Monday, February 5, 2024

JOE BIDEN'S ASSAULT ON FLORIDA - Florida Grand Jury: Biden Putting Alien Children in Harm’s Way

 

THERE IS NO END TO JOE BIDEN'S DESTRUCTIVE PATH

Bipartisan Border Bill: Worse than Skeptics Predicted

U.S./Mexico Border
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, AP Photo/Eric Gay

The Senate’s draft border bill that promised to reduce migration chaos at the border actually invites a greater inflow by welcoming migrants who seek jobs or claim asylum.

“I’ve seen enough,” said a Sunday evening tweet from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), adding:

This bill is even worse than we expected, and won’t come close to ending the border catastrophe the President has created. As the lead Democrat negotiator proclaimed: Under this legislation, “the border never closes.”

The phrase “the border never closes” is a much-replayed quote from the top Democratic negotiator, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT).

In a series of Sunday evening tweets, Murphy gloated that Democrats’ promised curb on illegal migration — including a much-touted border “shutdown” process — are trumped by many pro-migration rules:

A quicker, fairer asylum process. No more 10 yr wait. Claims processed in a non-detained, non-adversarial way in 6 months. A slightly higher asylum screening standard at the border. Also, no more waiting for work permits. Most asylum seekers can work immediately.

A brand new right to legal representation for all immigrants. Remember when Trump denied lawyers to victims of the Muslim ban?

And…the first ever government paid-for lawyers for young unaccompanied minors. A long standing injustice righted.

A requirement the President to funnel asylum claims to the land ports of entry when more than 5,000 people cross a day. The border never closes, but claims must be processed at the ports. This allows for a more a more orderly, humane asylum processing system.

But…important checks on that power. It can only be used for a limited number of days per year. It sunsets in 3 years. Emergency cases that show up in between the ports still need to be accepted. The ports must process a minimum of 1400 claims a day.

“Democrats proudly proclaim new border law ‘never closes’ the border and, of course, the entire $115 billion will be borrowed,” said a tweet from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). “Nothing, absolutely nothing, conservative about this deal.”

“’The border never closes’ -chief Democrat negotiator on the Senate bill,” tweeted Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). “That’s all you need to know.”

Murphy continued:

You can’t reduce arrivals at the border without allowing for more legal immigration. So, more visas! 50,000 extra employment and family reunification visas each year for the next 5 years. And a brand new visa category to allow non-citizens to visit family in the U.S.

A clarification of how humanitarian parole is used at the land borders, but NO changes to the President’s ability to bring in vetted, sponsored migrants through the program known as CNHV (Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela parole).

A new pathway to citizenship for Afghan parolees (the Afghan Adjustment Act) and the children of H1B holders (these kids are often currently subject to deportation when they become 21).

The bill helps fix the border and reform our broken asylum system. But it doesn’t deviate from our nation’s core values. We are a nation that rescues people from terror and violence. We are a nation that is stronger because of our tradition of immigration. Period. Stop.

Critics of the bill spotlighted sections of text that validated many of their prior warnings:

Even Republican senators who support more migration are alarmed by legislation. “I, for one, think it is a mistake to send this bill to the House without a majority of the Republican conference,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), told the Washington Post.

The descriptions by Murphy showed the hollowness of prior claims that the bill would allow the president to shut down the border during the current crisis. That was created by President Joe Biden’s decision to cancel the border security rules adopted by President Donald Trump.

The flood of new migrants would push the nation’s economy downwards because it encourages employers to reduce wages and cut investment in the labor-saving technology that raises Americans’ productivity, output, and overall wealth.

The bill would also change the nation’s society by spiking the cost of housing, so making it difficult for ordinary Americans to create the next generation of families and children.

Current law allows the federal government to import 1 million legal immigrants, even as Americans give birth to roughly 3.6 million new Americans each year, and graduate roughly 4 million youths from high schools each year.

Yet the bill supercharges the asylum system, giving many more people from around the world both the incentives and means to migrate into the United States. The huge inflow would hammer Americans’ living standards — and threaten the political careers of Republican politicians.

The bill’s asylum section creates a new asylum process that will be run by pro-migration staffers who will be eager to use their unreviewed power to award work permits, asylum, and fast-track citizenship to grateful migrants who offer “clear and convincing” stories of oppression and suffering.

The much-touted border “shutdown” trigger does not shut down the asylum process at the border.

The asylum process would get millions of Biden’s 2024 and 2025 migrants into voting booths by 2030.

The bill also does nothing to stop Biden’s “parole” migration, which imported roughly 1 million migrants into U.S. workplaces and communities during 2023. Before Biden, the parole process delivered only about 15,000 assorted migrants per year.

The bill also blocks lawsuit pushbacks by placing all judicial oversight over the migration system in the progressive-dominated D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The shift would largely prevent state and local officials — or American citizens — from trying to protect Republican goals and civic priorities from Murphy’s migration expansion law.

The bill also raises the incentive and means for foreign graduates to take more white-collar jobs throughout the United States. Fortune 500 companies already keep a population of roughly 1.5 million foreign graduates in U.S. jobs, partly because the federal government already allows the companies to pay those foreign workers with dangled offers of green cards and citizenship.

That expansion of white-collar migration comes as many white-collar jobs are being eliminated or degraded by artificial intelligence.

 

Florida Grand Jury: Biden Putting Alien Children in Harm’s Way

Parsing Immigration Policy, Episode 137

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By Jessica M. Vaughan and Richard Mantei on January 11, 2024

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Summary

January is Human Trafficking Prevention Month, and with this episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, we seek to bring more awareness to the issue as it pertains to immigration. Our guest host this week is Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, and she is joined by Richard Mantei, special counsel and statewide prosecutor with the Florida Office of the Attorney General. Mantei recently served as legal advisor to a Florida grand jury that was convened to investigate the effects in Florida of current border policies, including the smuggling of unaccompanied alien children (UACs). In December, he spoke at the second annual Conference to Combat Human Trafficking, co-sponsored by the Center.

The grand jury investigation revealed that the Biden administration’s immigration policies – including catch-and-release at the border, the dismantling of interior enforcement, and especially, policies on handling UACs – have contributed significantly to incidents of smuggling, trafficking, and other crimes occurring in Florida. These crimes are linked to transnational criminal enterprises driven by enormous profits.

In addition, certain entities in Florida are contributing to this illicit activity, wittingly or unwittingly, including NGOs that are receiving large sums in government funds. Some of these NGOs have actively promoted and facilitated migration, enticing migrants to sign up with smugglers to come to the United States illegally -- yet they fail to adequately communicate the inherent dangers associated with undertaking this journey.

As Mantei explains, the grand jury additionally determined that the policies of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is responsible for placement of UACs, have actually enabled the exploitation and abuse of these children. ORR’s priority is to release the children as quickly as possible to a sponsor in this country. Mantei remarked, “It’s about as difficult to adopt a pet as it is to get an unaccompanied child from ORR.”

The sponsors are sometimes the parents, but increasingly are unrelated, and rarely subjected to routine background checks, home studies, or post-release monitoring. Mantei relates several cases of abuse and exploitation of UACs that occurred in Florida and other states, including incidents of forced labor, sexual abuse, and other disturbing events.

Vaughan emphasizes that states can take steps to counteract bad immigration policies. The grand jury reports offer valuable recommendations to other states that want to address the problems and costs created by the Biden policies. Notably, one of these suggestions is to mandate that sponsors of unrelated UACs be required to undergo family court proceedings to maintain custody of a child, ensuring that UACs receive the same protections as American kids would.


 

Commentary
DHS Secretary Gives Lip Service to Fighting Human Trafficking
By Jessica Vaughan
DC Journal, January 31, 2024
Excerpt: This is a laudable effort, but it is tragically undermined by the reality that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas happens to be one of the most significant enablers of human trafficking. The mass migration crisis triggered by reckless open border policies that Mayorkas put in place has caused incalculable harm not only to American communities and the integrity of our immigration system but also, tragically, to many of the migrants themselves, who are lured into the clutches of traffickers.

Biden’s Shameful Border Legacy in Tennessee Is Human Trafficking
By Jessica Vaughan
The Tennessee Star, January 31, 2024
Excerpt: From the very beginning of his presidency, President Biden began dismantling a long list of policies that had succeeded in controlling the years-long wave of illegal migrants exploiting our dysfunctional asylum system and court rulings mandating the release of minors and those arriving with minors into the country. Not surprisingly, this has led to an explosion in the number of illegal border crossers, attributed by migrants to Biden’s “invitacion.”

Biden doesn’t need a bill to fix border, he just refuses to enforce the law
By Andrew Arthur
New York Post, January 30, 2024
Excerpt: Biden claims he needs additional powers to secure the border, but prior administrations showed that existing authorities are more than adequate. The issue’s not power but will, and Congress can’t legislate that.
Featured Posts
Biden Admin. Sends Millions to Religious Nonprofits Facilitating Mass Illegal Migration
By Todd Bensman
Excerpt: Suspicions that the administration of President Joe Biden is directly footing the bill for at least part of facilitating the most voluminous mass migration crisis in U.S. history, now in its fourth straight year, can now be confirmed.

Immigration, Border Are Key Issues in Swing-State Polling
By Andrew R. Arthur
Excerpt: The poll results help explain why President Biden is calling an unseen (and possibly non-existent) Senate border compromise bill “the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country” -- he’s desperate to distract key voters away from the failures of his feckless border policies.


Biden Border Policies Are Working Fine — For the Cartels

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By Jessica M. Vaughan on February 5, 2024

In July 2023, in an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, when pressed about the results of the newly expanded CBP One program in stemming the flow of illegal migration, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said, “Our approach to managing the borders securely and humanely — even within our fundamentally broken immigration system — is working.”

But working for whom?

The open border most certainly is working out well for certain special interests: employers who want to hire the migrants at lower wages, government contractors cashing in on contracts to shelter and transport the migrants, and governments in the sending countries that depend on the millions of dollars in remittances. Most of all, it is working for the drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations who now control the border.

Illegal immigration now far exceeds legal immigration. As a result, the cartels are reaping unprecedented profits from human and drug smuggling and trafficking, to the tune of $30 million a day, or nearly $1 billion a month, according to a House Budget Committee report. They use the funds to acquire more sophisticated weapons and technology to solidify control over their territories in Mexico and beyond. More worrisome for the long term, however, is the way the cartels are using this cash cow to underwrite an expansion of their operations within the United States. This expansion presents profound implications for public safety in communities across the nation that will persist for years into the future, and will require a much more a concerted effort and inventive new strategies.

According to Border Patrol testimony to Congress, the smuggling fee is currently about $8,000 for passage to America. Many migrants make only a down payment up front of about $500, and agree to work off the rest when they get to their destination. If they have children, they are encouraged to accept a reduced fee for loaning one of their kids to another single migrant (in order to pose as a family for near-certain release) and retrieve them on the other side (hopefully). The remainder is typically paid through debt bondage accomplished by wage garnishment, fees for housing and food, and other forms of exploitation and outright threats and extortion. Long-haul migrants from other continents pay more, sometimes up to $50,000, and those who don’t want to get caught also pay more. Our government helps subsidize this enterprise by paying a network of NGOs huge sums of taxpayer funds to arrange transportation, shelter, and other services on the final leg of the migrant’s journey to their destination.

The migrant-moving business is lucrative enough, but it also helps further another critical illicit cartel activity — drug smuggling. The cartels routinely send large groups of migrants over the border in certain areas to bog down the Border Patrol while they move drug loads through the other unguarded areas, along with high-value clients, such as criminals and watch-listed individuals, who don’t want to be caught by the Border Patrol.

In the last three years, the amount of illicit drugs flowing into American communities has exploded, with deadly, tragic consequences, and the cartels are behind nearly all of it, according to a recent exhaustive report by the House Homeland Security Committee. It’s happening not just in southwest border states, not just in cities, but also in rural areas, including Montana, Kansas, Kentucky, and many others.

With the profits from cross-border trafficking so enormous, the stakes for control of the plazas, or spheres of control along the border, have risen as well, increasing instances of deadly violence. For example, one night in mid-December, a shoot-out broke out among rival cartels for control of several areas along the Arizona border with large gaps in the border fencing giving easy access. Responding to the melee, Border Patrol agents arrested one man on a private ranch on the U.S. side who was carrying an AK-47, two AK magazines, a handgun, and ammunition. Mexican authorities found 10 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on the other side of the line.

Obviously, the cartels are not humanitarian actors seeking only to help asylum seekers; nor are they young, impetuous gang-bangers. They behave like terrorists, and they have a plan, which they hire well-trained and well-armed violent thugs to carry out. Given the porous border, moving their operatives into this country to manage the business has not been difficult lately.

For years, many American observers, including some in law enforcement, have been in denial of the threat that the drug cartels pose to America, insisting that the narco-bosses were too afraid of U.S. law enforcement agencies to try to replicate their violent tactics here. That theory has always been naïve, and is now thoroughly discredited. Among the acts of violence attributed to the cartels was an incident in January 2023 described by authorities as an “early morning massacre”, where six people, including a recently bailed-out Surenos gang member, but also a baby and his teenage mother, were executed in a quiet residential street in Goshen, Calif., Reportedly, the surviving family members afterwards refused all offers of help from local authorities

In 2022, federal authorities alone made more than 300 arrests for Mexican cartel-related crimes, according to one analysis.

The cartels are sophisticated business people, and nimble at adapting to emerging opportunities. The have evolved horizontally to branch out into new ventures, for example human trafficking as well as drug trafficking, in fentanyl trafficking as well as heroin and marijuana trafficking, and stealing oil as well as automobiles. Noticing the trend in some jurisdictions away from imposing stiff consequences for shoplifting and burglary, some cartels have branched out into the $70 billion organized retail theft industry, creating squads of operatives to steal goods on a major scale, even roping in recent illegal migrants as a way to pay off their smuggling debt, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators.

The Sinaloa Cartel and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) in particular have lost no time capitalizing on the state legalization of marijuana, opening tens of thousands of illegal weed, or “blood cannabis”, grows in northern California, Oregon, and other states, where they undercut lawful growers and use trafficked labor, managed violently. Local sheriffs lament that they are woefully out-manned and out-gunned, and can’t keep up with the body count. "We're a very short amount of time away from having heads in the square like they do down in Mexico," said Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall in December 2021.

Expanded cartel operations in the United States is good for their local criminal partners, too, who help distribute and sell the illicit products. The cartels have relationships with different partners in different locales, working everyone from MS-13, to the Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, and Aryan Brotherhood. In eastern Massachusetts, for example, they work mostly with distributors from the Dominican Republic, who dominate the local drug trade. In December, a 42-year old Dominican woman living in Massachusetts was sentenced to 11 years in prison for receiving huge amounts of fentanyl and laundered cash for the Sinaloa Cartel. She hid some of the product in her young daughter’s bedroom closet. The Dominican drug traffickers in particular are known to use the stolen identities of U.S. citizens from Puerto Rico to conceal their illegal presence from authorities and fraudulently obtain driver’s licenses and welfare benefits.

Not all of the cartels operating here are from Latin America. According to a federal law enforcement memo leaked to the Daily Caller, Chinese transnational crime groups have established about 750 illegal marijuana grow operations in rural areas in the states of Maine and Washington, often in collaboration with Mexican cartels.

Chinese foreign nationals purchased and operated the grow houses with financing obtained from a handful of mortgage companies. According to Derek Maltz, a retired DEA agent, the Chinese groups “take the cash from the [Mexican] cartels in America, and they buy these properties and they do these investments with cash from the Mexican cartels in our own country. This is part of their laundering scheme.”

Reporters from the Maine Wire tracked down more than 100 of the unlicensed operations, located in unassuming houses with boarded-up windows and outfitted with commercial grade electrical systems, and a few low-profile workers lurking around, all very conspicuous to the neighbors. One such operation was located across the street from a daycare, where the children and workers, along with the other neighbors, were regularly subjected to the unmistakable fumes polluting the air. Federal authorities believe that the operations generate profits of more than $4.37 billion per year, much of which likely goes back to China.

This business model requires creating a “safe” environment in which to operate. The cartels often create their safe space through violence, extortion, and even corruption of public officials. These civil society threats come on top of the other significant costs to taxpayers, including the cost of expanded services to the migrants and lost job opportunities and depressed wages for legal U.S. workers. In Texas, large swaths of two counties have been literally taken over with what may be the largest settlement of illegal migrants in the country, in Liberty County, a two-hour drive east of Austin, the state capital. The Gulf and Sinaloa cartels originally established enclaves in this area for stash houses for smuggled drugs and aliens. Now, with the help of unscrupulous real estate developers, political patrons, and the open-border policies, this area is a massive and nearly unpolice-able haven for the cartels, their employees, and their trafficked clients that has driven out most long-time American residents and spawned crime and violence on a third-world scale.

Biden’s disastrous border and immigration policies that have enriched the cartels and brought their havoc into the United States will require lawmakers to make bold and substantial changes to our laws and give new authorities and tools to the law enforcement agencies that will have to confront and dismantle them.

Obviously, the best defense against the foreign cartel threat is a secure border, and lawmakers must start there, although it will take more than tweaks to the asylum system to shut down the cash cow of migrant smuggling. Tough new enforcement measures such as those in H.R. 2, the House border security bill are essential to this effort.

In addition, Congress should create a new type of “designation” for the cartels similar to the approach to international terrorist groups, which would enable authorities to target the financial assets of the cartels, to utilize other government resources, including the military and intelligence agencies, and to bar or deport foreign citizen operatives from our country.

Federal and state governments should act against the infrastructure that supports cartel-sponsored illegal immigration and trafficking, especially the money transmission networks. A grand jury investigation in Florida recently outlined how the vast flow of remittances of money from the United States to foreign countries includes within it a flow of money to the cartels. A significant share of this outflow of funds is not a transfer of funds from migrants to their families in their home countries, or even payments directly from the migrants to their smugglers, but actually huge sums of money that are being laundered by the cartels and disguised as remittances.

To help disrupt this flow of money, state governments should consider enacting “know your customer” laws that require money transmitters to collect secure identification from anyone sending funds abroad, in addition to levying a tax or fee on the funds that are sent.

Since so many of the cartel operatives are not U.S. citizens, immigration laws can effectively be used against them, as long as immigration officers and special agents are not limited to pursuing convicted criminal alien felons, as has been the case under Biden. ICE should be empowered to launch a new program focusing exclusively on using immigration and customs authorities to attack the cartels, their businesses, and their revenue, much as it did to address the MS-13 problem nearly 20 years ago. In addition, worksite enforcement must be expanded to uncover the widespread debt bondage, forced labor, and exploitation that was enabled by the recent laissez-faire policies.

Finally, critical to the success of the cartel eradication program will be a concerted effort to rebuild the necessary partnerships between federal, state, and local agencies that have been eroded by the sanctuary city movement and the recent neglect of routine public safety-oriented immigration enforcement. Restoring the popular 287(g) delegation of authority programs — specifically, the investigative versions — in locations that have cartel activity and launching task forces to unite jurisdictions to counter this threat will help.

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