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IMMIGRATION

Questions the Candidates Must Answer And the one question that will expose those who actually hate you. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274223/questions-candidates-must-answer-michael-cutler

The questioning of an individual in a formal setting comes in two forms, the initial question and the follow-up question(s). I compare this to boxing. The initial question is not unlike the jab while the follow-up question is like the punch to the jaw and may actually score the knockout.

During the first two Democratic Primary debates many issues were raised that actually have relevance to the immigration crisis, yet this connection was never made.

Inasmuch as the “war on terror” continues and the “all clear” has not sounded and is not likely to sound for quite some time, I would want to start out by asking each and every candidate for any significant political office, but particularly for the Presidency, if he/she had read the 9/11 Commission Report and the companion report, 9/11 and  Terrorist Travel in their entirety.

The 9/11 Commission was convened specifically to learn from our mistakes to protect America and Americans from future terror attacks.

The President of the United States is also the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces and is also of all federal law enforcement agencies.

Any serious candidate for the Presidency must consider those reports to be “required reading.”

Angry About Border Conditions? Blame Congress By Rachel Bovard

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/06/angry-about-border-conditions-blame-congress/

The woke social media over the Fourth of July was something to behold. On America’s birthday, posts were full Trump-baby angst, references to illegal militias, treasonous criminality, and concentration camps, and carefully styled photos of summer desserts that spelled out “close the camps” on top of seasonal fruit.

Because you know what you do if you think child migrants are actually being tortured by your government and dying in concentration camps? You channel all your first-world, virtue signaling rage into the creation of artsy and seasonally appropriate desserts that are just perfect for that People photoshoot.

But the misplaced rage was not limited to social media. In the annals of Wokes versus People Living in Reality, this week was one for the books. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the avatar of lefty rage-emotes everywhere, visited the border and had a complete meltdown.

Ocasio-Cortez told reporters she “was not safe from the officers,” and that migrants were forced to drink out of toilets while being subject to “psychological warfare.”

“This has been horrifying so far,” she tweeted. “It is hard to understate the enormity of the problem. We’re talking systemic cruelty w/ a dehumanizing culture that treats them like animals.”

If what she’s saying is true—members of Congress being threatened for asking questions, migrants housed in World War II-style detention camps with only toilet water to drink, “mass atrocities” being perpetuated by the government—then we are indeed in a crisis.

But none of this is true. None of the migrants housed on the border are being held against their will. While Ocasio-Cortez provided no photos of the toilets from which she claims migrants are forced to drink, those familiar with border detention facilities suggest she is referring to this type of drinking facility which is connected to a toilet—but does not dispense actual toilet water from the faucet, as she claims. And, as former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson pointed out this week, the practice of holding migrants in “cages” after detention started under President Obama.

Democratic Congresswoman (Veronica Escobar R- Texas- District 16) Caught Sending Staff to Mexico to Coach Asylum-Seekers By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/democratic-congresswoman-sending-staff-to-mexico-to-coach-asylum-seekers/

Let’s just call it “voter outreach” by the Democrats.

According to the National Border Patrol Council’s El Paso chapter and several Customs and Border Protection personnel,  freshman Congresswoman Rep. Veronica Escobar has been sending members of her staff in secret to the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez to coach asylum seekers on how to game the system and make it into the U.S.

The Washington Examiner reports that the aides are looking to “find migrants returned from El Paso, Texas, under the ‘remain in Mexico’ policy, then coaching them to pretend they cannot speak Spanish to exploit a loophole letting them to [sic] return to the U.S.”

Is this a great country or what?

“What we believe is happening is Veronica Escobar’s office is going … to basically second-guess and obstruct work already done by the Border Patrol,” said one senior union official, who shared evidence with the  Washington Examiner from concerned CBP managers and rank-and-file members. Those documents have been held to protect identities.

The “Remain in Mexico” policy has been attacked despite it being a perfectly legal agreement between Mexico and the U.S., which is designed to relieve the crush of migrants flooding the border.

But there’s a loophole being exploited by Escobar.

Grandstanding at the Border Democrats finally admit there’s a problem. How about helping to solve it?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/grandstanding-at-the-border-11562367921

Ironic good news in the immigration wars: Democrats are finally admitting there’s a crisis at the southern U.S. border, judging by their visits the last two weeks with reporters and TV cameras in tow. Now will they help to stop it?

Nearly every presidential candidate has posed for a border photo op, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as always took it to the limit by claiming migrants were forced to drink from toilets and the U.S. is now heading toward fascism. There’s no confirming evidence about the toilet charge, and the Congresswoman has no standing to complain after she voted against the funding bill last week to get more humanitarian money to the border.

***

And, by the way, where has she been? The “breaking point has arrived this week at our border,” then commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Kevin McAleenan warned way back on March 27. “CBP is facing an unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our Southwest border.”

He was ignored. But suddenly Democrats and their media friends are flogging a pair of new inspector general reports, including one on May 30 that documents the “dangerous overcrowding” at a border control station in El Paso. It describes how one “cell with a maximum capacity of 35 held 155 detainees,” and how migrants were “standing on toilets in the cells to make room and gain breathing space.”

At a CBP facility in the Rio Grande Valley, says a July 2 IG report, “some single adults were held in standing room only conditions for a week.” Some migrants were desperate enough to clog the “toilets with Mylar blankets and socks in order to be released from their cells during maintenance.”

How to Put Citizenship Back in the Census The 14th Amendment gives the Trump administration the justification it needs. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Gilson B. Gray

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-put-citizenship-back-in-the-census-11562264430

The Trump administration said Wednesday it will attempt to add a citizenship question on the 2020 census while complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Department of Commerce v. New York. Five justices held that the Census Act allows the question, but a separate five-justice majority found the rulemaking that added the question was procedurally deficient. There is a way forward. The Constitution itself requires the collection of citizenship information.

Section 2 of the 14th Amendment provides that if a state denies the franchise to anyone eligible to vote, its allotment of House seats shall be “reduced in the proportion which the number of such . . . citizens shall bear to the whole number of . . . citizens . . . in such state.” This language is absolute and mandatory. Compliance is impossible without counting how many citizens live in each state.

The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, and this provision meant to secure the voting rights of newly freed slaves. But it wasn’t limited to that purpose. An earlier version of Section 2, introduced in 1865, specifically referred to limits on suffrage based on “race or color,” but the Senate rejected that limitation. The amendment forbids state interference with the rights of all eligible voters (then limited to males over 21).

Section 2 also applies to every state, a point Rep. John Bingham, the amendment’s principal drafter, emphasized during the floor debate: “The second section . . . simply provides for the equalization of representation among all the States in the Union, North, South, East, and West. It makes no discrimination.”

Open Border Demagogues Exploit the Border Crisis No solutions – just lies and reckless nonsense. July 4, 2019 Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274211/open-border-demagogues-exploit-border-crisis-joseph-klein

The open border advocates are shamelessly exploiting the humanitarian crisis caused by the massive flood of illegal immigrants and would-be asylum seekers who have overwhelmed the resources available to detain and take care of them. The demagogues appeal to raw emotions with their crocodile tears. They offer no real solutions to the crisis, which for many months they denied even existed. Their mantra is: immediate release, amnesty, and a path to citizenship.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted her impressions of conditions at border detention centers. She insulted the memories of Holocaust survivors by comparing the border detention centers to “concentration camps.”  She also falsely charged that some detainees were being forced to drink toilet water. Always the consummate narcissist, she hurled insults at federal law enforcement agents while reportedly refusing to actually tour a border facility in El Paso, Texas when given the opportunity. This self-professed Democrat-Socialist hypocritically voted against humanitarian aid for the migrants, including even the bill proposed initially by her own Democrat House leadership.

Rep.  Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) secretly recorded selective conditions he witnessed during his own visit to a southwest Texas detention facility. Referring to the would-be asylum seekers, he declared, “They need to be moved out of these facilities as quickly as possible, they’re being held way too long, unnecessarily.” Rep. Castro decided that it was not worth his time to vote on the bipartisan Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Humanitarian Assistance and Security at the Southern Border Act that passed the House on June 27th.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw Unloads After AOC Toilet Water Claim: ‘She’s Getting Bolder with Her Lies’

https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/crenshaw-unloads

Democrats don’t understand the border crisis mostly because they don’t want to understand the border crisis. There’s no better example of this than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The New York congresswoman was among the delegation that visited a controversial migrant detention site in Clint, Texas, on Monday. She emerged telling a tale about how she “was not safe from the officers in that facility” and how women said they were forced to drink out of toilets.

Ocasio-Cortez told reporters that the women she talked to were “put in a room with no running water. And these women were being told by [Customs and Border Protection] officers to drink out of the toilet. They were drinking water out of the toilet.”When asked whether she witnessed this with her own eyes, however, she wasn’t quite as available for a conversation:

In an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday, Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw called out Ocasio-Cortez on her claims.

“It’s sad to see, she’s getting bolder with her lies on this and this is what is actually happening, and this is what the American people need to understand,” Crenshaw told Martha MacCallum.

“People like AOC are operating off of a false premise, and it’s deliberately designed to misinform the American people for her own political ends, right? Remember, first there was no crisis at all, OK? Then it was a manufactured crisis, then it was a crisis completely created by Trump, then there were concentration camps, then people are Nazis.

“Now, she’s saying that Border Patrol harassed her and forced migrants to drink out of toilets?

“This is insanity, this is not true. There’s just no one else corroborating these kinds of reports,” Crenshaw added.

Anti-Trump Hysteria Hits Fever Pitch as Nadler Floats ‘Child Abuse’ Charges By Ryan Ledendecker

On Monday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler floated the idea of “child abuse” charges against high-ranking officials at U.S. border and immigration agencies.

“This is inhuman. Frankly, I think it’s criminal,” Nadler told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in an interview about the humanitarian crisis along the southern border.

“There ought to be criminal prosecutions of some of the agency heads and some of the people for child abuse. This is clearly child abuse. It violates probably a half a dozen laws,” he said. The comments from Nadler came after 14 congressional Democrats, who recently visited the border, said that migrants were living in squalid conditions with limited water, according to the Daily Caller.

In addition, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a dramatic outburstwhile at a border facility in Texas, claiming without evidence that Customs and Border Protection agents told a female detainee to drink from a toilet.

She also reportedly screamed “in a threatening manner” at U.S. Border Patrol agents and refused to tour the facility.

However, most of AOC’s harrowing account of the facility’s conditions were refuted by Hispanic pastors who toured the border in the days following her visit — ultimately making the case for “child abuse” charges more difficult to sell to the public.

“I read the reports, saw the news clips. I just wanted to see what was actually happening in order to better enable our efforts to find a fair and a just solution to our broken immigration system,” the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez said about touring the border in the wake of AOC’s dramatic visit, according to Fox News.

“To my surprise, I saw something drastically different from the stories I’ve been hearing in our national discourse. Even as a veteran of immigration advocacy in the U.S., I was shocked at the misinformation of the crisis at the border,” he said.

Democrats Embrace Lawlessness at the Border in Response to Family Separations By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/democrats-embrace-lawlessness-at-the-border-in-response-to-family-separations/

Decriminalizing unauthorized entry as most Democratic presidential candidates propose won’t end the separations; it will only worsen the crisis at our border.

During the first Democratic primary debate last week, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro succeeded in creating the viral moment that all second-tier candidates hope for when he challenged all of his opponents to support the decriminalization of illegal border crossings.

Castro, having deftly identified the separation of migrant families as the issue that has most exercised the Democratic base, stormed into his first debate performance with a ready-made solution: repeal section 1325 of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which makes “improper entry” into the U.S. a federal misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail, thereby ensuring that no migrants would be detained unless they’d committed another, ostensibly more serious offense.

“The reason that they’re separating these little children from their families is they’re using Section 1325 . . . to incarcerate the parents and then separate them,” Castro said to applause.

Poll: Two-Thirds of Voters Say Citizenship Question Should Be Allowed on Census By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-most-voters-support-citizenship-question-census/

Two-thirds of voters support allowing the U.S. census to include a question about an individual’s citizenship status, disagreeing with the Supreme Court’s decision to block the question.

In a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released Tuesday, 67 percent of respondents said the question, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” should be allowed on the census. That number included about 88 percent of Republicans, 52 percent of Democrats, and 63 percent of independents agreed.

“The public here agrees with the administration that it makes sense to ask citizenship on the census,” said poll director Mark Penn. “It is a clear supermajority of Americans on this issue.”

The question has become a contentious issue because of its implications for undocumented immigrants, who may not want to reveal their citizenship statusfor fear of potential repercussions. Last week, the Supreme Court shot down the Trump administration’s push to include the question in the 2020 census, temporarily prohibiting the question’s inclusion while requesting that the Commerce Department explain in more detail why it is necessary. The administration said the question would enhance the enforcement of part of the Voting Rights Act.