RUTHFULLY YOURS

The U.S. Border Patrol is reportedly fighting back against California’s openly seditious statewide sanctuary laws by refusing to hand over illegal aliens with felony warrants to police in California.

This makes perfect sense, according to the law of unintended consequences. It is an appropriate, tactically innovative way to counter California’s ridiculous laws that seek to nullify federal immigration legislation.

Rodney Scott, the chief patrol agent in the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector, previously said that the Golden State’s sanctuary laws were making normal cooperation between his agency and local law enforcement difficult.

This is because California now largely forbids cooperation with federal immigration authorities, a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. State law there now imposes draconian restrictions on communication between local police and federal immigration enforcement, including information regarding when criminal aliens are scheduled to be released from local jails.

According to the Daily Caller, Scott recently entered into evidence a declaration in support of the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit aimed at California’s reckless sanctuary state laws.

In the declaration Scott recounted several instances in which San Diego sector border agents determined that they could not hand over custody of a criminal alien to local law enforcement because local officials could not be trusted to return the alien to federal custody after processing by the courts.

According to the news report:

“In each instance, the Border Patrol Agent determined it was not appropriate, consistent with his or her federal responsibilities to ensure the enforcement of immigration law, to release a criminal alien to the state and local law enforcement,” Scott said in a court declaration. “This was because, although the alien was subject to removal, if released to California law enforcement, the alien would ultimately be released into the public.”

As Trump Derangement Syndrome drives the increasingly bold radical wing of the Democratic Party to flex its muscles, a proposal to abolish the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agency is well on its way to becoming part of the Democratic Party’s platform.

This leftist temper tantrum isn’t just a rejection of ICE – it is a wholesale repudiation of borders and immigration laws, that is, of the idea of the United States as a sovereign nation. It is beyond crazy.

Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union summed things up nicely on Fox News Channel yesterday:

I think it would be great if the Democrats would run on this. I think it’s honest. I have to give them credit for being honest. They believe in sanctuary cities. They don’t want to fix the immigration system. They want to give amnesty to absolutely everybody who’s here illegally.

The Democrats’ latest big, boneheaded idea is pure suicidal ideation: there are no administrative niceties in the current proposal. Left-wingers want to drive a stake through the heart of ICE, without concern for the future. They don’t care how many Kate Steinles get murdered in the future by illegal aliens. There is almost no discussion about replacing ICE, or for that matter, of enforcing immigration law at all.

While there may be plenty of Americans, even Republicans, generally sympathetic to the plight of illegal aliens, the wholesale destruction of the nation’s immigration enforcement apparatus won’t play in Peoria. Americans don’t want to erase the nation’s borders and turn the country into a sprawling, anarchic neutral zone between Canada and Mexico where anything goes.

Yet the idea of flattening ICE has gone viral on the Left in recent days after an MSNBC host asked Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a former attorney general of the newly designated sanctuary state of California, for her thoughts on ICE.

“ICE has a purpose, ICE has a role, ICE should exist,” said the future presidential candidate. “But let’s not abuse the power.”

The phrase “sanctuary cities” is warm and welcoming. Sanctuaries are safe, cozy, and sometimes therapeutic. This term is also a deceptive euphemism for something thoroughly unacceptable.

Conservatives redefined the debate on the “estate tax” when 60 Plus Association founder Jim Martin rechristened it the “Death Tax.” Likewise, those who seek law, order, and sanity in immigration should refer to “sanctuary cities” as “fugitive cities.”

Anyone who hides a wanted criminal from federal officials could be prosecuted for harboring a fugitive. According to 18 U.S. Code § 1071, it is “an offense to harbor or conceal any person for whose arrest a warrant or process has been issued, so as to prevent the fugitive’s discovery and arrest.” Also, 8 U.S. Code § 1324 prohibits sheltering illegal aliens from authorities. Breaking these laws can cost up to five years behind bars.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) lists Boston, New Orleans, West Palm Beach, and 31 other municipalities as fugitive cities. Some 135 fugitive counties span the nation. California, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont are fugitive states. Washington, D.C. is another fugitive jurisdiction. So far, the mayors, commissioners, and governors behind this rampant anarchy suffer few if any consequences for violating these laws, in letter or at least in spirit.

If only illegal-alien maids and busboys dodged Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other authorities in fugitive locales, this would be bad enough. But lawless politicians, mainly Democrats, shield often-deadly illegal-alien criminals from federal lawmen. These liberals protect foreign lawbreakers, often with dangerous and deadly results for law-abiding American citizens.

The Trump administration launched a long overdue legal assault this week on grotesquely unconstitutional new state laws in California that punish compliance with federal immigration laws and provide legal cover for state and local officials to continue brazenly flouting immigration laws and obstructing federal agents trying to enforce them.

Under the longstanding doctrine in American constitutional law known as “dual sovereignty,” states cannot be compelled to enforce federal immigration laws, but they are obliged not to hinder their enforcement. The so-called sanctuary cities that form the bulk of the sanctuary movement really ought to be called traitor cities because they are in open rebellion against the United States, just like the slave states that seceded from the Union before the Civil War.

The sanctuary movement gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement. Some left-wingers use the dreadful euphemism “civil liberties safe zones” to describe sanctuary jurisdictions. The phrase deliberately blurs the distinction between citizens and non-citizens by implying illegal aliens somehow possess a civil right to be present in the U.S.

“Immigration law “is the province of the federal government” and while there may be “a wide variety of political opinions out there on immigration,” the law is on “the books and its purpose is clear,” U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions told law enforcement officers attending the California Peace Officers Association’s 26th Annual Law Enforcement Legislative Day on Wednesday in the state capital of Sacramento.

Harden your hearts.

According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 68 million people around the world are or at risk of becoming refugees. The migration of a few million people has already turned the European Union inside out and motivated the election of an America-first presidency. What we have seen so far, though, is nothing compared to what is to come.

Fertility is declining in almost all the educated and prosperous parts of the world, notably including East Asia. But it remains extremely high in the least-educated parts of the world with the worst governance and the poorest growth prospects.

At constant fertility, the number of people aged 20 to 30 years will grow from 1.2 billion to almost 4 billion over the present century, and all of the growth will occur in Africa and South Asia (notably in Pakistan, where total fertility is 3.6 children per woman vs. 2.4 in India). Africa will be the main source of new young people.
Prominent Evangelicals Weigh in on the Immigration Debate

At least 5,000 Africans died during 2016 crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. According to Frontex, a half-million attempted the crossing last year, and the United Nations estimates that 2 million have done so since 2014.

Writing in The New Republic, Laura Markham reports that a trickle of “extra-continental refugees” is infiltrating the United States via Brazil, and that this trickle is likely to turn into a flood:

Because of the high risks of crossing and the low odds of being permitted to stay, more and more would-be asylum-seekers are now forgoing Europe, choosing instead to chance the journey through the Americas … Each year, thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia make their way to South America and then move northward, bound for the United States — and their numbers have been increasing steadily. It’s impossible to know how many migrants from outside the Americas begin the journey and do not make it to the United States, or how many make it to the country and slip through undetected. But the number of “irregular migrants” — they’re called extra-continentales in Tapachula — apprehended on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico has tripled since 2010.

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court dealt a setback to President Donald Trump’s immigration policy on Monday, declining to take up an administration appeal that sought a quick end to the Obama-era program protecting young, undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

The high court’s action, which effectively requires Mr. Trump to finish litigating in the lower courts first, means that hundreds of thousands of program recipients may continue to renew their protections while legal challenges continue, a process that could take another year or longer.

The court’s action also relieves pressure on Congress, which has struggled to find a legislative replacement for the program begun by former President Barack Obama.

In September, Mr. Trump announced that the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, would end on March 5. But two lower-court judges have issued injunctions blocking that plan for now and ordered administration officials to continue to process renewals, so Congress doesn’t face an imminent deadline.

The court’s action Monday was a rejection of an unusual request by the Justice Department, which had asked the justices to intervene now, even though appeals courts haven’t yet ruled on the cases.

The high court almost never grants such requests, but the department, citing time sensitivities, had argued the court should settle the issue without delay. That didn’t sway the justices, who turned down the request in a two-sentence order without recorded dissents.

Leftist billionaire George Soros has been pouring big money into a Texas district attorney race as part of his effort to install extremist prosecutors across America who will protect lawless so-called sanctuary cities that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration law.

We already knew that pressure groups funded by Soros are litigating to keep U.S. ports-of-entry wide open to terrorists and other people who hate America. And leftist propaganda shops like the Brennan Center for Justice, which has taken in about $23 million from Soros since 2000, have churned out reports arguing that state judicial systems need to be reshaped to more closely follow the Left’s agenda.

Soros is using his vast fortune in an attempt to radicalize local prosecutors’ offices in part because he wants to block U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from functioning. The self-styled philosopher wants to cripple law enforcement in order to advance the radical abstraction known as social justice that simplistically breaks the world down into race, class, and sex. Radicals claim that American laws and institutions are corrupt and that these systems protect, for example, wealthy, white, native-born, non-disabled males at the expense of everyone else. In this instance, U.S. immigration law is inherently unfair to illegal aliens, or so the reasoning goes.

Soros’s current target is Bexar County, Texas, District Attorney Nico LaHood, Peter Hasson reports in the Daily Caller. LaHood is a Democrat who oppose sanctuary cities and describes himself as “a conservative guy.”

Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, is the fourth most-populous county in Texas. Knocking off LaHood would be a significant step forward for the Soros agenda.

Soros has already blown through around $70,000 supporting LaHood’s primary opponent, Joe Gonzales, by way of Texas Justice & Public Safety, a political action committee or PAC. The sum includes more than $30,000 devoted to mailers attacking LaHood as “bigoted,” “racist,” and “Islamophobic” in both the English and Spanish languages.