Border Patrol officials in the Yuma Sector announced the building of an additional temporary migrant shelter in response to “sustained large volumes of family units in the Arizona sector. Sector officials opened the new shelter for tours late last week.
Border Patrol officials began construction of a new family shelter in the Yuma Sector” on June 15 in response to the strain on resources and facilities” due to the continuing unprecedented numbers of migrant families illegally crossing the border in southwestern Arizona, according to a statement obtained by Breitbart News. The shelter became available for tours on June 28 and is expected to begin housing migrants soon.
The shelter is reported to be similar in design to other temporary facilities located in Donna and El Paso, Texas. It is expected to hold up to 500 migrant families and unaccompanied minors.
“The temporary, soft-sided facility will accommodate up to 500 individuals in U.S. Border Patrol custody while they await transfer to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services-Office of Refugee Resettlement,” officials said in a written statement. “The temporary structures are weatherproof and climate-controlled for eating, sleeping, and personal hygiene.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) awarded a contract valued at just under $15 million to build the facilities. This includes showers, toilets, and syncs, officials reported. It also includes the perimeter monitoring equipment, office space, lockers, security, power, HVAC services, food, snacks, water, and custodial services, CBP officials stated.
Construction on the project began just over two weeks ago and is part of the Border Patrol’s effort to secure the border and meet the humanitarian needs of the current border crisis. During the month of May, Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents apprehended 42,225 family units. This is up from 8,775 in May 2017 — a 381 percent increase, according to the May Southwest Border Migration Report.
Additionally, Yuma Sector agents apprehended nearly 6,000 unaccompanied minors and nearly 6,500 single adults.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for the Breitbart Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Face book .
Ann
Coulter: Surprise! That 'cheap' immigrant labor costs us a lot
BY ANN COULTER, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
— 06/23/19 11:00 AM EDT 1,443
© Getty Images
We could pay
for every idiotic boondoggle proposed by the 300 Democratic presidential
candidates if the current president would simply keep his central campaign
promise to build a border wall and deport illegal aliens. (Back off —
“illegal alien” is the term used in federal law.)
A 2017 study by
the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found that illegal aliens
cost the American taxpayer — on net — $116 billion a year .
That’s pretty
high, but the actual number is more likely triple that.
Straight out of
the chute, FAIR assumes that there are only 12.5 million illegal
immigrants in the country, approximately the same number we’ve been told
for the last 15 years as we impotently watched hundreds of thousands more
stream across our border, year after year after year.
The 12 million
figure is based on the self-reports of illegal aliens to U.S. census
questionnaires. (Hello! I’m
from the federal government. Did you break the law to enter our
country? Now tell the truth! We have no way of knowing the answer,
and if you say yes, you could be subjecting yourself to immediate deportation.)
More serious
studies put the number considerably higher. At the low end, a Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Yale study last year put the number of illegals
at 22 million . Yet Bear Stearns investment bank had it at 20 million back in 2005 , and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters Donald
L. Barlett and James B. Steele reported in 2004 that 3 million illegals were crossing each year — so simple math would put it at well over 60 million
today.
So, right
there, the FAIR study underestimates the tab for illegal immigration by at
least a factor of three, meaning the real cost is about $350 billion a
year. That’s triple what Sen. Elizabeth Warren ’s (D-Mass.)
free college tuition plan will cost in a decade .
I don’t mean to
bash FAIR. It’s sweet how immigration restrictionists always bend over
backward to be impartial. But their circumspection doesn’t mean the rest of us
have to ignore reality.
Journalists’
usual method of determining the cost of “unauthorized entries” — as they
say — is to phone some fanatically pro-illegal immigration group, such as
Cato or CASA, and get a quote sneering at anyone else’s estimate of the costs.
In a deeply
investigated 2017 Washington Post article , for example, the Post cited the “belief” that illegal aliens
“drain government resources.” Without looking at any facts or figures, the
reporter disputed that “belief” with a quote from Cathryn Ann Paul of CASA:
"It's a myth that people who are undocumented don't pay taxes."
So there you
have it! Cathryn Ann Paul says it’s a “myth.” Now let’s move on to
the vibrant diversity being gifted to us by illegal aliens.
Earlier this
year, The New York Times mocked President Trump ’s tweet saying
illegal immigration costs "250 Billion Dollars a year" by quoting
big-business shill Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute: "There's no basis
to any of those numbers about the fiscal cost." Am I doing OK, Mr. Koch?
The Times
further explained that Trump’s figure “did not take into account the economic
benefits of undocumented immigrants” — for example, the surprisingly affordable
maids of some reporters.
Randy Capps of
the Migration Policy Institute told the Times that studies of the cost of
illegal immigration count only the costs or only the benefits. “They tend to
talk past each other, unfortunately,” he said.
Well, the FAIR
study counted both. For every dollar illegal immigrants pay in taxes —
fees, Social Security withholding taxes, fuel surcharges, sales and property
taxes — they collect $7 in government benefits: schooling, English as a second
language classes, hospital costs, school lunch programs, Medicaid births,
police resources and so on.
Legal immigrant
households also were big winners, receiving $4,344 more in government services
than they paid in taxes. (Our government does a fantastic job deciding
who can immigrate here.)
Only with
nonimmigrant households does the government almost break even, doling out a
mere $310 more in benefits than those households pay in taxes. (Surprise! The deficit is on track to
hit $1 trillion next year.)
Like FAIR
estimates, Rector’s study accepted the U.S. Census Bureau’s allegation that
we’ve had the same number of illegal aliens in this country since the beginning
of the Bush administration. Also like the FAIR study, Rector’s examination
counted only the obvious costs imposed on us by illegal immigrants —
things such as health care, education, fire and police protection, parks,
roads, and bridges.
But there are
all sorts of costs that no one ever counts. What about Americans’ lost
wages to illegal immigrants who are willing to work for $7 an hour? Even
if they don’t apply for unemployment insurance, how do we count the cost of
suicide, opioid addiction or other anti-social behavior?
Why not count
the lost wages themselves? We want to know the cost-benefit ratio to those already here , not to
the new total that includes the illegal immigrants. If it's a net negative to
those already here — well, that's the point.
And what was
the tab of illegal immigration to the family of Kate Steinle, the young woman
shot dead by an illegal immigrant in San Francisco in 2015? There were
obvious, tragic costs, of course — but there also are hidden costs, such as the
lost productivity of the people close to Kate for years to come, the additional
police presence around the San Francisco pier where she was killed and the
reduction in tourist dollars.
We hear about
the great largesse bestowed upon us by illegal immigrants all day
long. The only hidden benefits are the warm feelings of self-righteousness
that the CASA spokesman gets when bleating about illegals and the happiness
that cheap servants bring to the top 10 percent.
In Maine,
overdose deaths from opioids, mostly Mexican heroin , have skyrocketed in the last decade, up from an
already catastrophic 100 to 200 deaths per year to more than double that — 418
in 2018. What is the cost of the state legislature spending weeks debating
a bill to provide heroin addicts with Narcan? The cost of more crime and more
police?
This isn’t to
gratuitously mention the fact that completely unvetted, self-chosen illegal
immigrants can, in fact, be rapists, drug dealers and cop-killers. It is
to say that no analysis of illegal immigration’s cost can ever capture the full
price.
The
2020 Democratic Candidates and Their Redefinition of American Citizenship
·
New citizens stand
during a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) naturalization
ceremony at the New York Public Library, July 3, 2018. (Shannon
Stapleton/Reuters)
Making the click-through worthwhile: How the 2020 Democratic
presidential candidates want to make being an American citizen simply a matter
of location and desire, instead of law; another allegation of hideous behavior
from Donald Trump from the mid 1990s; the promised big roundup of thriller
novels; and a heartfelt “thank you” to you, the readers.
The 2020 Democrats Want to
Redefine Citizenship
Sometimes our political debates are furious and deeply divided
because of demagogues, clickbait media, and hype. But sometimes our political
debates are furious because they reflect a conflict of fundamentally opposed
worldviews, where no compromise is feasible.
Many of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates want to
fundamentally redefine who is American — that is, if you show up from another
country and want to be here, you ought to enjoy the full rights of citizenship
and all of the benefits provided to American citizens.
Bernie Sanders put it clearly : “We’re going to make public
colleges and universities tuition-free and open that to the undocumented.” In
other words, if are a citizen of another country and you want a free college
education, all you have to do is show up in the United States and get accepted
at any one of the 1,626 public colleges in the United States.
Needless to say, if enacted, this would bring a flood of people
from all around the world, eager to enjoy the benefits of a college degree,
paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. (In case you’re wondering, there are a handful of other countries in Europe that offer very low
or nominal tuition rates to American students, but at most of those schools,
competition for the limited slots is high.)
It is not only Sanders. Beto O’Rourke says that the United
States should contemplate eliminating the
citizenship exam because
it is a structural barrier to immigrants. Indeed, it is meant to be a structural barrier to
those who lack English proficiency in speaking, reading, and writing, and
civics knowledge. There was once a broad consensus that English proficiency and
civics knowledge were required to be a good American citizen. The 2020
Democrats no longer believe this to be true.
Ten candidates, including Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julian
Castro, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren believe that crossing the border
or entering the country without permission should no longer be a crime. On May
7, 2018, the Department of Justice announced they would prosecute all adult
aliens apprehended crossing the border illegally, with no exception for asylum
seekers or those with minor children. (If that policy was repealed, border
crossers would still go through a civil legal process that could lead to their
deportation.)
Booker, Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, Kirsten Gillibrand,
Marianne Williamson, and Andrew Yang believe the federal government should NOT require the use of
E-Verify to check the
legal status of all hires by private employers. Another nine candidates said
they only support that idea as part of a “compromise” on immigration reform.
Sanders contends that adding the question “Are you a U.S. citizen?”
to the 2020 census would constitute “absolutely bigoted language.” Amy
Klobuchar contends that if the question is included, she would, as president,
require a “recount” and O’Rourke threatens that if it is included, he will
re-do the entire census a second time without the question. Even John
Hickenlooper, allegedly one of the centrists in the swarm of candidates,
contends that asking the question on the census for is “ corrupt and
illegal.”
We all have our notions of what constitutes an injustice. To
many Democrats, the longstanding practice of enforcement of immigration law
— policies in place throughout
the Obama administration —
is an inherent injustice. In their minds, being an American citizen is simply a
matter of wanting to be here.
Yet Another Ugly Accusation
against Donald Trump
No doubt, Trump’s history with women is sordid and scandalous
and full of crass, crude, and objectifying behavior. On the other hand, we just
went through a Supreme Court nomination fight that illustrated the limited
options for a man who is accused of sexual assault with no evidence. We also
know how conditional the “believe all women” rallying cry is.
In Carroll’s account, sometime in “the fall of 1995 or the
spring of 1996” she ran into Trump in the early evening at Bergdorf Goodman, a
luxury department store based on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan in New York
City. After some small talk, she agreed to try on lingerie in front of Trump
for fun. She said there were no other customers or sales attendants in the
Bergdorf Goodman lingerie department, and no other potential witnesses. She writes
that she has checked and that the department store did not keep security tapes
from that time. She describes herself as laughing through much of the
experience. “I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie
department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow
ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through
the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself
outside on Fifth Avenue.” Carroll says did not report it to the police but told
it to two friends. The two friends, contacted by New York magazine and not identified,
confirmed Carroll described an experience like this.
Carroll is not seeking a police investigation or criminal
charges. She insists this is not just a ploy to sell books; if it were, the
book would be all about the president instead of the variety of creeps she’s
encountered in her life. She appears to believe that the country should know
about her experience and act accordingly.
“You don’t feel like a
victim?” Cooper asked.
“I was not thrown on the ground and ravished which the word rape
carries so many sexual connotations. This was not sexual. It hurt. It just — it
just — you know,” Carroll responded.
“But I think most people think of rape as — it is a violent
assault. It is not — ,” Cooper began.
“I think most people think of rape as being sexy,” Carroll said.
“Let’s take a short break,” Cooper said.
“Think of the fantasies,” Carroll interjected.
“We will take a quick break if you can stick around. We’ll talk
more on the other side,” Cooper continued.
“You’re fascinating to talk to,” Carroll said.
Do most
people think of rape as being sexy?
In her account , Carroll wrote, “the struggle might
simply have read as ‘sexy.’”
The Big Thriller Roundup
Last week on vacation, I finished Mark Greaney’s Agent in Place ,
the 2018 addition to his wildly popular series about Court Gentry, the
CIA-trained “Gray Man” who can blend in just about anywhere and who has the
skills and instincts to survive just about any situation. I had heard good
things about the Gray
Man Series , but
until recently I was a bit wary: the strong, silent, brooding loner assassin
protagonist can be a little tough to warm up to and enjoy. But what Agent in Place does particularly well — besides
terrific research about the horrific situation in Syria as its civil war winds
down, the Syrian exile community in France, and the glamorous halls of the high
life in Paris – is set up a situation where the hero goes against his better
judgment and agrees to pursue a mission that is one step short of suicidal.
Greaney puts Gentry into a circumstance where any rational person would say,
“Nope, sorry, I can’t help you, I’d like to, but doing this will almost
certainly get me killed.” It’s the most desperate situation imaginable, the
risks are just a Dagwood sandwich of various dangers and menaces and precarious
gambles, his few allies are unreliable, and it requires sneaking into probably
the single most dangerous location on earth. But the life of an innocent child
hangs in the balance . . . and Gentry would have to look at himself in
the mirror if he choose to not try to save the child.
Back in May , I reviewed Matthew Betley’s Overwatch , which established his
recovering-alcoholic Marine officer Logan West and an ever-changing realm of
national-security threats that he and his out-of-retirement comrades must
chase. That’s the first in his series; the fourth book in the series, Rules of War , hits stores and ships in
mid-July. With a ripped-from-the headlines relevancy, much of Rules of War is set in a
rapidly-deteriorating Venezuela. Betley told me, “I wanted to set it in a
crumbling third-world country, and there’s no better example of that today than
Venezuela.” Last week on Dana Perino’s program on Fox
News , he talked a bit about the book, and
a class action lawsuit against the Department of Veterans Affairs and his
recent experiences with the VA, attempting to get coverage for lung problems
stemming from the burn pits in Iraq.
Also last week, I finished John A. Daly’s Blood Trade . Set shortly after 9/11, Sean Coleman
is another protagonist who’s overcoming his battles with the bottle, looking
for a second chance and redemption for past mistakes. Blood Trade has a lot of atmosphere, high in the
Colorado mountains, with a mood of foreboding hanging over much of the action.
(Those who know my favorite television series will know I’m inclined to like
stories of rural small towns with secrets behind every door.) Daly takes what
looks like a mundane missing-persons stories and gradually reveals a chillingly
plausible plot with, a deeply relatable motive for the story’s villains, and a
vivid illustration of just how far some people will go to safe a life. This
book is accurately titled. Daly’s next is Safeguard , coming in October, featuring Coleman
guarding a defunct nuclear silo . . . and apparently attracting the attention
of a local cult.
Then there’s arguably the most anticipated thriller of the
summer, Brad Thor’s Backlash featuring
Scot Harvath, who’s ended up working for the U.S. Secret Service, Navy SEALs,
and as a CIA contractor over the course of 18 novels. As mentioned yesterday,
not only does it live up to the hype, it’s really striking for how different a
story this is from the previous books in this series. The last few Harvath
novels have featured him and usually a small team investigating or uncovering
some sinister plot by jihadists, or China, or the Russians. Backlash blows up that familiar rhythm
and is reminiscent of that Liam Nesson movie The Grey , and the classic The Fugitive , and some of Jack London’s classic
survival-in-the-most-hostile-wilds stories. Almost the entire story takes place
in a remote corner of the world that I suspect has never been featured in a
thriller before, and the story focuses as much on Harvath’s challenge to
survive psychologically intact as physically. Thor is to be saluted for willing
to experiment and move away from familiar territory, both literally and
figuratively.
And these are just the thriller novels I’ve gotten my hands on
recently. Daniel Silva’s The New Girl comes
out July 16, with Israeli spymaster Gabriel Allon crossing paths with a
ruthless Saudi prince who is likely to be compared to the real-life Mohammed
bin Salman.
ADDENDA: You guys really are the best
readers in the world. Yesterday I mentioned that reviews on Amazon help a book
find an audience, and this morning I find 27 reviews on the page , each one kind and offering some
sort of insightful observation. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Someone said
to me recently that I shouldn’t have said the book isn’t that political,
because it covers some big topics adjacent to our modern politics — “questions
of heroism, of identity, and of faith” as one reviewer put it, and “the fragile
line between chaos and sanity in a society” as another described it. This is
what happens when you start the creation of your villains with, “what frightens
me?”
What
a Border Crisis Looks Like
·
Migrants from Central America cross the Rio
Bravo river to enter illegally into the United States at El Paso, Texas, June
11, 2019. (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters) This is a similar border crisis
to the one Obama faced in his second term, with similar challenges.
N ews flash: There’s a crisis at the
border.
This was discovered again over the past few days when
immigration attorneys talked to reporters about appalling conditions at a
Border Patrol facility detaining migrant minors in Clint, Texas.
According to the lawyers, many of the kids had to sleep on the
concrete floor, failed to get proper adult supervision, and didn’t routinely
take showers or brush their teeth. The details were hard to read.
Assuming the account was accurate, one wonders how we could
treat anyone this way, let alone children? But a lawyer who talked to the New Yorker mentioned a telling fact: The
facility previously had a capacity of 104 and had never held children before.
Yet it held roughly 350 children, apparently accommodated by placement of a new
warehouse at the site.
All this is consistent with vast numbers of migrants, many of
them families and children, flooding the border and overtaxing facilities never
meant for these kinds of numbers or this demographic of migrant.
Indeed, the immigration lawyer mentioned to the New Yorker that the personnel at the
Border Patrol facility were constantly receiving children and constantly
transferring them over to a Health and Human Services site, and stipulated that
the guards believed the children don’t belong there and should go someplace
more appropriate. (Under the glare of publicity, they did.)
The broader problem is that HHS, which is supposed to get
custody of migrant children from Border Patrol in short order, is itself overburdened
and backed up.
Since it’s 2019, what should be properly attributed to dire
circumstances and limited capacity is instead taken as evidence of President
Donald Trump’s malice.
If what’s happening at the border is a product of Trump policy,
it would have to involve an intricate and well-executed plan. The White House
would have to convince the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security,
Kevin McAleenan — who served as deputy commissioner of Customs and Border
Protection under President Barack Obama — to send word down through the
bureaucracy to treat children as callously as possible and not to leak word of
this explosive guidance.
In the real world, a migrant influx will test even an
administration more favorably inclined toward immigration. The reason that the
Left can’t keep their viral images straight — often misattributing to Trump
photos of kids in steel-cage holding pens during the Obama years — is that this
is a similar crisis to the one Obama faced in his second term, with similar
challenges.
A viral video of a Justice Department lawyer arguing before a
panel of judges last week that kids don’t need toothbrushes and soap to meet
the standard for “safe and sanitary” detention under the so-called Flores
settlement has caused outrage. But few have stopped to note that the underlying
case had to do with a district court finding that the Obama administration in
2015 was in material breach of the Flores standard (or that the DOJ lawyer was
offering a technical legal argument — not a defense of mistreating kids).
All that said, once these migrants are under our care, it is our
responsibility to make sure they are treated as humanely as possible. The
border needs more resources. The Trump administration has been asking Congress
to pass a funding package, and it should do so forthwith. To address the root
cause of the crisis, it should also change the bizarre asylum rules that have
forced us to release family units from Central America into the country,
creating an incentive for more to come.
As long as that’s the case, we aren’t going to be able to
control the border or process people coming across it in an orderly fashion.
What we’re seeing is what a border crisis looks like. If we don’t like it — and
we shouldn’t — it’s time for Congress to act to begin to bring it to an end.
The
Border as an ‘Attractive Nuisance’
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection border-patrol agent talks
to people on the Mexican side of the border wall in San Diego, Calif., November
28, 2018. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)
If you have a swimming
pool, you can be held liable if a trespassing child falls in and drowns unless
you’ve taken reasonable steps to keep children from getting to the pool, like a
fence. An unfenced pool (or trampoline or a discarded refrigerator that locks
from the outside, among other potentially dangerous things) is thus called
an “ attractive nuisance . ”
The loopholes in our
asylum laws make our nation’s borders an attractive nuisance, as well. Of
course, no matter what we do, there will always be people who will try to
illegally infiltrate our borders, and it’s inevitable that some of them will
die in the process — whether by drowning, exposure, dehydration, or other
causes. But when we fail to take the most elementary steps to dissuade people
from trying to sneak in — heck, when we reward people
for sneaking in with kids in tow and making bogus asylum claims — we share the
responsibility for those deaths.
The heart-wrenching
photograph of a Salvadoran father and daughter who were found drowned Monday on
the banks of the Rio Grande forces us to face this issue. Julian Castro was
right when he said at last night’s Democratic debate, “ watching
that image of Oscar and his daughter, Valeria, is heartbreaking. It should also
piss us all off. ”
But once pissed off, how
to respond? How do we make our border not be an attractive nuisance?
Castro’s answer — and the
approach of virtually all Democratic candidates and elected officials — is open
borders. And I no longer mean that Democrats are, in effect , calling for open borders. At last night’s
debate there was no longer any pretense. Castro took the lead, followed by the
rest, in calling for repeal of the criminal law against border infiltration,
ending the practice of making asylum claimants take a number at ports of entry and
wait their turn, the complete abolition of immigrant detention, and amnesty for
every foreigner who manages to get past the border so long as they don’t commit
a “ serious ” crime
(whatever that means today). Though she wasn’t on the stage Wednesday, the
party’s leader, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, made clear that she’s on board,
asking at an event Monday “ What’s the point ? ” of enforcing
immigration laws inside the United States. What all this represents is the
abolition of immigration limits.
This would certainly end
the attractive-nuisance problem. It would also lead to a rush for the border
that would make the 2015 border crisis in Europe (sparked by the photo of
another drowned child ) pale by comparison. Gallup reported earlier
this year that 42 million people in Latin America want to move
here, and the share that would actually follow through would be a lot higher
than now if we were to formally convert the Border Patrol into a welcome wagon,
as the Democrats propose. And that’s not counting the Africans , Middle Easterners , and other “ extra-continental ” migrants
we’re seeing.
The other approach to
ending the attractive-nuisance problem is to fence off the swimming pool, as it
were. In some places that might actually mean a literal fence, but that won’t
address the reasons for the current surge. At the very least, that would
require plugging the three
most serious legal loopholes incentivizing people to
cross the border. It also would entail actually deporting people who’ve exhausted their due
process, been turned down for asylum, and received a deportation order from a
judge; until people in Central America see their fellows glumly stepping off
the plane, their asylum ploys having failed, they’ll rightly figure the trip is
worth it. More broadly, mandating the use of E-Verify, at least for new hires,
is imperative, to “ fence off ” the labor market.
There are two ways the
United States can limit its responsibility for deaths on the border: Unlimited
immigration, or limits that are actually enforced. The Democrats have
made their choice. They should be made to answer for it.
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