RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/stopping-the-caravan/Only Congress can fix this.

Can we stop the caravan?

As Rod Dreher notes, the sight of thousands of Central Americans making their way en masse to the United States forces us to ask: “How far would we go to defend the sovereignty of our nations from invaders who want to cross our borders not with weapons to conquer, but nevertheless to settle here?”

The president’s threat to deploy the military to the border to stop the caravan conjures images of gunning down unarmed border infiltrators. This is precisely the kind of confrontation that some of the radicals cheering the caravan would love to see.

But this isn’t a military problem. It’s a law-enforcement problem, and one that ordinary civilian law enforcement can solve if provided with the right tools — which it does not have right now. The current rules regarding asylum and the treatment of alien minors, and the inadequate level of funding for detention of people applying for asylum (to make sure they can’t run off when their cases are rejected), effectively force immigration authorities into a catch-and-release policy, where aliens crossing the border are given a court date and then let go. This is a powerful incentive for more people to follow.

The incentive is so powerful that the current caravan is just the most photogenic part of the problem; fiscal-year 2018 statistics show that a slow-motion caravan confronts the border every day, with a daily average in September of more than 500 illegal aliens traveling in family units apprehended on the border (and soon released). Many others walk up to an immigration inspector at a legal crossing point on the Mexican border (“port of entry” is the technical term) and simply utter the magic word “asylum” and get in.

What to do? Deploying troops won’t do any good because they can’t arrest people; it would be just like the National Guard deployments under the Bush, Obama, and current administrations, where troops assisted the Border Patrol in reconnaissance and the like, which is fine as far as it goes but doesn’t solve anything. And they’re obviously not going to open fire on unarmed people. Even land mines and machines guns atop concrete border walls wouldn’t matter much, since most of those arriving would simply go to a legal port of entry. (About one-third of last spring’s caravan actually made it all the way to the border, and of those, the large majority went to ports of entry.)

https://freebeacon.com/columns/how-to-think-about-the-caravan/

King Leonidas had his 300. President Trump has his 800. That’s the number of soldiers Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has ordered to the southern border to greet the caravan of illegal immigrants originating from Honduras. The band of families and singles, traveling en masse to avoid exploitation by smugglers and coyotes, now numbers 10,000 souls, according to one report. It may take them weeks to reach the United States. A second caravan is already taking shape behind the first. It won’t be the last.

An unauthorized march on a border—any border—is a challenge to national sovereignty. And it is precisely the idea of sovereignty that one of the groups supporting the caravan, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, wants to undermine. The confrontation is all the more emphatic when the men at the head of the column bear the flag not of the country they seek to enter but that of their homeland. Americans who oppose illegal immigration and are concerned at the mounting crisis in our border states, where thousands of family units and unaccompanied children are detained as an inundated bureaucracy decides their fates, look to Trump, Mattis, and the Army for relief.

Prepare to be disappointed. The soldiers aren’t going to the border to stop the caravan. They’re going to assist Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Health and Human Services, and other authorities as they take in the newcomers. There is little the government can do to turn back the tide. Why? Because the same rule of law challenged by illegal immigration also incentivizes and protects the illegal immigrants within the caravan. It’s a paradox—one inflaming this most polarizing of issues at a moment of political decision.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21741/the-rape-of-lady-liberty
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com
There has been much talk about rape lately. Wikipedia tells us that “Rape is a sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without that person’s consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority, or against a person who is incapable of giving valid consent, such as one who is unconscious, incapacitated, has an intellectual disability or is below the legal age of consent.”

The critical element in rape is penetration. The dictionary tells us that penetration is the action or process of making a way through something or into something. So let’s talk about rape and penetration. Rape is a horrific and violent crime that violates the most personal private boundaries of an individual. Rape is distinguished by the penetration of sexual boundaries but what about the penetration of other boundaries?

Let’s consider the breaching of less personal boundaries – our homes, our cities, and our country as we watch a menacing migration invasion march toward our national borders.

American homes are protected physically by border walls, doors, locks, alarm systems, and by laws. The U.S. Constitution declares that our homes may not be subject to unlawful search or seizure. Property laws protect ownership of our private homes as individual assets of private citizens. Citizen A cannot violate the property boundaries of Citizen B any more than he can violate the sexual boundaries of Citizen B. Citizen B is protected by our Constitution, laws, and a society that respects both. So far so good.

What happens when Citizen A violates the law and rapes Citizen B or unlawfully enters his home and decides to move in?

In a lawful, law-abiding society, the police remove Citizen A and he is prosecuted for the crimes he has committed. There is a recognition that breaching boundaries whether sexual in nature or not is unlawful. If Citizen A is found guilty he is imprisoned and loses his precious liberty.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271727/threats-posed-impending-invasion-michael-cutler

As I have been watching with growing concern the rapidly increasing numbers of aspiring illegal aliens in Latin America who are heading north towards the United States, I came to draw the comparison that the aerial videos of these huge numbers of people, at least from high overhead, appear somewhat like the images of the runners participating in the New York City Marathon.

That analogy caused me to think back to March 20, 2013, during the Obama administration, when I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the topic, “Building An Immigration System Worthy Of American Values.”

The last two paragraphs of my prepared testimony for that hearing more than five years ago now seem all the more appropriate if not, in fact, prophetic:

Law enforcement is at its best when it creates a climate of deterrence to convince those who might be contemplating violating the law that such an effort is likely to be discovered and that if discovered, adverse consequences will result for the law violators. Current policies and statements by the administration, in my view, encourages aspiring illegal aliens around the world to head for the United States. In effect the starter’s pistol has been fired and for these folks, the finish line to this race is the border of the United States.

Back when I was an INS special agent I recall that Doris Meissner who was, at the time, the commissioner of the INS, said that the agency needed to be “customer oriented.” Unfortunately, while I agree about the need to be customer oriented what Ms Meissner and too many politicians today seem to have forgotten is that the “customers” of the INS and of our government in general, are the citizens of the United States of America.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/here_they_come_another_illegal_immigrant_caravan_forming_in_el_salvador_.html

NBC News is reporting that another illegal alien caravan is forming in El Salvador and will begin its trek to the U.S. border soon.

As the Trump administration makes preparations to combat the 6,500-member Honduran migrant caravan making its way toward the United States, the Department of Homeland Security is also tracking a new caravan taking shape – this time from El Salvador, according to two U.S. officials, a local source on the ground in Central America and an internal U.S. government report obtained by NBC News.

The El Salvadoran caravan is still forming, but its members have plans to begin their journey northward toward the U.S. next week, according to the sources.

The internal report indicates that DHS is tracking the communications of caravan members, including a 230-member WhatsApp group that intends to leave on Oct. 31.

With the DHS “tracking the communications of caravan members,” you have to believe it has a pretty good idea of who is organizing these invasions.

Some international do-gooder organizations are saying it’s not they.

It’s unclear exactly how the caravan started in Honduras, but it appears to have no formal leadership.

“No one is capable of organizing this many people. Nobody,” said Irineo Mujica of Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders), which is providing support to the group. “It’s an exodus.”

Many Mexicans have turned out to help the migrants, handing out food and sometimes clothes in each town where they stop.

That woman is either naïve or disingenuous. There are many groups capable of organizing such a caravan. All it takes is a little money and a few people who know what they’re doing.

https://mobile.twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1054874705491120133

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271719/caravan-jihad-robert-spencer

CNN on Monday once again posed as the intrepid and impartial fact checker, correcting the falsehoods spread by our ridiculous and hateful President, with the headline: “Trump seizes on right-wing media reports to suggest migrant caravan has been infiltrated by ‘unknown Middle Easterners.’” And as usual, the President is in reality far closer to the mark than CNN ever is. CNN has once again proven itself to be, as Trump has so aptly and indelibly put it, very fake news.

CNN noted that “In a tweet, the President warned that ‘criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in’ the caravan of thousands of Central American migrants fleeing poverty and violence.” Note CNN’s thumb on the scale in its framing of the story: the hordes advancing toward the border are “Central American migrants fleeing poverty and violence,” not “A large cadre of military-age males being transported to the American border to flout immigration laws and create provocations designed to discredit Trump before the midterm elections.”

After that bit of legerdemain, CNN informs the Leftist marks who still take it seriously that Trump is, as expected, all wrong and going off half-cocked yet again: “The President did not support his claim with any evidence. Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday afternoon that Trump ‘absolutely’ had evidence to indicate there are Middle Easterners in the caravan. Sanders, however, did not provide specific information on the matter and it was still not clear what evidence Trump had to indicate the presence of such individuals in the caravan.”

The evidence is actually abundantly clear; CNN just doesn’t want you to know it exists. The Daily Caller reported Monday that Univision correspondent Francisco Santa Anna stated: “Yesterday when we were traveling through Guatemala, we noticed people from El Salvador and even people from Bangladesh. Can you imagine what they had to do to get here? They infiltrated themselves in this caravan and tried to cross with the crowd. That would have benefited them greatly.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/22/pueblo

Among the signs carried by the northbound invasion, one in particular stands out: “Pueblos Sin Fronteras.” This is the name of a group that organizes the so-called migrant caravans, but it also doubles as the raison d’être of the mob itself. They are not marching north to become good little capitalist “Americans,” much less citizens of the United States. In fact, they hate capitalism, bellowing socialist chants of: “We are international workers!”

They do not march because they look fondly upon our country, its institutions, its values, or its culture. And, no, they are not “fleeing” the violence and poverty of the pueblo. Rather, what they want is to bring the pueblo to us. They are convinced that it is their manifest destiny to do so.

Americans tend to think only we put stock in our destiny, and we don’t like to think of ourselves as conquerable—and certainly not already conquered. But if we cannot control our borders, let alone have a say in who may live among us, what might we call that condition?

Who Are the 14,000 and Counting?
As it has done in so many other Western nations, neo-Marxist education has stripped us of our ability even to conceive of anyone other than ourselves as conquerors (which, ironically, is rather condescending and paternalistic!). We learn to see only the evil in ourselves, and the “good” in everyone else—even those who would destroy our civilization. No people but us hateful and sinful Americans has the capacity to carry out something so incorrigible as “manifest destiny” anyway.

It is beyond the comprehension of our moral betters in the media, academia, entertainment, and government, that Third Worlders are even capable of doing harm—perennially “oppressed,” as we are assured they are, by white men in the midwest who have never even so much as seen the blood soaked streets of Guatemala on TV.

Yet here they come. As of Monday, they were 14,000-strong and screaming: “No one will stop us, only God.” And those Mexicans who we think only wish us well? They’re helping the invasion along, even joining it. Why wouldn’t they? Their president-elect told them that they have a “right” to violate our sovereignty. Moreover, “It’s solidarity,” Maria Teresa Orellana tells a journalist. Orellana handed out free sandals to the the swarm as it passed through her neighborhood. “They’re our brothers,” she said.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271692/impending-alien-invasion-michael-cutler

Headlines have been written proclaiming that a “caravan of migrants” is heading for the U.S./Mexican border. Sometimes the people who are heading north through Central America are referred to as “refugees” or “immigrants.”

Those terms are designed to downplay the threat that these individuals pose and assuage the fears that this may understandably engender in Americans. Words do matter.

In point of fact, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) defines an alien simply as being, “Any person, not a citizen or national of the United States.”

There is no insult in the term “alien” or in its definition, but there is clarity. The obvious goal of the radical Left is to obfuscate the truth through Orwellian use of language that has been mis-portrayed as “political correctness.”

Shortly after President Trump was elected I wrote about this intentional misuse of language in my article, The Left’s Orwellian Tactics.

Remarkably, the radical Left had no problem using the term “alien” when they needed a word that began with the letter “A” for the DREAM Act, an acronym for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors.

While we are on the topic of words, perhaps the term “invasion” should be substituted for “caravan.”

Invasion is defined, in part, as an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity or an unwelcome intrusion into another’s domain.

It is therefore important to note that Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution provides:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.

These columns favor generous immigration and asylum for refugees. But when migration becomes a political weapon to foment border chaos, leaders have no choice other than to step in and protect national security. Exhibit A are the 4,000 or so Central Americans moving on foot through Mexico to the U.S.

Waves of humanity marching in lock step don’t materialize spontaneously and neither has this “caravan.” This march is organized and not necessarily for the benefit of the migrants. Mr. Trump has good reason to turn it back.

Not since the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba has there been a similar attempt to overwhelm U.S. immigration law on the pretext of celebrating American freedom. Thousands of Cubans made their way to Florida when Fidel Castro temporarily lifted his Havana Curtain, and American boats of every shape and size sailed into the Caribbean to collect them.

But the sheer magnitude made it impossible to process the newcomers in an orderly fashion. Castro saw to it that criminals and the mentally ill also climbed aboard the boats. No one doubted the Cuban hunger to escape, but the unintended consequences of the mayhem were costly.

A Mariel replay now seems to be coming from Honduras. Though the details are murky, we do know that former Honduran congressman Bartolo Fuentes of the left-wing Libre Party has admitted to organizing this caravan.

Libre is the party of former president Manuel Zelaya, an ally of Venezuela and Cuba who in 2009 tried to override the Honduran constitution to remain in office despite a term limit. The Honduran congress, his own party, the Supreme Court, the national ombudsman and the Catholic Church opposed his power grab. He was removed by the military and never returned to power despite the efforts of the Obama Administration.

But Mr. Zelaya remains active in politics. While center-right President Juan Orlando Hernández has encouraged Hondurans on the journey to return home and even has offered them assistance, Mr. Zelaya is egging them on.

In a press release last week, he accused Mr. Hernández of a “submissive and lackey attitude” toward “the arrogant position of the empire” and criticized Mr. Hernández’s efforts to “deepen failed economic policies” like privatization. The opposition is now calling for street protests with a threat that if Mr. Hernández does not step down, the migration wave will continue.

Mr. Fuentes, who was detained in Guatemala last week and returned to Honduras, has said he did not expect the caravan to grow so large, which raises the question of where the financing for the marchers is coming from. Criminal organizations and governments like Venezuela would benefit from chaos at the U.S. border that embarrasses the Trump Administration before the election. Many nongovernmental organizations on the left also support the migrants’ “right” to the American dream.

The reality is that bowing to this migration blackmail would produce an American political backlash that would damage the cause of legal immigration and a humane refugee policy. Think of Germany’s Angela Merkel and the 2015 flood of Middle Eastern migrants. Mr. Trump is right to seek Mexican cooperation to make clear to the migrants that, whatever their plight, they cannot stampede over America’s southern border.