Las Vegas anti-homeless ordinance enforcement begins
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) has begun enforcing anti-homeless ordinance measures passed by the Las Vegas city council this past November and January. “Bill 2019–36” was passed by a 5–2 margin over the objections of the hundreds of workers, students and activists who packed the November 6, 2019, council meeting. The ordinance further criminalizes poverty, making it illegal to sleep or camp on sidewalks or in public spaces, “if there is space available at the Courtyard Homeless Resource Center.”
Homeless man detained by police [Credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Timothy Young]
The law is a further assault on the most vulnerable in society, with punitive measures ranging from monetary fines, up to $1,000, and/or the possibility of a six-month jail sentence.
A similar ordinance passed by the city council of Boise, Idaho, was struck down by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in December of last year. The court ruled that it is “cruel and unusual punishment,” to issue fines to people for sleeping outdoors while not providing adequate space for those that need it.
Advocates of the law, including the LVMPD, have stressed that the ordinance is a critical “new tool” for the police to use against the homeless. Unable to organize society to meet human need, the dictates of capital demand that property values be maintained by removing the “eyesore” of the homeless who have nowhere else to sleep but on sidewalks, in doorways or on park benches.
“Sin City” is bereft of social services and affordable housing, yet the police were able to grow their budget by $30,892,504 or 5.6 percent over the 2018/19 fiscal year thanks to an increase in the regressive sales taxes passed by a compliant city council. The total budget for the department now exceeds $631 million for 2020. The new funds will allow the city to hire 82 more police officers in order to maintain a ratio of two police officers for every 1,000 residents.
The new anti-homeless ordinance first took effect without the penalty provisions on November 10, however less than two weeks before the enforcement mechanisms were to take effect on February 1, the city council passed an additional “street-cleaning ordinance” which further expands the reach of the police, allowing them to fine or imprison anyone sitting or sleeping on sidewalks or streets “during designated cleaning times.” The month-old street-cleaning ordinance does not have the same stipulation as Bill 2019–36 regarding availability at the Courtyard shelter, meaning that even if there is no space available a person can be cited or jailed.
The city-funded Courtyard Homeless Resource Center, the only 24-hour, 7-day-a-week shelter in the city, has current capacity of 450 and is a chain-linked ghetto within the sardonically named “Corridor of Hope.” Next to the courtyard is the CARE Complex, a non-profit center that provides secure lockers and various services to those that stay in the Courtyard such as helping them to acquire an identification card.
CARE Complex President Michael Swecker recently spoke to NBC 3 regarding the current state of the Courtyard. “It’s a scary place and it’s not any place you would bring a child,” Swecker noted. He advised that “single women should not stay there overnight.” He concluded the interview with the hope that with additional funding the Courtyard would “become a more humane place.” The city of Las Vegas is currently in the midst of an $20 million “upgrade” to the facilities with the stated goal of increasing the capacity to 800 by 2021. As of right now, in total, the city only offers 1,300 shelter beds for those without a home to sleep on.
Those who stay in the facility are provided a roughly six-inch thick rubber mattress on which to lay. The sleeping area is a concrete slab where the blue mats are arranged in compact columns and rows with roughly one foot separating them, similar to an ICE detention facility or concentration camp. While there is a roof overhead the Courtyard is not an enclosed space.
No bedding is provided and those with pets must keep them locked in separate pens. “Residents” are provided one black plastic tote in which to store all of their possessions and are provided one bottle of water a day to drink. Twelve portable toilets are located within the Courtyard for the roughly 300 to 500 people that filter in and out of the facility daily.
Mayor Carolyn Goodman has faced increasing criticism from residents over the Dickensian legislation implemented under her direction and at urging of the local business community which is dominated by large casino operators. In her state of the city address Goodman defended the law, stating, “I will not allow the city of Las Vegas to become a skid-row harbor of rampant crime and potential pandemic disease.” In interviews following her address Goodman expressed her desire that the new ordinances will become “a model that can be replicated elsewhere in Nevada and hopefully elsewhere in the country.”
There have been several protests and demonstrations against the law since its passage and up until the beginning of its enforcement. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, roughly 50 people staged a march from City Hall to the Fremont Street tourist district in a demonstration dubbed “Occupy Fremont.”
Protesters carried signs reading “Homes Not Handcuffs, No to the Camping Ban.” Once they arrived at the tourist district they were quickly surrounded by horse-mounted police. A few protesters pitched small camping tents while the rest formed a circle around the tents. After ordering the group to disperse, the police moved swiftly on the few dozen left and within twenty minutes twelve protesters were arrested with one reported injury.
After the demonstration the former Democrat and now Independent Mayor Goodman took to the airwaves to denounce the protesters as outside agitators and “paid protesters,” who were “reading a script from a cell phone.” This was quickly rebutted by homeless advocate Katie Krikorian of the nonprofit group “Food not Bombs,” who was one of the twelve arrested. Rebutting the mayor’s baseless slander in a telephone interview, Krikorian stated, “I was arrested protesting against homelessness on the Occupy Fremont Street event. I am a resident. I’m a homeowner, and if you’d like to see me, I will be out there tonight.”
The mayor has tried to frame the new laws as her “getting something done” while demonstrating “compassion,” arguing that laws are there to “help those who want to help themselves” while providing an avenue “to get services to those that need it.” The truth is that neither of the new ordinances provide new funding for sanitation, housing or transportation to the nearly 14,000 chronically homeless in southwest Nevada or the over 6,500 without permanent housing within the city limits.
While the law has been in effect for two weeks, the police and City Hall have maintained that no one has been fined or arrested yet under the new guidelines, and according to various press reports, they have been given directives not to enforce the punitive measures for another week.
However, a cellphone video shot on February 11 by Krikorian casts serious doubts on the police and City Hall claims that they haven’t already begun to levy fines and detain “violators.” In the early morning video, a woman can be seen bent over the hood of a Las Vegas police sport utility vehicle with her hands cuffed behind her back. As Krikorian approached the vehicle, filming the entire time and inquiring as to the reason for the woman’s detention, the police quickly released her.
The briefly-detained woman produced to Krikorian a pink citation slip which stated it was for violating the street-cleaning ordinance, with an accompanying $1,000 fine.
According to Krikorian, there were no street-cleaning vehicles present and no signage posted indicating when street-cleaning crews were supposed to be present, as mandated by the new law. Police disputed this account, without saying what the person was cited for nor how much the citation was. The police went on to explain that the reason the woman was handcuffed was because she “refused to sign the citation.”
In anticipation of the Nevada caucuses on February 22, this past Saturday the Clark County Democratic Party hosted a “Kick off to the Caucus” gala which featured speeches from the candidates at the Tropicana Casino and Resort in Las Vegas. The event boasted a VIP reception, along with dinner and speeches from the candidates including billionaire Tom Steyer, former Vice President Joe Biden, Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, and former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg. Tickets for the event started at $125 and reached up to $2,500.
By Jason Hopkins
Business and Politics Review
Tom
Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants
California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs
NYT Boosts Investors' Campaign for More
Immigrant Workers, Consumers
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as
impoverished Americans wait
Los Angeles County Pays Over a Billion in
Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of
the Universe” want more legal immigration to the United States to further
diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.
Bloomberg
Pledges to Investigate ICE and End Trump Policies in Newly Unveiled Immigration
Plan
By Jason Hopkins
Business and Politics Review
THERE IS A REASON WHY ALL
BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS AND WANT WIDER OPEN BORDERS AMNESTY AND NO E-VERIY!
The state of California is home to more
illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five
illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4
million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows
illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek
welfare and food stamp benefits.
Tom
Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants
Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor
and Democrat 2020 candidate, wants Americans to provide cheap housing to
illegal immigrants.
“A Steyer Administration will …
ensure that all undocumented communities have access to affordable and safe
housing,” Steyer said in his immigration proposal.
Steyer’s offer of housing is
combined with promises to provide illegals with free healthcare, plus workplace
training and cultural celebrations:
A Steyer administration … [will]
provide a safe platform for immigrants to share their culture and celebrate
their heritage, foster opportunities for public service that support new
Americans, and coordinate with Federal agencies and the private sector in order
to build workforce training and fellowship opportunities for immigrants with
professional qualifications from their home nation to help them leverage their
specialized skills in the American marketplace.
Steyer made his promise of cheap
housing to illegals even though housing costs for many Americans forces them to
rent or buy cheaper housing far from work and friends, and are being forced to
give up hopes for larger families.
But those housing costs are high
partly because the federal government welcomes one million new legal immigrants
into the nation’s cities, neighborhoods, and schools. That is a huge inflow —
four million young Americans turn 18 each year.
But Steyer is a billionaire
investor, so illegal migrants will not be moving into his very expensive and
well policed neighborhood. The New Yorker magazine described his
house in 2013:
President [barack Obama] flew to San
Francisco on April 3rd for a series of fund-raisers. He stopped in first at a
cocktail reception hosted by Tom Steyer, a fifty-six-year-old billionaire,
former hedge-fund manager, and major donor to the Democratic Party. Steyer
lives in the city’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, in a house overlooking the Golden
Gate Bridge.
Any inflow of migrants will be a
boon to Steyer’s fellow investors who gain from the extra workers, consumers,
and renters. For example, one gauge of real estate investments shows a 50 percent
gain since 2015, even as Americans’
wages and salaries rose by only about 15 percent.
Meanwhile, Steyer’s home state is
experiencing record housing prices and record homelessness as today’s illegals
enjoy the state government’s offer of sanctuary, jobs, and welfare. The federal
housing agency reported January 7 the
state has about 108,000 homeless:
This year’s report shows that there
was a small increase in the one-night estimates of people experiencing
homelessness across the nation between 2018 and 2019 (three percent), which
reflects a 16 percent increase in California, and offsets a marked decrease
across many other states.
…
In terms of absolute numbers,
California has more than half of all unsheltered homeless people in the country
(53 percent or 108,432), with nearly nine times as many unsheltered homeless as
the state with the next highest number, Florida (six percent or 12,476),
despite California’s population being only twice that of Florida.
In September Breitbart News reported the Census
Bureau showed how the state’s housing costs are pushing Americans into poverty:
The September 10 study shows 18.2
percent of California’s population is poor, far above the 13 percent poverty
rate in Arkansas, 16 percent in Mississippi, and the 14.6 percent in West
Virginia.
…
By 2017, for example, the government’s
pro-migration policies had added 11 million people to the state’s native
population of 29 million people. The huge inflow means that one-in-four
residents are immigrants.
Numerous studies have shown many
millions of foreigners want to migrate into Americans’ society. For example,
another five million Central American residents want to migrate into the
United States, according to a Gallup survey published
right after the 2018 midterm elections.
Gallup also noted “three percent of
the world’s adults — or nearly 160 million people — say they would like to move
to the U.S.”
California's poverty rate is worse than
Alabama & Mississippi, says Census Bureau. The major cause of this huge
change is immigration policy which spikes housing costs & shrinks wages --
and delivers huge gains for investors in real-estate & corp. shares. http://bit.ly/2mgvBlW
California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs
Steyer’s promise to welcome illegals
is echoed by the other investor billionaire in the Democrats’ primary, Mike
Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. In January, he promised to make
illegals comfortable with Americans’ money, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Well, it’s a no brainer. You give
[a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people. We’re not going to deport them
anyways, it’s outrageous. If you look in New York City, we make sure that
people felt comfortable, regardless of their immigration status, to come and
get city services. I was always determined that they would not be afraid to
come. Somebody could need like life-threatening things and does not get medical
care. This is not a game. You’ve got to make sure that they’re okay.
Housing costs in Bloomberg’s New
York are very high because it has huge
populations of illegal and legal
immigrants. The result is that it has a homeless population of roughly 92,000,
and also the nation’s highest
rate of homelessness, at 46
homeless for every 10,000 people.
High housing costs also make it
difficult for Americans to move into towns and cities that have better-paying
jobs, according to a 2017 study about the
rising wealth gap in the United States. Americans “are frozen where
they live,” said Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, at a
January 9 meeting.
But nearly all of the Democrats in
the 2020 election have called for more migrants — without showing any concern
for the impact on Americans’ housing costs.
“We could afford to take in a
heartbeat another two million people,” Joe Biden told Democrats at an August
event in Des Moines, Iowa. “The idea that a country of 330 million people
is cannot absorb people who are in desperate need … is absolutely
bizarre … I would also move to increase the total number of
immigrants able to come to the United States.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s
immigration plan, for example, is titled “A
Fair and Welcoming Immigration System.” It says:
We need expanded legal immigration
that will grow our economy, reunite families, and meet our labor market demands
… s president, I will immediately issue guidance to end criminal
prosecutions for simple administrative immigration violations … As
President, I’ll issue guidance ensuring that detention is only used where it is
actually necessary because an individual poses a flight or safety risk
… I’ll welcome 125,000 refugees in my first year, and ramping up to at
least 175,000 refugees per year by the end of my first term.
The impact of federal immigration
policy on Americans’ housing costs is taboo among establishment reporters. But
those costs were touted by a group of investors lobbying Congress to raise
housing prices by importing more immigrants. A booklet by the Economic
Innovation Group says:
The relationship between population
growth and housing demand is clear. More people means more demand for housing,
and fewer people means less demand … As a result, a shrinking population will
lead to falling prices and a deteriorating, vacancy-plagued housing stock that
may take generations to clear
…
The potential for skilled immigrants
to boost local housing markets is clear. Notably, economist Albert Saiz (2007)
found a 1% increase in population from immigration causes housing rents and
house prices in U.S. cities to rise commensurately, by 1%
On January 9, Donohue noted New
Yorkers blocked the plan by Amazon and the city government to build a new
corporate headquarters in the city. The residents protested the development plan
partly because it would have driven up rents and housing costs, said Donohue.
“It is a very potent issue,” he observed.
A lobbying group for investors admits mass
migration helps investors in major coastal cities but 'fails' Americans in
heartland & rural towns. So it urges less immigration? No - it urges more
migration to spike family housing prices outside major cities! http://bit.ly/2VCZYUt
NYT Boosts Investors' Campaign for More
Immigrant Workers, Consumers
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as
impoverished Americans wait
Want
some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so many homeless
encampments hovering around?
Try the
reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free public housing by the
U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated, unskilled, and largely
unemployable. Those
are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier.
Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold
awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the
tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these emerging shantytowns are in
blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal immigrants - Orange County, San
Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is there a connection? At a minimum,
it's worth looking at.
The Trump
administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development is finally trying
to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals prepare to enter the U.S. this
year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do it yesterday.
The plan would scrap Clinton-era
regulations that allowed illegal
immigrants to sign up for
assistance
without having to disclose their
status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only
would the leaseholder using public housing have to be an eligible U.S. person,
but the government would verify all applicants through the Systematic Alien
Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a federal system that’s used to
weed illegal immigrants out of other welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would
have to go through a new verification, though it would be over a period of time
and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our
citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of
past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal
aliens were able to live in free public housing desperately needed by so many
of our own citizens. As illegal aliens attempt to swarm our borders, we’re
sending the message that you can’t live off of American welfare on the
taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times
notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and some illegal immigrant
families are getting full rides based on just one member being born in the
U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped across the U.S.
in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next day, now, along
with her entire family, gets that free ride on government housing. Plus lots of cheesy news coverage about how
heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to
find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants
would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The
problem of course is that Americans who paid into these programs, and the
subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact being shut out.
The
fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the virtues of illegal
immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice" for them, but the
hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are stealing from
others as they take this housing benefit under legal technicalities. That's not
a good thing under anyone's theological law. But hypocrisy is comfortable
ground for the entire open borders lobby as they shamelessly
celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the impoverished of the U.S.
out cold.
The Trump
administration is trying to have this outrage fixed by summer. But don't
imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the media sob stories,
the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Los Angeles County Pays Over a Billion in
Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid nearly $1.3
billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That figure
amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy
population, according to Fox
News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens
than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens
lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal
immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant
parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp
benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from
the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare
and food stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in
2015, $2.9 billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of
2017, more than 60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in
benefits in 2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million
in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who
studies poverty and illegal
immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of
the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector
said. It can cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay
for things like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed
a resolution making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new
legal protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing
policies.
In October 2017, former California governor Jerry Brown
signed SB
54 into law. This bill made California, in
Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice Department filed a
lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A federal
judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan. 1, 2018.
According
to Center for Immigration Studies, “The new law does many things:
It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer notices, it bars
any law enforcement officer from participating in the popular 287(g) program,
and it prevents state and local police from inquiring about individuals’
immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its
implementation and joined the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the
state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to
illegal immigrants did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His
successor, Gavin Newsom, is just as focused as Brown in funding programs
for illegal residents at the expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually
to the One California program, which provides free legal assistance to all
aliens, including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public
universities easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on
United States Taxpayers 2017
report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal immigrants
living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116 billion burden on
the national economy and taxpayers each year, after deducting the $19 billion
in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS IN THE U.S.
AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY, THEY ARE LEGALLY
ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY LEAVING MEXICO
DESERTED.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than
22 million non-citizens now live in the United States.
Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More
Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’
Bob Gathany / AL.com via AP
3:19
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of
the Universe” want more legal immigration to the United States to further
diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said
recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to
compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations
to deplete the earnings of Americans.
Brooks said:
I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we
ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working
in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where
wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]
And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are
artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re
artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I
respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into
America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least
amounts, would be better to take care of
their own families and less likely to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]
Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is
centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the
U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and
becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a
permanent dependent class of Democrat voters.
“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of
Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.
That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to
do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal
aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they
bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to
vote and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis
added]
“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare …
plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial
divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the
big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much
foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and
importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants
annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly
naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the
country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next
two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15
million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in
the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring
an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Breitbart
News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125
from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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