RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/14/trumps-crackdown-on-sanctuary-cities-is-good/

This week, Attorney General Bill Barr’s Department of Justice announced a raft of lawsuits against sanctuary jurisdictions that are undermining the ability of the federal government to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

So-called sanctuary policies are designed to prevent local and state law enforcement from cooperating with ICE and the Border Patrol. The goal? To nullify federal laws against illegal immigration and shield criminal aliens from deportation.

Now the Trump Administration is fighting back. In addition to Justice Department lawsuits against California, New Jersey, and King County in Washington state, the Department of Homeland Security has made New York residents ineligible to participate in “Trusted Traveler” programs because of that state’s new policies preventing the Department of Motor Vehicles from providing critical information to the Department of Homeland Security. New York residents will be perturbed, but they have only left-wing Governor Andrew Cuomo and a deep-blue state legislature to blame.

It’s about time that the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security started taking seriously their obligation to prioritize the safety of U.S. citizens and to quash, once and for all, the Democrats’ lawlessness.

The crackdown on sanctuary jurisdictions is just the latest in a long series of bold and largely successful efforts by the Trump Administration aimed at suppressing illegal immigration. Trump has ended the disastrous “catch-and-release” policies of the Obama years. No longer will illegals be bussed to their final destinations in the United States and asked politely to turn up for hearings months or years later. Instead, they are detained and rapidly returned to Mexico or their countries of origin.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/trump-demands-justice-victims-sanctuary-cities-matthew-vadum/

Crime victims harmed by dangerous illegal aliens should be able to sue the so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that unleashed them on an unwitting public in defiance of federal immigration authorities, President Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. At the same time, he endorsed pending legislation that would accomplish this goal.

This is another politically astute immigration-related proposal from Trump who demonstrates time and time again that he is one of the few Republican presidents in modern American history who actually knows how to fight the Left. It puts the illegal alien-coddlers and open-borders fanatics on the defensive and educates the public in clearly understandable terms about who the bad guys really are in this fight over the nation’s future. It comes almost a year after Trump proposed shipping immigration detainees to sanctuary cities, which are Democrat strongholds.

As FrontPage readers know, the sanctuary movement gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement. Some left-wingers call sanctuary jurisdictions “civil liberties safe zones” to blur the distinction between citizens and non-citizens by implying illegal aliens somehow possess a civil right to be present in the U.S. Leftists also like to refer to all migrants, including illegal aliens, simply as “immigrants” in order to further muddy the waters. This helps the Left portray conservatives, who are generally not anti-immigrant –they’re anti-illegal immigration— as xenophobic bigots.

Sanctuary cities really ought to be called traitor cities because they are in open rebellion against the United States just as much as the Confederate Army was when it opened fire on Fort Sumter.

President Trump railed against the sanctuary laws of California in his address.

“Senator Thom Tillis has introduced legislation to allow Americans like Jody to sue sanctuary cities and states when a loved one is hurt or killed as a result of these deadly practices,” Trump said Feb. 4, referring to Jody Jones, a guest at the speech whose brother, Rocky Jones, was allegedly shot and killed by two-time deportee Gustavo Garcia, an illegal alien wanted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Local authorities in California ignored ICE and let Garcia go.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/attempted-illegal-border-crossings-drop-to-eight-month-low/

Customs and Border Patrol announced on Tuesday that in January the agency recorded the fewest number of attempted illegal border crossings in eight months.

Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan told reporters at a press conference that the agency had apprehended or denied entry to 36,679 people in January, down from 144,116 people in May 2019. Of the 36,679, 29,200 were arrested by the Border Patrol, while the remainder were refused entry to the U.S. at border crossings.

Morgan said the decrease in attempted crossings was attributable to “successful” Trump administration policies.

The Trump administration’s policies have included measures intended to stem the flow of asylum-seekers to the U.S.-Mexico border, such as the “Remain in Mexico” directives requiring asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their cases are processed in the U.S. Migrants are sometimes returned to other Latin American countries if their cases are rejected by the U.S.

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The administration has also attempted to counter the phenomenon of sanctuary cities, where local governments instruct law enforcement not to cooperate with U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement. In the latest salvo against these policies, Attorney General William Barr announced Monday the Justice Department would commence a “significant escalation” in lawsuits against sanctuary cities for “unconstitutionally interfering” with immigration enforcement.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/10/trump-administration-secures-funding-for-1000-miles-of-border-wall/

Representatives of the Trump Administration recently told The Daily Caller that the White House has shifted its focus away from “procuring resources” and instead towards acquiring new funds for additional construction, which has just secured 1,000 miles of new wall on the southern U.S. border.

“With funding available, the administration will build up to approximately 1,000 miles of border wall along the southwest border,” the official told the Caller. The official claims that the budget requests for fiscal year 2021 guarantee this, apparently by calling for “increases for infrastructure, technology, and law enforcement personnel” rather than new funding, which will “gain operational control of the border.”

This development confirms President Trump’s promise to construct at least 450 miles of new border wall by the end of 2020, as acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan declared in January. Additionally, officials reported that both the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security “will provide $8.4 billion to wall construction.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/the_trump_administration_is_finally_going_after_sanctuary_cities.html

One of the most galling things that the left has done is to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement by creating so-called sanctuaries to protect known criminal illegal aliens from arrest. The phrase “sanctuary city” (or sometimes “sanctuary state”) is something of a misnomer, of course, because while these places are sanctuaries for criminals who are being released back into the community, they’re anything but sanctuaries for the communities ravaged by those same immigrants.

Early on, the Trump administration tried to withhold federal funds from California as a way to block it from declaring itself a sanctuary. The problem was that California rushed into federal court where a friendly activist judge immediately issued a nationwide injunction. It wasn’t until July 2019 that the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision, and then only on narrow grounds.

Suddenly, though, after three years, the Trump administration is moving aggressively against the sanctuary city/state problem. It began last week when the administration announced that it was prohibiting New York state residents from participating in programs such as Global Entry and NEXUS which allow low-risk travelers to enter the U.S. more easily.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/ag-barr-announces-significant-escalation-against-left-wing-sanctuary-cities/

During a speech at the National Sheriff’s Association 2020 Winter Legislative and Technology Conference in Washington, D.C., Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department would be filing multiple lawsuits against state and local governments for interfering with federal immigration enforcement, in what he described as a “significant escalation” to combat “sanctuary city” policies.

Attorney General Barr identified illegal immigrants who enter this country and commit crimes as a significant problem for law enforcement to address. “For many decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the priority for immigration enforcement has been identifying these criminal aliens and deporting them from the country as soon as they are eligible for release by state and local authorities,” Barr stated. “Those efforts are a vital part of how we keep our country safe. Immigration enforcement is an essential part of law enforcement.”

“Unfortunately, in various jurisdictions, so-called ‘progressive’ politicians are jeopardizing the public’s safety by putting the interests of criminal aliens before those of law-abiding citizens,” Barr continued. “They have put in place policies and laws designed to thwart the ability of federal officers to take custody of these criminals and thereby help them escape back into the community. They often proudly brand their jurisdictions as ‘sanctuaries,’ and package their obstructive policies in idealistic and misleading rhetoric about ‘protecting the immigrant community.'”

Let us state the reality upfront and as clearly as possible: When we are talking about sanctuary cities, we are talking about policies that are designed to allow criminal aliens to escape.  These policies are not about people who came to our country illegally but have otherwise been peaceful and productive members of society.  Their express purpose is to shelter aliens whom local law enforcement has already arrested for other crimes.  This is neither lawful nor sensible.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/30/democracy-dies-in-diverse-societies/

By using their police powers to swamp their already fractious populations with alien nations, governments have undermined existing ethnic balance in Western democracies and the fellow feeling so essential to democracy’s endurance.

Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years,” say researchers at the University of Cambridge. “The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent.”

No wonder. Certainly, America is a severely divided country. “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule,” argues Donald L. Horowitz, a scholar of democracy, at Duke University.

Having studied “constitutional engineering” in divided societies like South Africa, Horowitz has concluded,

In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. An ethnic party with a majority of votes and seats can dominate minority groups, seemingly in perpetuity.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-28-forcing-the-us-to-accept-immigrants-who-will-become-public-charges-2

Who runs the federal government of the United States? Is it the elected President and members of Congress? Or is it a permanent bureaucracy committed to expansion of its own size and power, together with a critical mass (potentially well less than a majority) of sympathetic federal judges who can be called upon as necessary to strike down any disfavored policy initiative from the elected branches? Or, in an even more cynical formulation, is it that the elected officeholders can run policy when they are Democrats, but when Republicans are elected the bureaucrats get to rule with the assistance of select members of the judiciary?

To view the dynamics of this process at work, there is perhaps no more striking example than what has occurred on the question of the extent to which the U.S. can exclude immigrants on the ground that they are likely to become “public charges.” We last visited this subject back in October 2019, in a post titled “Maneuvering To Force The U.S. To Accept Immigrants Who Will Become Public Charges.” This post is a sequel to that one.

The relevant context is that the U.S. immigration law as passed by Congress, since the enactment of the first statute on the subject back in the 1880s, has explicitly sought to preclude the admission as immigrants of individuals likely to become “public charges.” Although the statutory language has changed somewhat over the years in immaterial ways, one provision of the current statute ( 8 U.S.C. Section 1182(a)(4)) contains the following language:

Aliens who are inadmissible under the following paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States: . . . (4) Any alien who, in the opinion of the consular officer at the time of application for a visa, or in the opinion of the Attorney General at the time of application for admission or adjustment of status, is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible.