of Los Angeles County is illegal. This is where 800,000 illegal aliens out of an estimated 3 million statewide (the real numbers are likely much higher) have been harbored.

And that may be about to change.

In no county and state has the political power of the Democrats been as closely tied to open borders as in Los Angeles County and California. Flipping California convinced the Democrats to tie their national fortunes to mass migration and for a while it seemed to be working.

Biden’s open borders team, from Border Czar Kamala Harris to Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and USCIS director Ur Mendoza Jaddou, were not only Californians, but typical products of its diverse checkbox political class who rejected the idea of national borders.

California deportations had sharply dropped off after the state began implementing pro-illegal and pro-crime laws in 2014, falling from a high of nearly 100,000 to less than 4,000 in 2024. With the California Values Act (SB 54) blocking law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities in place, the first Trump administration struggled to bring deportations up to around 30,000 a year and under Biden deportations effectively disappeared in California.

But the 2024 election may be about to crack the nation’s worst sanctuary state, county and city.

If Kamala had won, she would have been the first White House Democrat from California, but instead California Democrats in the largest illegal alien county in the country are panicking.

The Immorality of Illegal Immigration Democratic leaders are facing backlash over the Biden administration’s handling of illegal immigration, leading to a surge in crime, strained services, and a Trump victory focused on border security. Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/25/the-immorality-of-illegal-immigration/

Donald Trump will not be president for almost another two months.

Yet Democrat politicians, both federal and local, vie to be the most strident in denouncing his plans to begin deporting millions of foreign nationals who, over the last four years, have entered the U.S. illegally. Trump pledges to focus initially only on the 400,000 to 500,000 current felons and some 1.4 million additional aliens who have ignored legal summons for their deportation.

Weekly we read of thousands of illegal immigrants arriving from areas controlled by violent Mexican cartel gangs or failed, strife-torn South American countries that have emptied their jails to send their felons northwards. Hundreds of thousands of them have been committing violent crimes while demanding still more free housing and support from strapped American taxpayers.

Big-city left-wing mayors and city councils boast that they will do all their best to nullify federal immigration laws, even as their cities face near insolvency housing, feeding, and monitoring the influx. More specifically, they brag they will continue to order local and state authorities to resist all efforts of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. They scream about possible “massive deportations” to come under Trump, callously ignoring that their own advocacy has fueled rising crime waves of unaudited illegal aliens. And they appear absolutely indifferent to the social costs imposed by illegal immigration upon their own poor and middle-class constituents.

Virtue-signaling Democratic governors and mayors have so far not dared to utter a word of criticism about what has been the Biden administration’s truly historic “massive importation” of illegal aliens into the U.S. over the last four years.

Why?

Largely because these political grandees and media demagogues have the money, connections, zip codes, and influence to be immune from the fallout of their own performance-art advocacy of illegal immigration. They take for granted that the baleful consequences of open borders always falls upon the distant and vulnerable Other.

Again, consider the left-wing logic: it is deemed moral to dismantle the border, disrupt the social fabric of the country, and destroy federal immigration laws. But it is immoral to restore U.S. sovereignty, secure the border, stop the flux of lethal cartel-supplied fentanyl and child sex trafficking, and follow the law?

Sending Them Home ‘Mass deportation’ starts with the removal of illegal aliens who break the law inside our borders, whether on the streets or on campuses by Mark Krikorian

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mass-deportation-criminal-aliens

Who said the following?

Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.

Donald Trump? Stephen Miller? Incoming “border czar” Tom Homan?

No—civil rights icon Barbara Jordan in 1995.

Jordan, the first Black congresswoman from the South and a star of the Watergate hearings, was named by President Clinton to head an immigration commission some 30 years ago. It is precisely because her recommendations were ignored that we are where we are today. The lack of credibility that Jordan bemoaned is how you get a man like Trump.

The bottom line is that a large-scale program to make illegal aliens leave doesn’t require soldiers breaking down doors, cattle cars, or concentration camps. This is law enforcement, not war. And it is imperative in light not just of the past four years of immigration mismanagement, but the past four decades of dishonesty.

Decades of unwillingness to enforce immigration laws were driven by the desire of some for cheap, controllable labor, and of others for a new client class that would shift political power to the Democratic Party. The culmination of that process under Biden became entwined with the identity of the party and its ideological activists who sincerely believe that national borders are an expression of racism and that turning away foreigners who want to move here illegally is immoral. The belief in unlimited, lawless immigration has become a litmus-test issue for the activist left, like hostility to the existence of law enforcement itself.

And because most voters naturally consider that insane, we now see broad public support, including among first-generation migrants, for “mass deportation” and an electoral mandate for what the president-elect has promised will be the “largest deportation effort in American history.”

Restoring credibility after decades of deceit will take time, cost money, get tied up in courts, and inevitably involve an unfortunate measure of human suffering, the images of which will be ruthlessly exploited for political purposes by the media and the interests they serve. But it’s neither the Manhattan Project nor the D-Day landings—it’s simply a matter of enforcing existing law consistently and without apology, which is the legal and popular mandate the American people have given the incoming administration.

Trump’s Plans to Enforce the Law Against Illegals The battle ahead. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-plans-to-enforce-the-law-against-illegals/

President-elect Donald Trump’s landslide victory over the Democrats’ hapless nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has given him a clear mandate to vigorously pursue his policy priorities. These include strong immigration law enforcement, lowering prices and reinvigorating domestic manufacturing to create more good paying jobs, U.S. energy dominance, strengthening national security, conducting foreign policy that puts America first, and protecting free speech.

Mr. Trump emphasized these policy goals repeatedly during his campaign. He left no doubt with the American people what he would do if elected. The American people responded with overwhelming approval in a fair, transparent election – across demographics, classes, ages, and geographical regions.

But the hypocritical left-wing progressives, who have continually smeared Mr. Trump as an existential threat to democracy, are proving that they are the real threats to democracy. They refuse to accept the majority of voters’ verdict on the direction they want the country to follow.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is plotting with his Democrat colleagues to block President-elect Trump’s achievement of his policy agenda priorities, or at least to slow them down as much as possible. Members of the Progressive, Black, Hispanic, Asian Pacific American and Equality caucuses are the most vocal advocates in Congress of this obstructionist strategy. Governors in Democrat-run states such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker are planning to fight Mr. Trump every step of the way. This includes shielding illegal immigrants who reside within their sanctuary jurisdictions from federal law enforcement officers.

Immigration Is a Mess. Here’s How to Fix It. We need a plan that supports cultural dynamism and protects American workers. Ten commonsense proposals from Reihan Salam.

https://www.thefp.com/p/immigration-is-a-mess-heres-how-to

In 2018, I published Melting Pot or Civil War?, a short book on immigration. Despite its provocative title, the book offered a cautious, careful, almost hilariously mild case for immigration restriction. Having closely followed how countries around the world had handled, and more often mishandled, immigration, I laid out a road map for Making Immigration Great Again. Among other things, I called for rebalancing immigrant admissions toward the young and skilled; rejecting identitarian ideologies that undermined immigrant assimilation and sowed racial resentment; embracing labor-saving automation as an imperfect substitute for low-wage migrant labor; and investing in low-income youth.    

If this sounds like a boringly centrist Davos Man manifesto, I don’t disagree.

Keep in mind, though, that I wrote the book in the thick of the Donald Trump–era immigration wars, when the rhetorical temperature was high and public opinion was as pro-immigration as it had ever been. Against a backdrop of family separations, attempted Muslim bans, and anxious Dreamers, it felt taboo to even suggest that Steve Bannon and friends might be half-right about the wisdom of opening our borders, especially in my small, hyper-educated, blue state–parody world. 

As I was labeled a fascist by anonymous trolls, and my arguments were called “completely off the rails,” a vocal minority on the right was growing ever more extreme in its opposition to immigration. By making a moderate case, my arguments weren’t restrictionist enough for the hardcore restrictionists or cosmopolitan enough to satisfy enlightened opinion.

But I came by my position honestly. My parents, immigrants from Bangladesh, settled in Brooklyn in the mid-1970s. They were part of a larger wave of newcomers that helped revitalize New York and other cities that had fallen on hard times. I had seen all that immigration can do to enrich urban neighborhoods up close. Yet I also recognized that mass immigration wasn’t a free lunch, and that open borders romantics were inviting a backlash that risked slamming our borders shut for a generation. 

By offering a middle course, my hope was that some number of moderates would read my book and be convinced that the reaction to Trump’s shock-and-awe restrictionism must not be to heedlessly dismantle immigration enforcement altogether.

Instead, a few years later, the Biden administration came in and did just about everything I warned against, torching Democrats’ credibility on the most important issue facing the country. 

Tren De Aragua Gang Terrorizes American Cities By Wendi Strauch Mahoney

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/tren_de_aragua_gang_terrorizes_american_cities.html

Joe Biden’s border policies are disastrous for communities nationwide, including cities that are nowhere near United States borders.  There have been at least 10.8 million encounters with illegal aliens nationwide since the start of Fiscal Year 2021 (FY2021), according to Rep. Mark Green’s September “Startling Stats” report on the border crisis.  The same report indicates that 2 million more aliens have entered as “known gotaways.”  According to former chief of Border Patrol Raul Ortiz, the total number of gotaways “could be underreported by as much as 20 percent.”  

The devastating numbers fail to tell the whole story, however. Embedded in those historic numbers are criminal gangs like Tren de Aragua, whose members have taken root in communities nationwide.  Tren de Aragua is terrorizing communities, forcing the Biden administration’s U.S. Treasury to label the gang as a U.S.-designated transnational criminal organization (TCO).

The Treasury’s announcement states that the gang has “opportunistically infiltrated local criminal economies.”

From its origins as a prison gang in Aragua, Venezuela, Tren de Aragua has quickly expanded throughout the Western Hemisphere in recent years. With a particular focus on human smuggling and other illicit acts that target desperate migrants, the organization has developed additional revenue sources through a range of criminal activities, such as illegal mining, kidnapping, human trafficking, extortion, and the trafficking of illicit drugs such as cocaine and MDMA.

Tren de Aragua poses a deadly criminal threat across the region. For example, Tren de Aragua leverages its transnational networks to traffic people, especially migrant women and girls, across borders for sex trafficking and debt bondage. When victims seek to escape this exploitation, Tren de Aragua members often kill them and publicize their deaths as a threat to others.

Kamala’s Open Border Is an Attack on America By John Fonte

https://tomklingenstein.com/kamalas-open-border-is-an-attack-on-america/

Immigration, or specifically, the migration crisis, has emerged as a major issue in the 2024 presidential election. This crisis is not simply a traditional dispute over policy. It is one front in an ongoing “cold civil war” over the future of the American way of life. 

On January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden issued a series of executive orders: stopping all deportations for 100 days; halting construction of Trump’s border wall; and phasing out the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) or “Remain in Mexico” program that required asylum-seeking migrants to stay in Mexico (instead of in the U.S. in violation of immigration law). 

On the same day, President Biden also proposed massive new amnesty legislation for an estimated 11 million illegal aliens with no serious enforcement measures. During the first hundred days, the Biden-Harris administration issued 94 executive actions to gut Trump’s border policy. Not surprisingly, thousands of migrants began to pour across America’s open southern border every day. Two months later, on March 26, 2021, after a congressional visit to the border, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) declared, “Border Patrol is overwhelmed, overworked, and discouraged by the new [Biden-Harris] policies.” She recounted, “Agents took us through a dangerous path to the Rio Grande where we could hear the cartel members taunting us across the river. … Human trafficking, child abuse, and drug smuggling are rampant. This is a crisis.”

Two weeks later, the president of the National Border Patrol Council said the United States had lost operational control of the southern border to the cartels. He remarked, “I was asked last night,‘Who is controlling the border? Is it President Biden? Is it Kamala Harris, who is it?’ And my answer was, ‘It’s the cartels.’ The cartels control the border now. It’s not even the Border Patrol. It’s not even the U.S. government.”

Unlike any previous administration in American history (including even Barack Obama’s) the Biden-Harris administration has completely refused to obey immigration law. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, aliens seeking asylum are to be detained until their cases are decided. Instead, under Biden-Harris, the aliens are not only released but bussed and flown into towns throughout America without the knowledge or consent of the citizens of those jurisdictions. Officials in Westchester County, New York, complained that unwanted migrants were being flown in by government-funded NGOs in the middle of the night to avoid detection.

Over the past three and a half years, the Biden-Harris administration has implemented measure after measure that has weakened border enforcement, the safety and security of Americans, and that of the migrants themselves. 

Biden-Harris Team Still Flying Haitians into the United States By Ed Sherdlu

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/biden_harris_team_still_flying_haitians_into_the_united_states.html

(The information in this essay comes from first-hand interviews.)

Last April, the Republican-led House Committee on Homeland Security caught the Harris-Biden administration spending your taxpayer dollars to fly military-age Hattian men into America. Charter flights would land in the middle of the night and discharge tens of thousands of illegals. Once caught, it stopped for a while. Now, Mumbles and Giggles have resumed the program in a way that costs you more, and all the illegal passengers are approved by the gangs running Haiti.

The overnight flights of the “slip them in at 2:00 AM when no one is watching” program were easy to track. Websites such as Flight Aware allowed anyone to follow the planes all the way to their landings at more than 50 U.S. airports. Knowing they were busted, Biden-Harris changed their M.O. They stopped the charters on the Fly by Night Airlines. They now pay traditional U.S. airlines to slip them in with their regular passengers.

At the microscale, the process is a bit complicated for young Hattian men. First, they must get to the airport in Port-au-Prince. In the aftermath of hurricanes and an earthquake, it isn’t easy to get there from remote villages. Despite billions of dollars funneled through the Clinton-Bush Initiative, many rural roads are still impassable. What else would you expect when the donated dollars went to a country rated by Transparency International as one of the most corrupt in the world? But no roads – no problem. Since the roads don’t work, U.S. taxpayer-paid helicopters fly the young men to Toussaint Louverture International Airport. With its 9900-foot runways, Toussaint can accommodate even the biggest airliners.

One might think U.S. airlines would stop service to a country where the terms “government” and “gangs” are synonymous. But there is money to be made flying the illegals into the U.S., so three of our airlines still serve the Haitian capital.

Canada to ‘Significantly Reduce’ Immigration as Trudeau Caves to Public Pressure: Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/canada-to-significantly-reduce-immigration-as-trudeau-caves-to-public-pressure/

Canada plans to “significantly reduce” the number of immigrants it allows into the country over the next two years, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reverses course amid falling public support for immigration.

Canada previously set a target of 500,000 new permanent residents in 2025. Under the new immigration plan, Canada will decrease that target by 21 percent, to 395,000. After 2025, the limit will shrink by roughly 4 percent each year as the government looks to set a target of 365,000 new permanent residents by 2027.

And for the first time ever, Canada will set a target for temporary immigrants. The new limitations, which will impact international students and foreign workers, will see admittance of non-permanent residents drop by roughly 445,000 in 2025 and 2026. By comparison, the country allowed in 800,000 temporary immigrants in 2023.

“This is temporary — to pause our population growth and let our economy catch up,” Trudeau said Thursday. “We have to get the system working right for all Canadians.”

The prime minister said during a news conference that the new plan is being put into place because the country “didn’t get the balance quite right” as it responded to the “tumultuous times” that followed the Covid-19 pandemic.

The new policy marks an about-face from Trudeau’s previous support for immigration that had allowed for a record increase of immigration to the country since he took office in 2015. Trudeau’s government raised annual permanent resident targets from 272,000 when he took office to 485,000 this year.

Immigration has driven 97 percent of the country’s population growth as it contends with worsened housing shortages, inflated rent prices, strained public services and rising unemployment. The country’s unemployment rate is particularly high among young people — 14 percent compared to 6.5 percent unemployment overall.

Fifty-eight percent of Canadians now feel that immigration levels are too high, according to a poll by the Environics Institute, which found public opinion on immigration levels has “effectively flipped from being acceptable (if not valuable) to problematic”.

The EU is falling apart Poland’s suspension of the right to asylum is another giant crack in the Brussels regime. Tim Black

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/22/the-eu-is-falling-apart/

‘The state must regain 100 per cent of the control over who enters and leaves.’ What makes this statement so remarkable is who said it. Because it wasn’t a Eurosceptic populist making this case for a nation’s sovereignty over its own borders. It was Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk.

Yes, that Donald Tusk. The died-in-the-wool Europhile and former president of the European Council. A man so enamoured by the EU’s borderless dream he damned those concerned about the 2015 migrant crisis as racists and xenophobes. A politician so committed to the passport-free promise of the EU’s Schengen area, that he has relentlessly defended it, even as it has visibly creaked under the migratory waves of the past decade.

And yet here he is now, issuing a call to take back control of Poland’s borders, pledging to wage a ‘merciless’ fight against illegal immigration. He now sounds more like the Brexiteers he once said deserved ‘a special place in hell’.

The ostensible prompt for Tusk’s rather surprising conversion to the merits of national sovereignty lies on Poland’s and the EU’s border with Belarus. Over the past three years, thousands of migrants from Belarus, the Middle East and Africa have crossed into Poland from the east and sought to claim asylum. Tusk claims that this influx is part of a ‘hybrid war’ being waged by Russia via its Belarusian ally / proxy. Belarusian border guards are said to be waving migrants through as part of an attempt to destabilise Poland and the EU. So in response, Tusk has announced ‘the temporary suspension of the right to asylum on [Polish] territory’.

Yet while Tusk has been invoking the spectre of Russian foul play to justify pulling up Poland’s drawbridge, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that he’s more worried about threats closer to home. His pro-EU, centrist Civic Platform coalition may have narrowly won Poland’s parliamentary elections last year. But it has been struggling ever since, and is currently level-pegging with the Eurosceptic Law and Justice Party (PiS) in the polls. Tusk knows only too well that the EU’s inability to address public concerns about high levels of immigration and a broken asylum system is fuelling the revival of his domestic opponents. Tusk’s suspension of the right to asylum whiffs of an attempt to neutralise the populist appeal of his rivals.

Tusk is far from alone among struggling Europhile politicians in suddenly discovering the importance of national borders. Last month, Germany’s colossally unpopular chancellor, Olaf Scholz, introduced border controls on all of Germany’s land borders. This was partially in response to an Islamist terror attack in Solingen, west Germany, but mostly in response to mounting pressure from voters and populist parties.