“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.”
Washington Times
“Judicial Watch’s records request is designed to expose how California state legislators are wasting tax dollars to take care of another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the guise of resisting the rule of law on immigration and other matters,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “His record at the Clinton and Obama Justice Departments demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons.
Biden Border Policies Are Working Fine — For the Cartels
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.
Hell Must Be Empty
By J.B. Shurk
In New York City, the bad guys have long understood an unwritten rule: you don’t hit a cop. In the past, doing so put you at the top of the NYPD’s to-do list and ensured that you would not be free on the streets for long. When 30,000 officers are tasked with securing a metropolis of nine million residents, the impenetrability of the “thin blue line” is a matter of life and death. When video emerged of a group of illegal aliens wrestling two cops to the ground near Times Square and beating them with fists and feet, that thin blue line got thinner. When news broke that the offenders were released without bail and that a left-wing “charity” had likely given them a free ride to California, the blue line all but disappeared.
By looking the other way as criminal invaders attack the people charged with protecting the city, NYC mayor Eric Adams and district attorney Alvin Bragg not only betray their duties to those who risk their lives every day for others’ safety, but also prove their complicity with those who wage war against citizens of the United States. Before he disappeared without a care in the world, one of the foreign nationals apprehended for the attack left Manhattan Criminal Court with two middle fingers extended into the air and a broad smile across his face. It was an “F you” to all Americans from a man who should never have been allowed to illegally enter the United States in the first place. At the same time, it sure felt as if Adams, Bragg, Biden, Mayorkas, and all the other open-borders advocates and politicians were really the ones flipping off desperate American citizens whose decades-long pleas for secure borders have been entirely ignored.
Ever since Obama’s presidency, Democrats have demonized police officers and lionized criminals. They lied about “hands up, don’t shoot”; maligned cops as Klan members with badges; and instigated race riots throughout the country. They excused criminal behavior, cut bail requirements, reduced felonies to misdemeanors, and celebrated unethical prosecutors who have used their powers to lock up police officers for spurious charges while treating violent crime as some kind of race-based civil right.
Barack Obama and Eric Holder (the corrupt attorney general who regularly abused the law to protect friends and target political enemies) set the country down a dangerous path, where criminal gangs are psychologically empowered to target law enforcement officers for assassination and municipal politicians are so desperate to prove their soft-on-crime bona fides that they release violent criminals from jail in order to make room for unjustly indicted cops. The end result has been that police officers are retiring in droves and refraining from any proactive policing that might put them in the crosshairs of one of George Soros’s cop-hating district attorneys. Just as the “woke” U.S. military is struggling to recruit warriors willing to take commands from deranged men in skirts who would rather fight “climate change” and “white supremacy,” municipal police forces are struggling to refill their ranks with good cops willing to protect and serve their communities, when two-bit, backstabbing politicians endanger their lives and threaten to send them to prison.
Democrats’ attacks on police officers and coddling of criminals are part and parcel of their larger war against the American people. In this day and age — when the Marxist destroyers have risen to the heights of institutional and financial power — they barely disguise their hatred for the United States or their contempt for regular Americans. Every insane policy initiative — such as the choice to provide illegal aliens with thousands of dollars of free stuff each month and a get-out-of-jail-free card for sucker-punching cops — can be understood if seen through the lens of a simple question: does the policy damage American society? If so, then Democrat politicians, Uniparty co-conspirators in the swamp, and the Marxist globalists who seek money and power from America’s demise are all on board. It’s why the Department of Homeland (in)Security specializes in aiding and abetting terrorism-linked cartels, human-traffickers, and drug-smugglers in their criminal enterprises across our borders. It’s why corrupt D.C. politicians send working Americans’ tax dollars to un-American international institutions such as the United Nations that use those dollars to fund the manufactured migration of tens of millions of foreigners from all over the world into the United States. In effect, the federal government steals from the incomes of struggling Americans so that it can pay for violent criminals (and foreign soldiers and murderous terrorists) to break our laws, victimize American communities, and gang-stomp police officers. The sick SOBs actually make Americans pay for the foreign invasion from which they suffer.
Forget “two-tiered justice.” This is just plain old evil disguised as politics. Only in a nation under attack from demonic forces would J6 political hostages be imprisoned for exercising their First Amendment rights at the U.S. Capitol when a congressional staffer can make gay porn videos in a Senate hearing room without any risk of ever being charged for a crime. Only in a nation suffering from the widespread proliferation of evil would the Department of (in)Justice seek decades-long prison sentences for peacefully protesting Americans who dare to speak out against abortion, while federal agents routinely look the other way as “unknown assailants” vandalize and firebomb the buildings of Christian churches, pro-life organizations, and politically conservative groups. Only in a nation whose government chooses to embrace evil and reject godliness could a Christian veteran be charged for the “hate crime” of destroying a demonic shrine celebrating Satan. When adherence to moral conscience is criminalized and the protection of flagrant sin becomes government’s chief concern, there can be no doubt that evil has risen from the shadows and seized control of the State. When Christians are punished for their convictions and Satan has more friends in political office, it is clear that America’s institutions are rotting from the inside.
Once that decay begins, it is difficult to save the host without first severing the cancer from the body. It is why government-engineered injustices now occur with almost daily regularity. Consider a few of the startling news stories of just the last few weeks. A group of international scientists is calling for a global moratorium on COVID “vaccines” because a peer-reviewed study concludes, “For every life saved, there were nearly 14 times more deaths caused by the modified mRNA injections.” Meanwhile, there is now documentary evidence that the CDC intentionally covered up risks from the experimental, yet largely mandated, treatments — particularly the risk of myocarditis. Switching to the growing evidence of 2020 election fraud, unearthed documents confirm that the FBI and Michigan authorities were notified of “alarming” witness accounts attesting to “ballot fraud in Detroit.” How was that situation resolved? The FBI buried its head in the sand, and Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel charged sixteen Republican alternate electors with felony fraud crimes. Not wanting Michigan’s rampant election-rigging and political persecution to get all the glory, PBS (the Marxist news organization that Americans are forced to support with taxes) confirmed that Congress’s partisan January 6 Committee was never anything more than shameless political theater meant to tilt the 2022 midterms toward the Democrat party. Finally, in international news, even though the Biden administration has been forced to temper its support for a U.N. agency implicated in the October 7 attack on Israel, nobody is surprised that the U.N.’s terrorists have still been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Lies beget evil, and evil begets more lies. One thing is certain: Hell must be empty, because all the devils are ruling right here.
The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history’s great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.
ERIC HOLDER HAS long insisted that he tried really hard when he was attorney general to make criminal cases against big banks in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. His excuse, which he made again just last month, was that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges.
Many critics have long suspected that was bullshit, and that Holder, for a combination of political, self-serving, and craven reasons, held his department back.
A new, thoroughly-documented report from the House Financial Services Committee supports that theory. It recounts how career prosecutors in 2012 wanted to criminally charge the global bank HSBC for facilitating money laundering for Mexican drug lords and terrorist groups. But Holder said no.
"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!
The “zero tolerance” program was dismantled by Attorney General Erc Holder once it had successfully cut the transit of migrants by roughly 95 percent. Initially, officials made 140,000 arrests per year in the mid-2000s, but the northward flow dropped so much that officials only had to make 6,000 arrests in 2013, according to a 2014 letter by two pro-migration Senators, Sen. Jeff Flake and John McCain.
“The cost of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their media allies admit. Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would legalize at least 3.3 million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”
Additionally, the Justice Department under Holder, and now Loretta Lynch, has one of the worst records before the U.S. Supreme Court, losing significantly more cases than either of the Bush or Clinton Departments of Justice. “In most administrations, the department wins about 70 percent of the cases before the Supreme Court; Mr. Holder’s department has a losing record and has lost at least nine cases 9-0–even with Obama appointees Elena Kagen and Sonia Sotomayor on the court,” wrote Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, in a review of “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”
Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a records request with the California Legislature Joint Rules Committee seeking to examine legislative records regarding the state’s employment of former Obama U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. The record request includes:
With Biden, one set of laws for them, another set for us
By Jack Hellner
Twenty-one students at three universities were charged with participation in a massive drug ring.
Total proceeds were $1.5 million over a few years. No, they shouldn't have done it. But the penalties for them are draconian: They are in huge lifetime trouble with the law. Their lives will be destroyed, and several will probably go to prison.
Twenty-one people have been charged with dealing drugs on and around college campuses after federal officials uncovered a massive drug ring involving students at three North Carolina universities, authorities announced Thursday.
Martin said that over several years the suspects allegedly moved more than a thousand of pounds of marijuana and hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and other drugs through their supply chain. The drug proceeds exceeded $1.5 million, according to the DEA.
Contrast the students’ treatment with terrorists being let off scot-free by the Obama administration Justice department after Obama dictatorially instructed bureaucrats to drop the years-long investigation into a billion-dollar-a -year drug ring, all to appease Iran.
You see, terrorists are special when Obama/Biden and John Kerry want to appease dictators who pledge death to America as they work on their legacy.
Where were the whistleblowers at the Justice department in 2008, calling out this pure abuse of power by Obama? Where were the congressional hearings and articles of impeachment?
From Politico in 2017:
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.
The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.
The media and other Democrats claim they care about all deaths from drugs, so why don’t they care about all the deaths from terrorism and drug overdoses because of Obama’s actions?
The Justice department, the media, and the politicians of both parties go after pharmaceutical companies for their contribution to the drug crisis, so why didn’t they go after Obama -- and China, the terrorists and Iran, for their major contribution to the problem?
This is what is going on now in San Francisco
According to the Associated Press, 621 people have died in San Francisco of drug overdoses thus far this year, a staggering number that equates to nearly two deaths per day.
On the other hand, just 173 San Fransisco residents have died of COVID-19.
It is an absolute joke to watch Biden and the media claim that the new administration will not interfere at the Justice department when they know how the Obama/Biden administration completely politicized the Justice department throughout their eight years.
When they say that no one is above the law and there will be equal treatment under the law, they are plainly lying.
They not only let terrorists off scot free, IRS bureaucrats who targeted Obama opponents, obstructed justice, destroyed computers and lied to Congress were also above the law.
Hillary Clinton, her aides, and officials throughout government, including Obama, could violate the nation's security laws, could destroy computers, hide documents, and repeatedly lie and they were above the law.
The Justice department could shake down corporations, establish a slush fund, and give kickbacks to political supporters such as ACORN or whatever they call themselves now, and few cared.
Eric Holder, James Clapper, James Comey, John Brennan, Andrew McCabe and others could repeatedly lie to Congress and/or the FBI and they were all above the law.
Bureaucrats could use a fake dossier from a foreign source, paid for by the DNC and Hillary campaign, and lie to the FISA court as they targeted Trump and his supporters, and they, too, were above the law.
Bureaucrats within the Obama/Biden Administration illegally spied on thousands of Americans throughout their eight years in office and they were all above the law. Remember this?
Newly declassified memos detail extent of improper Obama-era NSA spying
The Obama/Biden Justice department refused to enforce immigration laws. Politicians and bureaucrats in sanctuary cities and states were above the law.
The Clinton and Biden families were allowed to use their powerful government positions to solicit massive kickbacks for themselves and their families from foreign sources, and they were and are above the law.
Democrats not only didn’t care about the kickbacks, they impeached Trump for wanting an investigation into the Biden corruption.
While members of the Obama/Biden crime syndicate could violate as many laws as they liked, they were also targeting innocent people like Gen. Michael Flynn and energy expert Carter Page for destruction.
It is no wonder there is so much corruption and criminal activity among politicians and bureaucrats thrives throughout the United States when the press is coopted, asleep, or just don’t care. They frequently bury the stories and actively campaign for the corrupt criminals. It is sad that they support putting corrupt criminals in the White House. They support anyone who seeks to make the government run by leftists more powerful.
Meanwhile, they will seek to destroy anyone who wants to give the power, purse, and freedom back to the people as fast as possible. They don’t care about how many fake stories, such as Russian collusion, they have to peddle in their efforts to defeat political opponents. Evidence and the truth are not important. Anonymous sources are treated as evidence. Only victory for leftists matters and that truly makes the media an existential threat to our survival as a great country.
Image credit: Pixabay public domain
“Judicial Watch’s records request is designed to expose how California state legislators are wasting tax dollars to take care of another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the guise of resisting the rule of law on immigration and other matters,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “His record at the Clinton and Obama Justice Departments demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons.”
MAYORKAS = ONE MORE LYING PIG LAWYER LIKE HIS BOSS JOJO!
THE GAMER LAWYERS:
Actually, it's only stricter in some areas, and only contingent on having personnel willing to follow the law as written her than use their activist 'discretion' to wave every applicant through. Even Joe Biden can waive the whole thing for whatever he deems 'an emergency.'
“Joe Biden is great on immigration. I guess depends on your perspective. If you’re a human trafficker, or drug dealer, you’d give him an A-plus, but theAmerican people would give him an F. The crisis at our border was not only entirely predictable, it was predicted. I predicted that if you campaign all year long on open borders, amnesty, and health care for illegals, you’re going to get more migrants at the border. That’s what’s happened since the election.” SEN. TOM COTTON
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Senate border deal mostly about preserving Joe Biden's 'new normal'
After weeks of secretive bipartisan negotiations, the Senate border deal proposal is out and, well, it's got a lot of compromise.
According to Politico:
Senators in both parties have finalized a deal on stricter border and immigration policies that is headed toward an uncertain floor vote in the coming days.
The $118 billion agreement, which was released Sunday afternoon and negotiated for months, would tighten the standard for migrants to receive asylum, automatically shut down the southern border to illegal crossings if migrant encounters hit certain daily benchmarks and send billions of dollars to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan as well as the border.
Actually, it's only stricter in some areas, and only contingent on having personnel willing to follow the law as written her than use their activist 'discretion' to wave every applicant through. Even Joe Biden can waive the whole thing for whatever he deems 'an emergency.'
Bill Melugin at Fox News has some preliminary dissections of what the bill contains:
The problem with quotas based on moving averages and all that is that it still violates the law, given that only Congress is authorized by the Constitution to set immigration quotas. The law itself will set new quotas, but only based on Joe Biden's "new normal" in open borders admissions. As Melugin observes, they already are getting about 5,000 illegal crossings a day so all this new 4,999 law would do is normalize that number rather than presumably letting it get bigger, which it will do.
One can only imagine the cartels of Mexico reading this new quota system and either divvying up the numbers and proceeds they make from illegal crossings, or more likely, battling it out amongst each other for their share of the 4,999 quota. And once again, that's if the BIden administration actually follows those quotas. No mention of what happens if he doesn't nor how they count 'gotaways,' particularly since, as far as I can tell, there are no measures to repair and strengthen the border wall.
They call it catch and deport rather than catch and release, but some groups will escape from that designation anyway -- unaccompanied minors, meaning, gang-aged youth, and "families" whether DNA-tested or not. There should be plenty of fraud on both fronts, given the impossibility of verifying whether such illegal crossers really are underaged youth or family units. Nobody, of course, will have papers, and the gang-aged "youth," trafficked kids, and toddlers flung over the wall will get free government-paid asylum lawyers to ensure they can stay here in the states instead of be sent back. Cartels will take note and adjust their plans accordingly. The incentive will remain to ship unaccompanied minors over illegally.
As for tough new standards on asylum applicants, well, as I said earlier, it's in the hands of so-called "asylum officers" to likely be hired from the open-borders activist community rather than immigration judges trained in immigration law. Any tough standards there and penalties for failing to heed the law or overusing 'discretion'? Any penalties for letting predators in who will prey on Americans? None that I can see. Soung auspicious?
Verifying criminal records, which is one disqualifier, seems a little skeevy with migrants rolling in from places like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Venezuela, the latter of which has emptied its jails precisely to inflict its criminals upon the U.S. Anybody expect them to cooperate? They're already threatening to not take their own migrants back because the U.S. has sanctions on the drug dealers in their leadership. Scratch any effectiveness about keeping criminals out from that quarter.
A related problem is that certain nationalities are exempted from the tougher asylum requirements, such as Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans. There is no doubt that a lot of those people should qualify for asylum, but sorting them out seems just about impossible. For example, Jhoan Boada, the charmer who beat the New York police officers and then flashed the double-middle finger to the cameras as he was exiting the New York courthouse on zero bail -- would be in the asylum-worthy category and not be sent back. Sound like a good idea to be importing more of him?
Lastly, the cash shovel-out to NGOs seems problematic, given the role of NGOs in encouraging illegal immigration and fostering it forward with road maps, advice on how to get here, free bus rides in and the like. NGOs are probably the biggest problem in the encouragement of open borders, being an interest group with cash interests in more illegal migrants coming in, so that issue is only going to incentivize more illegal immigration.
There are counter-arguments, such as this one presented by Daniel Di Martino here,
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Some important points he makes is that the new law would strip out lots of garbage already in the tangle of immigration laws, such as illogical restrictions on family visits and extended asylum court cases, and that Democrats will probably never vote 'yes' on another bill except this one, so it may be the only chance.
But on the whole, the border bill has just a little too much compromise, normalizing the situation as we have now and ignoring that we already have a legal process for entering the U.S., which could be made easier instead of accommodating some 'acceptable' level of illegal immigration and expanding Joe Biden's power.
The other thing is that BIden can shut down the border right now if he wants to -- he just doesn't want to. That leaves the border mess on him and the possibiolity of changing America's leadership possibly the best option on the table.
House Speaker Mike Johnson says the bill is a non-starter. Perhaps putting more restrictions on Biden rather than the illegal border crossers will make it more palatable. I'm not going to 100% say that this bill is a nonstarter, but on the whole, it looks like a bad bill, and bad bills are worse than no bills, as President Trump has stated.
Image: Twitter screen shot
Mayorkas Doubles Down, Says ‘We Need’ More Migrants Amid Border Debate, Impeachment Fight
President Joe Biden’s border chief says Americans need more migrants to fill jobs — even as House legislators debate his possible impeachment and the Senate considers a legislative deal he helped broker.
Mayorkas made his demand for a high-migration, low-productivity economy during a softball interview with the New York Times:
Wouldn’t it be more orderly, and wouldn’t it be responsible governance to be able to deliver a lawful pathway to fill what we have, which is a labor need, and cut the exploitative smugglers out and give individuals a path to arrive lawfully, safely, in an orderly way, to perform labor that we need? They can send remittances home. They can return home when their work is done. Isn’t that an element of a workable immigration system?
Interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro passively accepted his family-separating, George W. Bush-like “Any Willing Worker” pitch as she suggested the nation’s migration debate is really about how to ensure more orderly migration:
Q. So what I’m hearing you say is that you’d like to expand legal pathways in order to relieve some of the pressure on the Southern border where people come in illegally?
A. Yes, and to fulfill one of the goals of our immigration system.
Mayorkas did not mention that a primary legislated goal of the immigration system is ensuring that American families are not discarded by employers’ use of cheap and compliant foreign labor.
Since 2021, Mayorkas has allowed more than 6.2 million migrants into Americans’ housing, schools, hospitals, and workplaces. His policy has pressured down Americans’ wages. It also boosted rents and housing prices and inflicted more divisive diversity on Americans’ society. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of fields and spiked the number of “Deaths of Despair.”
Mayorkas heads the Department of Homeland Security that guards the nation’s borders. But he has repeatedly called for a Canadian-style migration system in the United States that would supply companies with all the labor they prefer. Yet Canadians increasingly recognize that their migration strategy has caused great damage to their people and economy.
However, Mayorkas’ pro-Wall Street economic agenda is downplayed by GOP legislators and by most reporters. The establishment’s silence is a tacit admission that the dispute is powering the nationwide populist upsurge that sidelined Jeb Bush and elected President Donald Trump in 2016.
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Emma-Jo Morris / Breitbart NewsThat democratic pushback is powering the House impeachment of Mayorkas, many court battles, and public opposition to the establishment-drafted border-management plan in the Senate that would legalize much illegal migration.
Mayorkas played a central role in drafting the planned legislation with Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
The interviewer also ignored many dramas in Mayorkas’ tenure — including his 2021 decision to stop deporting illegal migrants once they cleared the border, and the overall impact of his favoritism towards migrants — including more anti-Semitic attitudes and racial appeals — and his moral and legal duty to Americans, including roughly 5 million men who have fallen out of the workforce.
Similarly, the New York Times article sidelined the huge death toll among migrants trying to reach Mayorkas’ welcome, and his failure to curb the cross-border flow of drugs that kills roughly 70,000 Americans each year from drugs. It was also silent about Mayorkas’ recent deals with Mexico to steady the inflow of economic migrants.
Instead, the interviewer mischaracterized Americans’ rational and legitimate concerns about Mayorkas’ nation-changing immigration policies, and allowed Mayorkas to smear those concerns as unreasoning “hate”:
Q. Some people argue that the Biden administration’s mishandling of the border has given those who are anti-immigrant [some] ammunition to advocate for draconian cuts to immigration, like mass roundups of undocumented people and shutting the border down.
A. I’ve never understood individuals with anti-immigrant sentiments to need ammunition. Hate is its own ammunition. And regrettably, we have seen that [hate] materialize in many different ways … in this country.
The interviewer did not ask, and Mayorkas did not explain, why he dismissed the public’s majority criticism of his migration policies as mere “hate.”
In general, Mayorkas gets kid glove treatment when he speaks to the national press.
For example, the Associated Press also interviewed Mayorkas and let him dodge the awkward issues of his pro-migration skew, record on drugs and migrant deaths, wages and housing, law, and polls. But the Associated Press article did include this bouquet:
Supporters say he is driven by commitment to public service and that impeachment is completely at odds with what they know of the law-and-order-minded former prosecutor.
Cecilia Munoz, who worked closely with Mayorkas during the Obama administration, praised his tenure as head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, where she says he put in place a program giving protection from deportation to migrants brought to the border as children in “light speed.” She also noted his efforts to get Haitian children, orphaned by the 2010 earthquake, into the U.S. to people who wanted to adopt them.
The New York Times‘ softball interviewer, Garcia-Navarro, is on safe ground with her pro-migration editors.
For example, a February 2 article by the newspaper’s Editorial Board complained that the border deal is threatened because “Republican leaders … are engaged in other forms of sabotage.” The deal should go through, said the board, because it will legalize more immigration:
The deal under construction in the Senate reportedly would raise the bar for asylum claims and provide funding to expedite decisions. It would expand other forms of legal immigration [emphasis added], which could help to take some pressure off the asylum process.
…
[Congress] needs to act so that people without legitimate claims cannot walk into the United States — not least so that others are able to do so [emphasis added].
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the federal government has relied on Extraction Migration to grow the economy after it allowed investors to move much of the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.
The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.
The economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced native-born Americans’ productivity and political clout, reduced high-tech innovation, crippled civic solidarity, and allowed government officials to ignore the rising death rate of discarded Americans.
The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The colonialism-like policy has also killed many thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.
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