RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/a-win-at-the-border/

“The New York Times had a report over the weekend throwing cold water on the deal, saying its component parts had already been agreed to months ago. It’s no secret that the U.S. has been pushing Mexico in this direction for a while (indeed, prior talks that the Times calls “secret” were publicly announced). It’s still an accomplishment to get Mexico to commit openly to fuller, more urgent cooperation with the U.S.”

President Trump evidently knows something about the art of the tariff threat. His unorthodox Twitter diplomacy has gotten Mexico to make potentially important public commitments on immigration enforcement.

Trump said he was going to slap steadily escalating tariffs on Mexico unless it did more to help with the border crisis, a threat with huge downside risks. If implemented, the tariffs would have been disruptive at a time when U.S. growth is perhaps slowing, been an economic gut-punch to an allied country whose stability is important to us, and probably precipitated a congressional revolt against the policy. Instead, Trump has a win that is likely more than a mere PR victory.

Mexico is devoting 6,000 troops to attempting to better police its own border with Guatemala. It’s unclear what this will produce, although it can’t hurt. More important is the extension of the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), or the “remain in Mexico” policy. Under this arrangement, we can return asylum-seekers to Mexico while their claims — almost always ultimately rejected — are adjudicated. This avoids one of the biggest problems of our current policy, which allows asylum-seekers into the country, never to be removed, even if their claims are rejected and they are ordered deported.

Mexico wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about MPP and limited the number of asylum-seekers it would accept to a trickle. Now it is saying it will accept them with no restrictions. That’s a big deal, although our capacity to process the migrants for return is limited, and it remains to be seen how much Mexico will do to follow through on its commitment. The deal at least makes it possible, though, for us to prevent Central American family units from automatically gaining entry into the country, and thus it significantly reduces the incentive for a future flow of migrants.  

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/09/trumps-wins-one-on-immigration/

Tariffs don’t work. Or so the talking heads kept saying. We watched for days as Democrats and Republicans lambasted President Trump’s threat to impose steeper and steeper tariffs on Mexico unless and until that country takes concrete action to stem the tide of illegal immigrants crossing into the United States.

“I think it’s both bad politically and bad economically and I don’t think it’s really going to help solve the immigration problem, either, which is what Mr. Trump said he’s trying to attack,” said John Negroponte, the former U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines, the United Nations, and Iraq.

“This is a stunningly stupid idea on many levels,” wrote Eric Boehm at the libertarian Reason magazine. “Making it more expensive to import goods from Mexico is a pretty roundabout way to get Mexico to change its border policies.”

“Mr. Trump is blaming Mexico for a mess it can’t solve,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized

Well, now we know.

Late Friday, President Trump announced that an agreement was reached to suspend the threatened tariffs “indefinitely” in exchange for Mexico agreeing to house many of the illegal immigrants who are overtaxing America’s broken asylum system. Instead of releasing so-called asylum-seekers into the interior of the United States, often never to be seen again, tens of thousands will remain in Mexico while they await their court dates.

Clearly, the threat of tariffs works very well.

Democrats and their allies in the media continually bemoan President Trump breaking long-standing political norms.  They still seem unwilling to grasp one of the central tenets of the 2016 movement that led to his election.  Yes, accepted practices and “norms” of Washington worked well for apparatchiks of the administrative state and their crony allies among big business and K Street influencers.  But this crooked system failed miserably to enhance the well-being of millions of working-class Americans who therefore chose, very knowingly, to send an agitator to Washington, D.C. 

President Trump has been particularly forceful in breaking protocol and bucking conventional Beltway wisdom in the international arena.  For example, he scuttled our participation in the unfair Paris climate accord.  He also successfully shamed NATO partners into paying their proper share of the alliance’s defense burden.  In international trade, he demands reciprocity and honest dealings from China, a country that has serially abused America for decades. 

Trump also smartly confronted Mexico over its inaction regarding our volatile shared border.  The recent situation there has grown totally untenable, on pace this year to send over 1 million unvetted and uninvited trespassers pouring into our country. The overwhelming majority of these people, contrary to media narrative, are economic migrants willfully abusing our nation’s generous and well-intended asylum provisions.  But, because the Democrats in Congress seem to prefer a controversy to a solution when it comes to illegal migration, the internal options for Trump and his Department of Homeland Security remain limited.  But thinking creatively, the president determined that our immense economic leverage over Mexico could be summoned to coax them into acting as a good neighbor.  For too long regarding Central American migrants, we have allowed Mexico to transfer its temporary trouble into our permanent problem.

But President Trump warned Mexico of imminent trade sanctions unless it shared proactively in the burden of stopping this dangerous flow of people and the attendant humanitarian border crisis it caused.  Predictably, critics shrieked in disapproval over the last week. 

Many media mavens recoiled to their standard default position of criticizing Trump as a racist.  My CNN colleague Chris Cuomo, for example, claimed that Trump characterized the border crossers as a “marauding brown menace.”  First, he used no such description. Second, America is not a race, and defending American citizens, of all colors and persuasions, does not represent a prejudiced construct in any sense.  In point of fact, black and brown American citizens suffer disproportionately from a lawless border, due to totally preventable illegal alien crime and illicit competition in the labor markets.  It is neither xenophobic nor bigoted for any country to determine the processes and qualifications for becoming legal new citizens. 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mexico-is-sending-6-000-troops-to-secure-its-border-ahead-of-trumps-tariff-deadline

Mexico intends to send 6,000 National Guard troops to its southern border to head off the threat of U.S. tariffs over its lax border policies.

Despite Mexico’s intent to beef up border security, the White House is still planning to enact a 5% tariff on about $350 billion worth of goods flowing from Mexico into the U.S. on June 10. Tariffs will increase by 5% each month up to 25% in October.

“Our position hasn’t changed. The tariffs will move forward and go into effect on Monday,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Friday.

If negotiations are not settled before the weekend, the White House will issue a notice Friday of the tariffs expected Monday.

“There’s a legal notification that goes forward today with a plan to implement [Mexico] tariffs on Monday, but I think there is the ability — if negotiations continue to go well — that the president can turn that off at some point over the weekend,” Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, said Friday.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/447288-dhs-official-warns-gop-senators-about-rented-babies-at-border

Mark Morgan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told Republicans senators Wednesday that migrants from Central America are “renting babies” to make it easier to get across the U.S. border. 

Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), one of the Republican senators who attended the Wednesday lunch briefing with Morgan, said the official offered the information to underscore the crisis at the border.

“I can’t believe that this actually happens but that people down there in Central America or Mexico are renting babies to get across the border and then sending them back and renting them again to get across the border,” Grassley told reporters on Thursday.

“The public doesn’t know about it. I hope you guys will help advertise that, assuming the information that I heard yesterday was accurate because that’s a humanitarian crisis that we have to be concerned about,” he said.

Morgan previously raised the issue of migrants from Central America allegedly renting children to make it easier to get across the border and gain asylum in an April interview with the Epoch Times.

“They know now, you grab a kid, you’re in,” he said, citing protections for migrants established by the Flores Settlement and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.

“Grab a kid and you’re in. And so now you’ve seen a complete change in the demographics because of that. And now you’re seeing adult males coming along. And it goes even further, the children are being exploited,” he added. “An adult male who wants to get across will pay the cartels to basically rent the kid. It’s horrendous.”

https://www.foxnews.com/world/isis-plot-westerners-mexico-border

A chilling confession from a captured ISIS fighter has shed light on how the terrorist group intended to exploit the vulnerabilities of the U.S. border with Mexico, using English speakers and westerners to take advantage of smuggling routes and target financial institutions.

Seized ISIS fighter Abu Henricki, a Canadian citizen with dual citizenship with Trinidad, last month said that he was sought out by the violent insurgency’s leadership to attack the U.S. from a route starting in Central America, according to a study by the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and published in Homeland Security Today.

“ISIS has organized plots in Europe with returnees so it seems entirely plausible that they wanted to send guys out to attack. The issue that makes a North American attack harder is the travel is more difficult from Syria,” Anne Speckhard, who co-conducted the study as the director of ICSVE and Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University, told Fox News. “So the idea that they would instead use people who were not known to their own governments as having joined ISIS might make it possible for them to board airplanes.”

Henricki allegedly traveled to Syria with the intention of serving as an ISIS fighter, but was later told he could not take on soldier duties due to a chronic illness. At the end of 2016, he claimed to have been “invited” by the ISIS intelligence wing – known as the emni – to join other Trinidadians and launch financial attacks on the U.S.

The attacks were described to Henricki as designed to “cripple the U.S. economy,” and he was said to have been informed that he would be issued false identification and passports and would be maneuvered from Puerto Rico to Mexico and then to the United States.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/mexico-asylum-policy-hypocrisy/

It embraces an expansive definition of asylum, then passes the buck by waving asylum-seekers northward.

President Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Mexican goods starting next week may or may not get Mexico to be more cooperative in preventing third-country “asylum-seekers” from passing through on the way to our border. I’m not too concerned about the costs that such a tariff would impose on U.S. businesses and consumers (which would be real), because the costs would be worth it if the tactic were actually to work. I’m skeptical it will, since Mexico always has a chip on its shoulder with regard to us. But recent signs suggest I might be pleasantly surprised. Here’s hoping.

Perhaps more important than the means, however, are the desired ends. During a call with reporters last week, acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan laid out three specific steps the administration wants Mexico to take. First is tightening security on Mexico’s border with Guatemala and chokepoints in southern Mexico (such as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec). Second is targeting the smuggling organizations; as McAleenan said, “The logistical effort to move 100,000 people through a country every four weeks is immense. This is noticeable.”

Mexico might well agree to these two demands, potentially averting the tariffs. But the third demand is the most consequential, and the most difficult. As McAleenan put it, “We need to be able to protect people in the first safe country they arrive in — really, all through the hemisphere, but certainly with our partner to the south.” In other words, the administration wants Mexico to sign a “safe third country” agreement, whereby foreigners who pass through Mexico would not be permitted even to apply for asylum at the U.S. border, and Mexico would agree to take them back, because if they were genuinely fleeing persecution, they should have applied in the first safe country they reached. As Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation wrote last fall about one of the migrant caravans, “ignoring Mexico’s asylum process is prima facie evidence that a claim for asylum in the U.S. is bogus.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/report-nearly-90-of-illegals-fail-to-show-up-for-court-hearings/

A report from the Justice Department on a pilot program to discover if illegal aliens applying for asylum actually showed up for their initial court hearing found that 90 percent of those who file asylum papers and are released into the interior of the country never show up.

Breitbart:

Since December 21, 2018, DHS  has released at least 190,500 border crossers and illegal aliens into the interior of the United States. Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan  told Congress this month that those foreign nationals are eventually given work permits that allow them to take U.S. jobs while awaiting their asylum hearings.

In testimony before Congress this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials said that the agency had recently conducted a pilot program with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to test how many recent illegal aliens would show up to their asylum hearings after being released into the U.S.

The results, an ICE official told Congress, were that about 87 percent of illegal aliens, or almost 9-in-10, recently released by DHS into the U.S. did not show up to their asylum hearings. With illegal aliens not showing up to their scheduled hearings, the ICE official said, the agency is then forced to grapple with attempting to locate and deport each illegal alien, an almost impossible task that strains federal resources.

This report flies in the face of other studies that show 65-70 percent of illegals showing up for court. But that information comes with two big caveats.

First, the most recent data is from 2016 — before this most recent tidal wave of asylum seekers began arriving. It should be noted that as the numbers of asylum seekers rose, the no-show rate in court rose as well. The significance is that there are two kinds of asylum seekers; those who show up at the border and report directly to immigration officials asking for U.S. protection and those who are caught entering the country illegally. The first kind is called an “affirmative” asylum request while the second group usually makes their plea for asylum during their court appearance. These are called “defensive” claims of asylum.