RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270514/weaponizing-compassion-bruce-thornton

The Democrat “resistance” has managed to break its own record for hysterical and hypocritical invective. Literalizing the clichéd punch line of a thousand gags––“Will no one think of the children!!!” ––the Dems are hyperventilating about the illegal alien parents and their children being separated upon detention, as the law requires. Once again, we see how much “conspicuous compassion,” as Alan Bloom called it, has become a weapon of politics, one that damages our security and interests.

In this case, the disconnect between fact and spin is more glaring than usual. No matter that ICE and Homeland Security are working within the constraints of court rulings and the law that Congress passed and can change any time. No matter that often it’s impossible to certify that the detained adults are the actual parents, or that human traffickers aren’t using this dodge to enter the country with their prey. No matter that the alternative is to turn these poorly vetted illegal aliens loose (as Obama did, as a form of de facto amnesty), merely on their word that they will show up for a hearing. No matter that across the country, Child Protective Services are “ripping children from their parents’ arms,” as are the children of those arrested on suspicion of a crime. Do we set a criminal suspect free on his own recognizance just because he’s accompanied by his kid?

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

No human with an ounce of compassion wants to see children separated from their parents. The bond, especially between a mother who bore and gave birth to a child, is unbreakable. Yet, plying heart strings will not resolve the problem we have with illegals (or smugglers claiming to be parents) who seek asylum, or have chosen to by-pass the legal immigration process and have crossed without papers into our country, by way of an unsecured border.

As everyone knows, border guards have only four choices when families are caught at the border, attempting to cross illegally, without proper authorization: Violators can be sent back into Mexico, which was one step the Obama Administration took. The entire family can be released into our country, pending a hearing to which they would voluntarily have to return, another choice the Obama Administration made. (Statistics suggest that 80% of those who disappear into the nether reaches of the country do not show up for scheduled hearings.)Three, the entire family (including the children)can be incarcerated, pending a hearing. And four, the parents can be incarcerated, pending a hearing, while the children are housed separately from their parents. The first choice commits the family to extreme hardship, as Mexico has no interest in taking them in. They must return, unescorted, to their country of origin. The second encourages the illegal entry into our country of not only asylum seekers but potential terrorists and those who choose not to play by the rules. The third would be cruelest to the children. The fourth, the option chosen by the Trump Administration[1](and distasteful to all, including Mr. Trump), highlights the need for comprehensive immigration reform – something both Parties in Congress, the author of our laws, has studiously avoided. Mr. Trump has been blamed, but the real culprit is Congress. Especially cynical are the misanthropists in the media and Washington who let crocodile tears detract from their failed policies

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/21/no-americans-want-border-wall-arent-anti-immigrant/

A recent Quinnipiac poll confirms what most of us already know: Republicans favor a border wall, Democrats don’t. In April, 81 percent of Republicans favored a wall, while only 4 percent of Democrats did.

In the eyes of the Left, this makes Republicans “the bad guys.” They are portrayed as a stain on our national character — “That’s not who we are” — and a shameful blight on our heritage — “We’re a nation of immigrants.” Worst of all, they are portrayed as anti-immigrant.

But they’re not. They’re anti-illegal immigration, and there’s a big difference. It isn’t personal.

Any decent person’s heart breaks at the plight of Central American parents worried sick that MS-13 will recruit their children, if they aren’t killed by violence first. (Read up on what happens to unaccompanied minors once they get here, however. Out of 214 recent MS-13 gang arrests, 30 percent had crossed the border illegally as unaccompanied minors.)

Drug cartels in Mexico feed on broken families, poverty, and hopelessness, aided by rife government corruption and an astronomical murder rate (25,340 in 2017). We want to rescue as many of these people as we can, but there’s a limit to how many can join our country every year. We have a right to control who gets in, for our own survival.

It is not anti-immigrant to want to block illegal aliens from pouring into our country. Even if every single one were a squeaky clean Mother Teresa, the sheer fact of their presence robs citizens and legal residents of something precious. Some of the calculus is economic, some isn’t.
Illegal Immigrants Are a Big Net Economic Loss

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270517/real-child-abusers-border-insecurity-daniel-greenfield

What the media has been falsely calling President Trump’s family separation policy began with Hollywood actor Ed Asner’s housekeeper and a lawsuit by the ACLU during the Reagan administration.

The issue was child trafficking.

Teenage girls were being smuggled into the United States. Some were being sent on to their illegal alien family members in the United States. Others were being sent to the United States as cheap labor or being trafficked for prostitution. People purporting to be family members might show up asking for them to be released into their custody. And immigration authorities were faced with a horrible situation.

The ACLU was less interested in the teens than in Attorney General Edwin Meese. Reagan’s AG was the Sessions of the day. A man whose name so enraged the left-wing group that at one point it circulated petitions demanding that Reagan fire Meese and called him the most dangerous official since Nixon.

Flores v. Meese, the case that led to the family separation policy, was born with Ed Asner’s housekeeper and the ACLU’s obsession with Meese. But the case, with various AGs replacing Meese, dragged on. And the ACLU went on insisting that refusing to release teenage illegal aliens violated the Constitution.

In ’93, when Jenny Lisette Flores, the girl at the center of the original case, was 23, the Supreme Court finally ruled 7-2 against the ACLU and rejected its bizarre claim that illegal teens had a right to be released. The verdict was brutal and made a hash of the ACLU’s opportunistic misreading of the Constitution.

And that should have been it. But by then it wasn’t Flores v. Meese, but Flores v. Reno.

http://www.businessinsider.com/migrant-children-in-cages-2014-photos-explained-2018-5

Several 2014 photos of detained immigrant children in cages went viral in May, and former Obama administration officials rushed to offer explanations.
The former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau had even shared the images on Twitter, mistakenly believing they were taken during Donald Trump’s presidency.
The former officials doubled down on their criticisms of Trump’s immigration policies, and said the 2014 photos showed unaccompanied children the government had been attempting to place with family members.
On June 17, reporters toured a similar government holding facility in McAllen, Texas, where migrant families are separated from one another and held in cages.

Several former Obama administration officials took to social media and news outlets last month to explain a gallery of years-old photos that showed immigrant children sleeping in shoddy conditions at a government-run holding facility in Arizona.

The images, which the Associated Press first published in 2014, resurfaced recently for reasons that remain unclear, and quickly prompted viral outrage on Twitter. One particularly disturbing image showed two children sleeping on mattresses on the floor inside what appeared to be a cage.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/border-politics-family-separation-debate-abuse-of-history/

Much has been written — some of it either inaccurate or designed to obfuscate the issue ahead of the midterms for political purposes — about the border fiasco and the unfortunate separation of children from parents. Rich Lowry’s brief analysis is the most insightful.

The media outrage usually does not include examination of why the Trump administration is enforcing existing laws that it inherited from the Bush and Obama administrations that at any time could have been changed by both Democratic and Republican majorities in Congress; of the use of often dubious asylum claims as a way of obtaining entry otherwise denied to those without legal authorization — a gambit that injures or at least hampers thousands with legitimate claims of political persecution; of the seeming unconcern for the safety of children by some would-be asylum seekers who illegally cross the border, rather than first applying legally at a U.S. consulate abroad; of the fact that many children are deliberately sent ahead, unescorted on such dangerous treks to help facilitate their own parents’ later entrance; of the cynicism of the cartels that urge and facilitate such mass rushes to the border to overwhelm general enforcement; and of the selective outrage of the media in 2018 in a fashion not known under similar policies and detentions of the past.

In 2014, during a similar rush, both Barack Obama (“Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back.”) and Hillary Clinton (“We have to send a clear message, just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay. So, we don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”) warned — again to current media silence — would-be asylum seekers not to use children as levers to enter the U.S.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/border-games-15977.html

New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced this week that he will refuse to deploy National Guard troops to assist in border control—though no one asked him to, and no one is ever likely to ask. Cuomo is a master of the political non sequitur—last month, he promised to send a Dunkirk-style small-boat flotilla against offshore oil rigs that don’t exist—and he’s also pretty good at twisting the English language to serve his interests.

In this, he is not unique—hence the rhetorical riot generated by the Trump administration’s so-called “family separation” policies—but the governor’s National Guard posturing is at once over the top and instructive. “In the face of the federal government’s inhumane treatment of immigrant families, New York will not deploy National Guard to the border,” Cuomo announced Monday. “We will not be complicit in this ongoing human tragedy.”

Well, again, nobody asked. But the Guard diversion is a useful tool, deflecting attention from the fundamental dishonesty of the governor’s full statement. That is, the federal government is treating no one inhumanely; the “families” involved are not so much immigrants as they are economic migrants with no inherent right of entry into the United States—and to the extent that there is an “ongoing human tragedy” on the border, responsibility for it resides with those attempting to enter the county illegally.

It is true that Americans love children. The Clinton administration discovered that in 2000, when it sent heavily armed immigration agents storming into a Florida home to remove a screaming seven-year-old boy. The reaction was furious. That same instinct underlies the current controversy, as well as the politicized reaction to it. Just as most people don’t want bad things to happen to children, even fewer want to be perceived as agents of harm, and not just to children. That’s why disingenuous rhetoric such as Cuomo’s can be such an effective tool.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270492/proposed-legislation-daca-aliens-spurs-stampede-michael-cutler
President Trump made border security and the effective enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws the centerpiece of his successful campaign for the presidency.

This has enraged globalist politicians from both political parties who see in America’s borders impediments to their wealth and the wealth of their campaign contributors.

Prior administrations have refused to take immigration law enforcement seriously and our nation has, as a direct consequence, paid one hell of a price.

The 9/11 Commission made it clear, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were made possible by multiple failures of the immigration system that enabled the terrorists to enter the United States and embed themselves.

The preface of the official report, 9/11 and Terrorist Travel begins with the following paragraph:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

That report went on to note:

Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/et_tu_laura.html

Laura Bush is publicly supporting the Democrats’ BS propaganda effort, hand-wringing over the poor “immigrants” (make that illegal immigrant law-breakers) who are arrested and therefore separated from the children. She wrote a column for the Trump-hating Washington Bezos Post that is getting major attention from all the other Trump-haters:

On Sunday, a day we as a nation set aside to honor fathers and the bonds of family, I was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents. In the six weeks between April 19 and May 31, the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers or foster care. More than 100 of these children are younger than 4 years old. The reason for these separations is a zero-tolerance policy for their parents, who are accused of illegally crossing our borders.

The reason for the separations is that their parents have been arrested for violating our law. Just like American citizens who are arrested. As Bre Payton of The Federalist reminds us:

Putting a child in temporary housing or foster care when their [sic] parent engages in illegal activity is standard practice – even for U.S. citizens. A bit of information that’s been largely ignored is that there are an unknown number of American children who’ve been seperated [sic] from their parents and placed in foster care when their parents are incarcerated.