RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/a_dirty_dangerous_border_situation_with_illegals_threatening_riots.html

Democrats have gone a long way to create chaos at the border.  They’ve denied necessary funds for law enforcement to pay for humane conditions in detention camps during a border surge.  They’ve nullified any meaning to border law.  It’s all a politically cynical bid to Blame Trump.

Thus far, the issue has been viewed and reported as a public relations issue for President Trump, with reports of children brought to the U.S. illegally now in detention without soap or toothbrushes.  The media and the Democrats have been dining out on it, calling Trump a heel.

There’s more than that, of course.  There are the legal challenges from the Left to any border enforcement, the strange collaborations between some Democratic political machines and the Mexican and Central American governments, the left-wing activist networks linked to Democrats actively recruiting illegals, and the open encouragement of illegal immigration by blue states offering huge arrays of benefits.  If chaos were the aim, Democrats couldn’t have done it better. 

But it’s actually something much more dangerous.  We’re now seeing potential for violent migrant riots.  The mobs rolling over our border now are violent, and they demand to be let in without vetting. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/salvadoran-president-on-death-of-drowned-father-and-daughter-it-is-our-fault/

The newly elected president of El Salvador has taken responsibility for the deaths of a father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande while trying to reach the U.S., telling the BBC that the tragedy could have been avoided if conditions in the Central American country were not so dire.

A photo of Oscar and Valeria Martinez lying face down in the Rio Grande went viral last week, stirring outrage among activists and political figures who were quick to cite the Trump administration’s immigration policies to explain the tragedy. But President Nayib Bukele, who was elected last month, believes that blame for the deaths rests with Salvadoran officials, who have failed to curb the violent crime and economic deprivation that is fueling record immigration to the U.S.

“People don’t flee their homes because they want to, people flee their homes because they feel they have to,” Bukele told the BBC in an interview published Monday. “Why? Because they don’t have a job, because they are being threatened by gangs, because they don’t have basic things like water, education, health.”

“We can blame any other country but what about our blame? What country did they flee? Did they flee the United States? They fled El Salvador, they fled our country. It is our fault,” he added.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/01/constitution-grant-citizenship-anyone-born-inside-united-states/

Originalism is the theory of legal interpretation holding that the meaning of a law is the original public understanding of the actual text. That is to say, we are bound to interpret a statute or constitutional provision to mean whatever the people at the time it was passed commonly understood its actual words to mean. It’s a pretty straightforward idea and comports with how most people read things in their everyday lives. Words mean what they mean, not what we wish them to mean.

But what happens when, after a thorough, originalist look into the meaning of a constitutional provision, the best answer scholars can come up with is that we don’t really know? That is, in essence, the question debated in at a meeting of the Federalist Society in Philadelphia earlier this week when law professors John Eastman and John Yoo took the stage to discuss the meaning of the Citizenship Clause of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, and specifically how it applies to the children of illegal immigrants and birth tourists.

How Should We Interpret Citizenship?

It was a lively and thoughtful debate between two conservative law professors who clearly respected one another. Projected on the screen behind them were the words of the Citizenship Clause, with the relevant section in italics for emphasis:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.