RUTHFULLY YOURS

We have all heard the bogus claim that “Sanctuary Cities” and “Sanctuary States” protect the “immigrants” from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents and that the mayors of sanctuary cities are being compassionate.

There is no compassion to be found in exploitation

In reality, politicians who create and support sanctuary policies are every bit as disgusting and exploitative of illegal aliens as are human traffickers and unscrupulous employers who intentionally hire illegal aliens and benefit by sanctuary policies and, indeed those human traffickers and employers of illegal aliens are being provided with “sanctuary” and are being shielded from detection by ICE.

Mayors and governors of “sanctuary” jurisdictions are actually “partners in crime” with human traffickers and exploitive employers.

Before we go further, however, it is imperative to lay waste to that the false claim that mayors of sanctuary cities protect immigrants from immigration law enforcement agents.

Lies about sanctuary policies being motivated by “compassion” creates a hostile environment and antipathy for ICE agents and Border Patrol agents that impedes them from locating and arresting aliens who violate our immigration laws, but also makes it far more difficult for ICE and Border Patrol agents to engage with the public to develop actionable intelligence.

This hostility also endangers their safety (reportedly physical attacks on immigration law enforcement personnel have more than doubled in the past couple of years).

Let’s be clear, Immigrants need no protection from immigration law enforcement authorities.

After a big buildup, the migrant caravan full of Central America’s finest has finally arrived, and as screengrabs from local television broadcasts show, they gave America the bird.

Seriously. Buried in a News 8 broadcast from San Diego was footage of illegal migrants and their supporters on the U.S. side breaching the U.S. fence on the border, waving a big Honduran flag, victory-style, and whipping out a big middle finger at America.

In times past, arriving immigrants used to kiss the earth. Today, they wave the middle finger at us. Look at these photos, both from News 8 and the CBS national report, rough and blurry, admittedly, showing just what that caravan was about in all its anti-American tenor, which frankly, should have been the lede to the story:

For a publicity stunt as staged as the migrant caravan from Central America, one that one might have expected to have been carefully choreographed to advance their narrative of needy people with sob stories needing asylum, what does it say that all we see are military-aged young men, some with tattoos, illegally entering the U.S. under the Honduran banner and angrily flashing the middle finger in what might be their first moments in America?

Here are more photos showing that this crowd (and its cheering section on the other side) is anything but the women and children in peril being promoted by the group’s organizers. Actually, it’s almost all single military-aged young men in small groups, who seem to be angry at our country and us for not letting them in on demand.

Apparently the “caravan” of Central and Middle [oops! — Ed.] Americans that was headed towards our Southern border, still is headed towards our Southern border.

Sure, Mexico has stopped openly lending support, and the lawyers accompanying the merry band have stopped telling them it’s a shoe in, but they’re still coming.

The truth of the matter is that Mexico might not be lending open support to this attempt to test US borders, but they are in fact lending it their support, by not arresting these illegal aliens on their soil (Mexico has much tougher immigration laws than ours) and not offering them asylum there. Instead, they let what must be a significant and large multitude continue towards the US border.

Why are they doing it? The answer is fairly obvious. From the linked article:

The Central Americans, many traveling as families, on Sunday will test the Trump administration’s tough rhetoric criticizing the caravan when the migrants begin seeking asylum by turning themselves into border inspectors at San Diego’s San Ysidro border crossing, the nation’s busiest.

They’re coming to test the “Trump administration’s tough rhetoric”. In effect, they’re coming to test our borders and our decision to uphold their integrity.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it: I am not against immigration. It would be stupid and weird for me to be against immigration, given that I’m an immigrant myself.

I am not, however, a believer in open borders. The whole open borders project is a weird project of intellectual elites who view themselves as the aristocrats of the world and all cultures similarly blighted and in need of their input. It was never realistic, and it is less realistic than ever for the US.

The US, while a nation, possessed of territory, like all nations, is something quite new in the history of the world, as our founding principles are a radical departure from past countries and an effort to create a citizenship of belief.

Because I am quite devoted to our founding principles and the liberty which they secure us, I don’t believe in immigration simply for economic necessity or to escape this or that. While those are valid motives to immigrate anywhere – including here – you should come here with the intention of becoming an American, or as my friend, Dave Freer, himself an immigrant to Australia, puts it, FIFO: Fit in or F**k off.

This “caravan” coming to “test” our borders is the very antithesis of FIFO, and in fact, if we do not find a way to turn it away, and ship these people back where they came from, we might as well consider our borders non-existent. And you know what you call a country with non-existent borders? Not a country. To study the fate of such a land, read up on the tragedy of the commons.

If we are open land whom anyone may come and settle in, first we need to stop the welfare system because pioneers by definition don’t get welfare. And second, we can kiss our culture and our founding principles goodbye, because, in the face of a massive invasion by another culture, there is no way to make anyone acculturate (a painful process at best) or fit in.

I know that many people on the left and right will emphasize the plight of the people in this caravan as “refugees” and bring up both the long tradition of Americans taking refuges from anywhere, when they were in peril of their lives, and the breach of such a policy, such as the turning away of boats full of European Jews fleeing the holocaust. They’ll say that the turning away of these “refugees” is an act of malice and racism.

In fact, it is neither. There might be many reasons to take in refugees, but one of them is not to accept a caravan composed in other countries and passing through many countries on the way here.

Take one of the members of the caravan: Nefi Hernandez, who planned to seek asylum with his wife and infant daughter [who] was born on the journey through Mexico, worried he could be kept in custody away from his daughter. But his spirits lifted when he learned he might be released with an ankle bracelet.

Hernandez, 24, said a gang in his hometown of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, threatened to kill him and his family if he did not sell drugs.

First of all, I beg leave to not believe his dire peril, or at least that the story is somewhat shaded. Sure. Maybe he sold drugs for this gang, then did something they didn’t like and got in trouble, but I don’t believe drug gangs are in the habit of threatening someone to make them join the trade. There is something that doesn’t hang together there.

But in addition to that, a drug gang, no matter how lawless the country, is not a government. Even if they wanted you to sell drugs in this particular village, in this particular province, they’d be unlikely to follow you to the next province or the next village, let alone the next country. Hernandez comes from Honduras. That means to get to Mexico he had to cross another country, probably Guatemala. And to get to the US he had to cross another country, Mexico.

CONTINUE AT SITE

How the Golden State defies immigration law

‘I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.” That was President Andrew Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s intention to prevent enforcement of a federal law within the state. Despite his admiration for Jackson, President Trump hasn’t yet threatened to start hanging California politicians. But that state’s “sanctuary” policies protecting illegal immigrants and obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law echo the long-ago fight over nullification and states’ rights.

The passage of three sanctuary bills last year by the state legislature in Sacramento is now the subject of a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. It was the culmination of a decades-long process, as mass immigration transformed California’s politics from reddish purple to deep blue.

The first measure that could be described as a sanctuary provision was the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order 40, enacted in 1979, which prohibited officers from arresting a person for the federal crime of illegal entry and, unless he was arrested for another crime, from even inquiring as to legal status. But that order merely instructed police to abstain from involving themselves in immigration enforcement. In the 1980s, a more proactive conception of illegal-alien sanctuary spread, as Central Americans fleeing war in their homelands snuck into the U.S. but did not qualify for asylum.

At first, only some pro-Sandinista churches postured as sanctuaries for these illegal aliens. But in late 1985, Mayor (now Senator) Dianne Feinstein signed a resolution declaring San Francisco a “city of refuge” for illegals. She ordered that “City Departments shall not discriminate against Salvadorans and Guatemalan refugees because of their immigration status, and shall not jeopardize the safety and welfare of law-abiding refugees by acting in a way that may cause their deportation.” The declaration was followed four years later by a city law formally prohibiting city employees from assisting federal immigration authorities.

Protesters at the Supreme Court were wrong.

The weak arguments made on Wednesday in the Supreme Court against President Donald Trump’s restrictions on travel from dangerous countries demonstrate that the government should win the case. The justices should rule in favor of upholding the president’s authority to protect national security and the safety of the American public.

It was a rainy, overcast day in the nation’s capital, but that did not stop protesters outside the Supreme Court who were yelling about the so-called Muslim ban, which exists only in their fevered imaginations. The weather also did not deter those attending the arguments inside the courtroom, which was packed with Washington’s media and political elites, including Don McGahn, Trump’s White House counsel, and legislators including Representative Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Even Lin-Manuel Miranda, author of the Broadway musical Hamilton, was there.

The justices heard their final oral arguments of the term in U.S. v. Hawaii, the case filed against Trump’s revised proclamation of September 24, 2017. That proclamation was issued after an intensive, multi-agency review applied to 200 countries. The Department of Homeland Security recommended that entry be restricted from eight countries that, as Noel Francisco, the solicitor general, told the Court, “failed to provide the minimum baseline of information needed to vet their nationals.”

The countries included Iran and Syria, state sponsors of terrorism; Libya, Yemen, Chad, and Somalia, which have extensive terrorist activities inside their borders; and two non-Muslim countries, North Korea and Venezuela.

Francisco put on a very strong case on behalf of the government. He relied heavily on a straightforward provision of federal immigration law, whereby Congress gave the president the power to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” if he finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” As Francisco argued, “the proclamation reflects a foreign-policy and national-security judgment that falls well within the president’s power” under this federal law.

The solicitor general argued against the courts’ getting involved in this, since “the whole vetting system is essentially determined by the executive branch. It’s up to the executive branch to set it up. It’s up to the executive branch to maintain it. And it’s up to the executive branch to constantly improve it.” He pointed out that prior presidents, Carter and Reagan, used this law to restrict entry from Iran and Cuba, and Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that Trump’s proclamation contains more detail on the specifics of the grounds for the restrictions than did those prior presidential proclamations.

A recent Supreme Court decision stopping a deportation was correct, but Congress can easily fix the law.

The Trump administration’s efforts to get convicted criminal aliens off of our streets and out of the country was dealt a setback this week, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A majority in Sessions v. Dimaya held that a part of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) used to deport criminal aliens was unconstitutionally “vague.” Fortunately, this is a problem Congress could easily remedy with a very simple legislative fix. Only those opposed to safeguarding the public from convicted felons could possibly oppose it.

At issue was a provision of the INA that defines what a “crime of violence” is for purposes of removal proceedings. Under federal law, if an alien is convicted of an “aggravated felony,” he is subject to deportation even if he is in the country legally. The INA has a long list of specific offenses that fit the “aggravated felony” definition, one of which is a “crime of violence” punishable by at least a year in prison.

The man at the center of this case, James Dimaya, is a lawful permanent resident alien from the Philippines. The U.S. moved to deport him after his second felony conviction for first-degree burglary under California law. An immigration court ordered Dimaya’s deportation because it found that first-degree burglary met the “crime of violence” definition.

Why? Because a “crime of violence” is further defined in federal law as any felony that poses “a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.”