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IMMIGRATION

The Great Betrayal of American Democracy The American people will have their chance to hold Joe Biden and his party accountable in November. By Christopher Schorr

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/05/the-great-betrayal-of-american-democracy/

The Biden Administration is aiding and abetting an invasion of the United States.

Let’s review the facts. As a candidate, Biden precipitated the crisis with several campaign promises: 

Amnesty and citizenship 
Halting construction of the southern border wall 
Suspending deportations
Abandoning successful asylum fraud prevention efforts like the “Remain in Mexico” policy and “safe third country” agreements with Central American nations. 

Upon taking office, Biden swiftly implemented these promises, escalating the crisis. He reinstituted the Obama-era policy of releasing migrants apprehended at the border into the interior of the country, pending hearings they often skip. His Department of Homeland Security secretly transported migrants across the country in the dead of night to avoid public scrutiny. Confronted with a court order to reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy, Biden passively refused to comply. 

In March, monthly border encounters hit a new record of 221,303, beating the previous record (also set by Biden) of 213,953 in July. Biden has funneled 1 million illegal aliens into the United States in just over a year. 

Last month, Biden announced his plan to end Title 42, a public health authority under which 1.8 million migrants have been turned away at the border. By the administration’s own estimates, this could swell border incursions to 18,000 per day. Ending Title 42 eliminates the last vestige of American control over the southern border. With 19 months remaining before the 2024 election, Biden could add another 10 million illegal aliens to the United States. The number could be lower—the planet might run out of economic migrants posing as asylum seekers—or it could be much higher. In any event, American law would no longer govern entry into the United States. 

The Politics of Dismantling U.S. Sovereignty 

Biden has determined that displacing Americans with foreigners is in the long-term interest of his party. No other explanation makes sense. 

Consider the invasion’s short-term politics. Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of immigration by 57-35 percent. By 51-34 percent, most Americans believe that Biden is “purposefully encouraging illegal immigration.” Facing a midterm rout, vulnerable Democrats are rebelling, but Biden seems intent on punishing his party and the voters it claims to represent: low-wage earners, blacks, and Latinos.

A humanitarian crisis did not necessitate Biden’s invasion, but it has caused several, including:

A migrant rape crisis. Human traffickers reportedly rape 60-80 percent of migrant women and girls. This is the true face of open borders: Central American parents giving their pre-teen daughters birth control, expecting the worst.
Making Cartels Great Again. Biden’s invasion enriches Mexican drug cartels, fueling violence and corruption in Mexico.
China’s new Opium War against the American people. Mexican cartels funnel Chinese fentanyl through border security gaps they create by tying down U.S. Border Patrol with migrants. Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45. 
American families under siege. Cartels (and migrants) destroy property, threaten families, and burn homes to the ground. 

These are some of the invasion’s costs. What are its benefits? 

Biden Administration’s Post-Title 42 Border Plan: More of the Same How today’s disaster will become tomorrow’s catastrophe. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/biden-administrations-post-title-42-border-plan-joseph-klein/

Title 42 has allowed Border Patrol agents to deny entry to illegal border-crossers because of COVID-19 health concerns without having to conduct any kind of hearing first, even on an asylum claim. The Biden administration is still planning to lift the Title 42 entry restriction on May 23rd. However, that may be on hold for a while following a federal district judge’s issuance of a temporary restraining order on April 25th requiring the administration to keep Title 42 in place for now.

Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), admitted in an April 26th memo that when “the Title 42 public health Order is lifted, we anticipate migration levels will increase, as smugglers will seek to take advantage of and profit from vulnerable migrants.”

Not to worry, according to Secretary Mayorkas, who says that DHS has a new plan to deal with that. 

The DHS Secretary’s April 26th memo is entitled “DHS Plan for Southwest Border Security and Preparedness,” which discusses various measures the Biden administration intends to implement once the Title 42 termination goes into effect.

Secretary Mayorkas uses benign sounding terms in his memo like “vulnerable migrants” and “noncitizens” to obscure who they really are – illegal immigrants.

With Biden Reckless and Congress AWOL, Will the Supreme Court Save ‘Remain in Mexico’? Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/with-biden-reckless-and-congress-awol-will-the-supreme-court-save-remain-in-mexico/

Don’t count on it.

‘I guess I’m just wondering why that’s our problem.”

Chief Justice John Roberts was asking why the catastrophe at the southern border, which is clearly the nation’s problem, should be the Supreme Court’s problem. The catastrophe results from the hash the political branches have made of things. Since they caused the problem, and they alone have the wherewithal — if not the will — to address it, Roberts was grousing about the problem’s arrival at the doorstep of the judiciary, the branch least equipped to solve it.

But isn’t that always the way it is with a catastrophe? There are many good questions about how we got into this fine mess. What eludes us is how we get out of it.

The occasion for the chief justice’s musings was oral argument this week in Biden v. Texas. In its mulish determination to cancel all Trump policies, for no better reason than that they were Trump policies and regardless of how beneficial they were, the Biden administration has endeavored to undo “Remain in Mexico.”

That is the popular name for what is formally known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols.” These comprise a procedure, worked out after tough negotiations with the Mexican government, whereby aliens seeking to enter the United States without authorization are permitted to remain in Mexico while awaiting their hearings.

The illegal aliens at issue, who are now arriving at our border at a breathtaking, sovereignty-destroying rate of over 200,000 per month (221,000 last month), are overwhelmingly excludable. That is, they should be instantly turned away because they have no legal right to enter and no realistic basis to claim asylum. Nonetheless, our law allows even obviously meritless asylum claims to be made by illegal aliens (whom we’re now supposed to call “migrants” based on the nonsensical progressive trope that “no human being is illegal”). Something, therefore, must be done with the “migrants” while they await hearings on their frivolous claims — and those hearings are taking ever longer to schedule because the numbers arriving are ever more daunting, overwhelming the government’s finite resources — which is why what Roberts euphemistically refers to as a “problem” looks more like an invasion (although it is not referred to as such because our betters abide such leaps of language only for insurrection).

Policy-wise, Remain in Mexico has been a home run. It keeps out people who are not entitled to be in the U.S., thus incentivizing use of legal immigration processes. It discourages people in South and Central America (among other places) from making the dangerous trek to our border, since the risk is not worth bearing if there is no realistic expectation of admission. Consequently, the procedure relieves our government of the prohibitively costly burden of detaining and expelling illegal immigrants, or, worse, of dealing with the significant downsides of discharging an ever more massive illegal-alien population into the United States.

Our Inhumane Southern Border By Carine Hajjar

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/16/our-inhumane-southern-border/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Migrants and Americans suffer when the law is absent

Val Verde County, Texas

Star Ranch, half a mile from the Rio Grande, is a popular spot for border crossers to “surrender” and request asylum in the United States. The surrender I witness this morning is as remarkably unremarkable as all the others I have seen in a week of ride-alongs with law enforcement. A family from Colombia — mother, father, and young son — chat calmly with two adult male migrants as a Customs and Border Protection van pulls up. National Guardsmen lean on their vehicles and watch casually. The CBP officer will take the migrants to a processing center, where they will be assessed for asylum eligibility.

I ask the father what the family’s plan is for life in the United States. “Empezar de cero,” he replies: to start from zero. They remind me of Jorge, a Cuban migrant I met days before at an NGO in town. He wanted asylum to pursue “el sueño Americano,” the American dream. Jorge told me he planned to send money to his three kids at home. It is hard not to sympathize. Why not welcome people who want to work, to improve their lives? This is the motivation behind calls to lower the bar for asylum seekers and thereby create a more open, “humane” border.

Look a little further, though, and it becomes clear that the current system is not ready for that idea, no matter how well intentioned. Right now, a more open border is not only dysfunctional, it’s a danger.

Last month, Customs and Border Protection had 209,906 encounters — both expulsions and apprehensions — with migrants at the southern border. That number breaks a 22-year record.

DHS head Mayorkas spars with House GOP and blames Trump for border troubles by Virginia Aabram,

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dhs-head-mayorkas-spars-with-house-gop-and-blames-trump-for-border-troubles

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sparred with Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee over the crisis at the southern border, while he and the Democratic lawmakers blamed the Trump administration for his department’s troubles.

While the GOP members pressed Mayorkas on migration statistics at the Thursday oversight hearing, Democrats acknowledged that he “inherited something of a mess,” as Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said.

“One of the greatest obstacles we have, Mr. Chairman, is to overcome the distrust that was sown by the prior administration,” Mayorkas told New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler. “Through its global policies, many still feel fearful, given what trauma they experienced and continue to experience.”

Nadler said that “the previous administration did all it could to break our immigration system” by enforcing family separation policies in which “children were literally kidnapped from their mothers and fathers with no plans to reunite them” and doing everything in its “power to block legal pathways.”

Mayorkas, in response to Lofgren’s lamentation of the state of the immigration system left by former President Donald Trump, agreed that “the prior administration decimated the legal immigration system, leaving U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that administers our nation’s legal immigration system, on the brink of bankruptcy.”

BIDEN’S WORSENING BORDER CRISIS: SCOTT WALKER

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/22/bidens-worsening-border-policies/

Arrests at America’s southern borders are surging, and the crisis is the worst it has been in decades. According to data released this week from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, border agents made more than 200,000 arrests along the border in March. That is the busiest month in the past twenty years. The United States has made more than one million arrests at the southern border since October 2021. That is the fastest pace of illegal border crossings in at least two decades.

Things will likely worsen in the next month as the Biden administration is preparing to lift Title 42 on May 23, 2022. The Trump administration implemented the policy during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing border agents to quickly turn away people who are arrested trying to enter the United States illegally.

Of the 1.01 million crossings this year, roughly half resulted in the person being expelled under Title 42. Biden administration officials acknowledge that revoking the policy will likely lead to a massive rise in illegal border crossings. Yet they show no signs of pulling back on their plans to lift Title 42.

Ironically, it took a federal judge to force the Biden administration to stop requiring passengers on domestic flights to wear a face mask. Yet, the same people want to open the floodgates to illegal aliens without regard to their health status.

We already see the consequences of failing to deal with the border crisis effectively. At the end of 2021, we learned that drug overdoses surpassed 100,000 last year. Nearly two-thirds of the drug overdose deaths in the past fiscal years were from synthetic opioids— primarily fentanyl.

More Than 70 Sheriffs Call on Congress to Keep Title 42: ‘We Simply Have No Border Left’ By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/more-than-70-sheriffs-call-on-congress-to-keep-title-42-we-simply-have-no-border-left/

A group of more than 70 sheriffs is urging Congress to take action to extend the Title 42 public health order, which has allowed border agents to immediately expel illegal border crossers but is slated for termination on May 23.

Lawmakers have warned the southern border will likely see a huge surge in illegal immigration when the order ends. The policy was first handed down under the Trump administration at the start of the pandemic.

“Title 42 is the only policy provision left since January 2022 that helps to stop the unhealthy (no COVID testing) border crossings by millions of illegal entrants to our country,” writes the group of sheriffs organized by the National Sheriff’s Association in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) on Thursday.

The letter says the Biden administration’s efforts to undo Trump-era immigration policy, including ending the Remain in Mexico policy and construction on the border wall, mean that “we simply have no border left in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas or Southern California.”

“Today, there are thousands of immigrants in the jungles of the Darien gap headed to the US border. We simply don’t know their health status and implore you to keep Title 42 as the last policy we have to keep Americans safe from COVID and a host of other communicable diseases carried by these immigrants,” the group adds.

The letter notes that Border Patrol agents have already encountered more than a million migrants in just the first half of the fiscal year.

Will America’s Open Borders Disaster Doom Dems In 2022?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/21/will-americas-open-borders-disaster-doom-dems-in-2022/

One of a president’s clear and stated duties under the Constitution is to protect America’s states from “invasion.” In short, to protect the borders. President Joe Biden has utterly failed to do so. Now even his own political party is running scared from the policy it helped to put in place.

With illegal border crossings already at a 22-year high, the Biden administration is pondering letting the Title 42 restrictions that held back the flood of illegal immigrants during the pandemic end on May 23.

But doing so would produce a grim state of affairs, with hundreds of thousands of people illegally crossing the border in coming months and no one stopping them from doing so.

Not only would this be a nightmare for financially strapped border cities, which would be overwhelmed by the human tide, but it would pose a very clear national security risk as well.

The data are alarming. In March alone, the U.S. stopped 221,303 crossings along the Southwest border, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection released Monday. That’s a 33% jump from the month before (see chart, below).

Worry about illegal immigration holds at near two-decade high: Gallup

https://news.yahoo.com/worry-illegal-immigration-holds-near-130349755.html

The public’s worry over illegal immigration is close to a two-decade high ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday.

In a poll conducted March 1-18, 41 percent said they worry a great deal about illegal immigration, the highest total since 2007, when 45 percent of respondents said they were concerned a great deal about the issue.

Overall, around 60 percent of adults said they worry at least a fair amount about illegal immigration.

Only 17 percent of those surveyed said they worry about immigration a little while 23 percent said they don’t worry at all about the issue.

The poll was conducted before the Biden administration announced it was dropping Title 42, which allowed Border Patrol to deny asylum claims from migrants due to the pandemic and allowed migrants to be deported easier.

Gallup’s polling found the issue has become more partisan throughout the years, with Democrats and Republicans now heading in opposite directions in their concerns on the issue.

Democrats have shifted toward less concern about illegal immigration, with only 18 percent saying they are concerned a great deal about the issue while 44 percent say they don’t worry at all.

Democrats Revolt over Biden’s Border Bungling Carine Hajjar

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/democrats-revolt-over-bidens-border-bungling/

With the looming expiration of Title 42, some lawmakers are waking up from the progressive fantasy.

Democrats are being butchered in the polls, with their progressive shift not sitting well with average Americans. According to FiveThirtyEight, President Biden’s approval rating is hovering at 42 percent — that’s more than ten percentage points lower than at the same time last year. His falling approval is mirrored by his party, with 42.5 percent of Americans saying they want a Democratic win on the generic congressional ballot, as opposed to 44.7 percent favoring Republicans.

Despite Biden’s “unity” promise, Democrats are catering to a small, progressive wing whose goals simply do not resonate with Americans. On the April 1 episode of Potomac Watch from the Wall Street Journal, Kim Strassel was discussing Biden’s approval ratings and said:

There’s . . . increasing frustration with Joe Biden that he is pushing an agenda that is out of tune with what most Americans are interested in seeing done. . . . Joe Biden is following the agenda of a very small wing of his party that’s ascendant, the progressive wing, but that is not reflective of national mood or politics.

And yet, progressives think the polling problem is due to not being progressive enough. Last week, for instance, Chris Hayes blamed Joe Manchin and the failure of Build Back Better for “single-handedly” costing Democrats their standing among Americans. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez simply believes that the president isn’t delivering the progressive agenda he promised. On Errol Louis’s podcast, she said that “this isn’t just about middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters” (well, actually, it is). She went on: “This is really about the collapse of support among young people, base, feeling like they worked overtime to get this president elected and they aren’t necessarily being seen.”