RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obama-built-the-cages-for-illegals-not-trump-says-obama-ice-chief/

It was only a few months ago that Democrats were dismissing the crisis at the border as manufactured by Trump, and now they’re comparing migrant detention centers to concentration camps and blaming Trump for “putting kids in cages.”

But for those still trying to blame President Trump, Barack Obama’s former ICE chief, Thomas Homan, has a reality check for them. Speaking at a conference hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies, Homan explained that the “cages” Democrats are blaming on Trump were the product of the Obama administration:

“I’ve been to that facility, where they talk about cages. That facility was built under President Obama under (Homeland Security) Secretary Jeh Johnson. I was there because I was there when it was built,” said Thomas Homan, who was Obama’s executive associate director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nearly four years.

At an immigration conference today, Homan, under consideration for a new position of “border czar” in the Trump administration, grew visibly angry answering a question about “cages” often cited by Democratic critics of the president.

Homan, who ran Obama’s successful deportation operation, ripped Democrats who question Trump immigration officials on the Obama-era idea.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hawley-slams-fellow-lawmakers-pa

Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) lashed out at fellow lawmakers during a Wednesday hearing, expressing frustration with the lack of substantive legislative responses to the ongoing crisis at the southern border.

Hawley cited grisly reports of inhumane conditions that migrants, especially children, are being forced to endure, and argued that those hardships are the direct result of Congress’s failure to allocate more resources to the agencies tasked with sheltering and providing medical care to the record number of asylum-seekers arriving at the border.

“The behavior of this Congress is absolutely pathetic. I mean, it is just pathetic,” Hawley began. “The problem is this Congress never does anything. This Congress refuses to do anything. We know what the facts are, you’ve outlined them again today: CBP is overcapacity, underfunded, undermanned. ICE: overcapacity, underfunded. HHS: overcapacity, underfunded. Yet this Congress will do nothing.”

Hawley’s testimony comes one day after acting Customs and Border Protection (CBP) chief John Sanders announced his resignation amid continued reports of migrant children receiving inadequate housing and medical care at Border Patrol holding facilities, where the migrants are held until they can be transferred to HHS custody. That transfer process now routinely exceeds the 72 hours allotted by law due to HHS’s own inadequate funding and staffing.

The Senate plans to vote this week on a $4.5 billion spending package that would provide increased funding to CBP, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and HHS. The bill’s passage has been threatened by a companion bill, which passed the House Tuesday, that bars the allocation of funds for certain Department of Defense enforcement actions.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/there-is-an-existential-threat-to-the-very-idea-of-american-citizenship-and-democrats-are-leading-the-charge/

Jim Geraghty in NRO:

Sometimes our political debates are furious and deeply divided because of demagogues, clickbait media, and hype. But sometimes our political debates are furious because they reflect a conflict of fundamentally opposed worldviews, where no compromise is feasible.

Many of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates want to fundamentally redefine who is American — that is, if you show up from another country and want to be here, you ought to enjoy the full rights of citizenship and all of the benefits provided to American citizens.

Bernie Sanders put it clearly: “We’re going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free and open that to the undocumented.” In other words, if are a citizen of another country and you want a free college education, all you have to do is show up in the United States and get accepted at any one of the 1,626 public colleges in the United States.

Listen carefully to Elizabeth Warren’s statement today backing a proposed law by Democratic candidate Julian Castro that would destroy any semblance of a border.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274129/obama-judge-invents-sanctuary-courthouses-matthew-vadum

All courthouses in Massachusetts have become ICE-free zones because a zealous left-wing Obama judge took it upon herself to forbid immigration officers from detaining suspected illegal aliens on judicial soil.

This lawless order is reportedly the first judicial fiat in the United States to block immigration arrests across an entire state, according to The Epoch Times. Massachusetts happens to be the home of state Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph, who was charged earlier this year under federal law for helping an illegal alien evade an ICE agent in her courthouse.

Although police have been arresting suspects in courthouses ever since courthouses were invented –it is a great deal safer for police than raiding a factory or a home— labor lawyer Indira Talwani, now a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, granted a preliminary injunction barring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “from civilly arresting parties, witnesses, and others attending Massachusetts courthouses on official business while they are going to, attending, or leaving the courthouse.” The order specifies that it “does not limit ICE’s criminal arrests of such individuals or its civil arrests of individuals who are brought to Massachusetts courthouses while in state or federal custody.”

President Barack Hussein Obama nominated Talwani Sept. 24, 2013. The U.S. Senate confirmed Talwani on May 8, 2014.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/byron-york-what-now-for-those-who-denied-a-crisis-at-the-border

Congress is debating emergency humanitarian aid to care for migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border. The need is obvious. With virtually no barrier to stop them, thousands of migrants are crossing illegally into the United States every day. More than a million will come this year. U.S. law prevents border officials from quickly returning them. While they are being processed, some of the migrants, including children, are being kept temporarily in terrible conditions. American officials have an obligation to take care of them before those with no valid claim to be in the United States are returned to their home countries.

Capitol Hill Democrats are reportedly torn about an emergency aid measure. On one hand, they want to care for the migrants. On the other hand, they fear approving aid would empower President Trump to carry out a plan to deport illegal immigrants whose cases have received full legal due process and who have been ordered deported. Such deportations used to be relatively uncontroversial but are now, apparently, unacceptable to some Democrats.

This moment might be a time for introspection for those who have consistently downplayed the urgency of the situation on the border. Earlier this year, with the number of illegal crossings rising; with the nature of the crossers changing — more families and more children than in earlier years; with the testimony of border officials that they were unable to handle the situation — with all that happening, many Democrats and their supporters in the media forcefully denied that there was a crisis on the southern border. Here are a few — actually, more than a few — examples:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/what-the-viral-border-patrol-video-leaves-out/

News outlets seized on the video as evidence of the Trump administration’s cruelty, but they omitted the crucial context.

In an attempt to justify Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s absurd comparison of American detention facilities to Holocaust-era concentration camps, many figures within the media have shared a viral video clip of a legal hearing in which a Department of Justice attorney debates a panel of judges as to what constitutes “sanitary conditions.” The majority of the shares were of a version put out by NowThis News, which claimed that the video shows a Trump administration official arguing that “children don’t need soap, toothbrushes, or beds to be ‘safe and sanitary’ while in Border Patrol custody.” The claim has led to several days of outrage, and has been used repeatedly as evidence that the current administration is being intentionally cruel to migrant children. Countless journalists, along with clickbait outlets such as The Hill and the Huffington Post, have highlighted the video inside this framing.

Unsurprisingly, it is not that simple. Indeed, the hearing in the video was related not to actions taken by the Trump administration, but to a challenge of a 2017 ruling that the CBP under the Obama administration had violated the Flores Settlement agreement with its treatment of children in custody. The judge in that case cited specific infractions that she felt were in violation of the “safe and sanitary” requirement under the Flores agreement and recommended a special monitor be appointed to ensure these facilities were complying with the original standard. The DOJ attorney in the video, Sarah Fabian, was not arguing that the United States should decline to provide those items to children, but rather that the Flores Settlement agreement didn’t specifically require those items. The notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit judges disagreed with this argument, preferring to read Flores narrowly. Fabian has been arguing similar cases on behalf of the Justice Department for years; that is her job. Some of her legal arguments have upset immigration advocates before. But they have never led to this type of media coverage, or to the claim that her fulfilling her legal role is indicative of a moral shortcoming.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/now_the_cartel_members_are_asking_for_asylum.html

If there’s any proof the asylum system is a mess, take a look at who’s getting in on ‘credible fear’ reasons from the Center or Immigration Studies:

KVOA News 4, the Tucson NBC affiliate, has reported on a June 10, 2019, gun battle that took place across the border from Douglas, Ariz., in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico. That gun battle apparently involved an internal dispute among members of the Sinaloa drug cartel and, by the end, almost 12 people had died. A gun battle directly across the border from the United States in which almost a dozen people were killed would be shocking enough.

One passage in that report, however, underscores the biggest difficulty the United States faces in securing its Southwest border: “Sources told News 4 Tucson four cartel members showed up at the port of entry asking for asylum and claimed ‘credible fear’.”

Given the low standard, the regrettable thing is that those cartel members likely were found to have a credible fear of persecution and/or torture.
So now it’s not just welfare seekers getting in on the credible fear argument, it’s the cartels they pay to get them in. And once those brutal thugs get into fights among themselves, whether it’s over alien-smuggling profits, drug routes, or cheap little whores, the losing party has rights to enter the U.S. to seek asylum as a consolation prize, citing perfectly logically the credible fear of torture, beheading, being dropped into acid pots, being run over alive over and over by semi-trucks, being fed to pigs and buried in the desert, or being strung up naked by one foot from the local bridges. Technically, they would likely have more credible fear than anyone else applying for asylum, and by leftist logic, that would put them at the front of the queue.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/florida_sets_an_important_precedent.html

As reported in the Miami Herald News, on Friday 14 June, 2019 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Federal Immigration Enforcement bill, SB 168, keeping a promise he had made during his campaign for governor.

Here is a summary of the bill’s provisions shown on the Florida Senate website:

Prohibits a state entity, local governmental entity, or law enforcement agency from having a sanctuary policy, which is a law, policy, practice, procedure, or custom that restricts a law enforcement agency’s ability to communicate or exchange information with a federal immigration agency on immigration enforcement matters or from complying with immigration detainers.
Provides procedures for a court to follow to reduce a defendant’s sentence by up to 12 days and thereby permit a law enforcement agency to transfer the defendant to a federal facility and complete the remaining 12 days of the sentence.
Requires a law enforcement agency that has custody of someone who is subject to an immigration detainer to notify the judge of the detainer, record in the person’s file the existence of the detainer, and comply with the detainer.
Requires a county correctional facility to enter into an agreement with a federal immigration agency for the payment of costs associated with housing and detaining defendants.
Provides that the Governor, in an exercise of his or her constitutional duties, may initiate judicial proceedings against any executive or administrative state, county, or municipal officer to enforce compliance with duties under the act or restrain unauthorized actions contrary to the act.
Permits the Attorney General to institute an action for a violation of this law or to prevent a violation of the law.
Requires any sanctuary policies currently in effect be repealed within 90 days after the effective date of the act.