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30 June, 2022
Senate Republicans’ Report Condemns ‘Biden’s Border Crisis’
Consumers of the mainstream media might think that all news stopped on Jan. 6, 2021, but readers of The Daily Signal know that illegal crossings at the U.S. border are at “astronomical and record-breaking levels,” as a just issued report from the Republican minority on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee puts it.
The 47-page report, “Biden’s Border Crisis: Examining Policies That Encourage Illegal Migration,” describes the ongoing disgrace on our southern border and the utter failure of the Obama and Biden administrations to address it, concluding with some recommendations for immediate action to secure our country from uncontrolled illegal immigration.
First, the numbers: The report says that 234,088 foreigners were encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the border attempting to illegally enter the country in April. That’s the highest-ever monthly total.
That staggering record was already broken, even as the report was being written. In May, “there were 239,416 encounters along the southwest land border,” according to government figures.
That doesn’t count the unknown (and unknowable) number that evaded detection entirely. One estimate puts that number—the “got-aways”—at about a third (32%) of those caught, which would mean more than 600,000 last year.
According to the report, most illegal crossers still come from Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), but the number from elsewhere increased nearly nine times between President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021 and March of this year to more than 88,000.
It seems not just Ecuadorians, Haitians, and Cubans, but also Cameroonians, Bangladeshis, and Chinese have received the message from the Biden administration that the border is wide open to illegal crossing without credible repercussions.
As 2022 rolls on, we are well on target to exceed the 1.7 million illegal immigrants apprehended on the southern border in 2021, which was itself an unprecedented number.
As the report makes clear, this crisis has been brewing for decades. The “push factors” in Latin America (not to mention much of Africa and Asia) get worse: feckless governments, corruption, poverty, and economies hampered by socialism or incompetence, or incapable of harnessing the labor of their burgeoning populations.
Transnational criminal organizations such as the Tijuana cartel and gangs such as MS-13 have established themselves as essential brokers on the route into the U.S. and are making billions.
The report says that “55% of those traveling illegally [use] a smuggler” at rates up to $10,000 a head. Illegal crossers from the Northern Triangle alone paid out an estimated $1.7 billion in 2021 to get through Mexico into the U.S.
Meanwhile, what has the U.S. done about it?
To summarize the report’s conclusion, we have spent billions of dollars in foreign assistance in failed efforts to tackle the “root causes” of immigration. No doubt some of it reached the target countries, but much will have gone in administration and overhead fees to the “Beltway bandits” run by nongovernmental organizations with government connections.
The Obama administration’s Strategy for Engagement in Central America was built on the fantasy that any amount of U.S. money (in that case, $3.6 billion) could fix what ails the countries to our south.
The idea that we can spend enough on noble but vague goals such as security cooperation, promoting economic prosperity, encouraging good government, and fighting corruption in El Salvador, Honduras, or Guatemala in time to deter their youth from leaving right now is ludicrous.
In the words of the State Department’s senior Latin American official in 2019, “This approach failed.” There is no realistic correlation between U.S. aid dollars spent in Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and any reduction in illegal crossings of our border by the targeted nations, much less from places such as Eritrea and India, which the “root causes” aid spigot does not even touch.
Meanwhile, as the report makes clear, former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents programs were essentially amnesty by the slow boat, adding to the factors pulling illegal migrants into the U.S.
Just as “Justice delayed is justice denied,” so too action on immigration deferred, whether by Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole, or deliberate lack of prosecution, is amnesty in practice.
With an official policy of “prosecutorial discretion” not to deport them, work authorization, schooling for their children, health care in emergency rooms, and even driver’s licenses and “free” in-state college tuition in many states, illegal residents of the U.S are highly incentivized to stay.
The Biden administration came to power with an open-borders mentality, determined to undo everything former President Donald Trump had done to control the border. Biden ended the successful Migrant Protection Protocols, which, by sending would-be illegal immigrants back into Mexico while their cases were decided, deterred fraudulent and frivolous asylum claims by economic migrants.
Biden also ended the promising Asylum Cooperative Agreements with Northern Triangle countries, and through regulatory overreach and prosecutorial discretion—which in practice means telling prosecutors not to do their jobs—undid efforts to streamline the asylum-processing system.
U.S. immigration courts already have 1.7 million pending cases, and that impossible backlog is rapidly increasing.
The Biden regime is also determined to end Title 42, the health-related provision enacted by Trump because of COVID-19 that allows CBP to expel illegal immigrants before they can be admitted and claim asylum.
The disdain with which this administration treats career border officials and agents who attempt to enforce the law is disgraceful, from Biden’s silence when Texas National Guardsman Bishop Evans died saving illegal immigrants from drowning to the White House’s refusal to apologize to mounted Border Patrol agents after falsely accusing them of using their reins to whip Haitians crossing into the U.S. illegally.
The consequences of Biden’s abject refusal to enforce our immigration laws are obvious, if slow to unfurl. At current rates, the Biden border is allowing in enough illegal immigrants to fill a city the size of Houston or Chicago in a year. Among them, CBP will likely arrest more than 10,000 criminal aliens in 2022.
How many made it through, while agents were pulled off the border to rubber-stamp “credible fear” claims that end in asylum applicants being released indefinitely? The Department of Homeland Security reported in 2017 that of the 89% of illegal migrants from the Northern Triangle who claimed asylum and then passed an initial “credible fear” screening, “more than half never applied for asylum after being released or failed to show for their initial hearing.”
Seizures of drugs at the border are at record levels, but enough get through that more than 107,000 Americans died of overdoses last year.
Despite the failure of Obama’s effort to stem the tide of illegal migrants by throwing money at “root causes,” according to the report, the Biden administration doubled down with its own Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America.
It’s the same idea: billions in deficit-funded U.S. tax money in an attempt to create functional democracies in the Northern Triangle. This being the Biden administration, it sprinkled the plan with terms such as “community-based solutions” and “safe spaces,” and added climate change and “sexual, gender-based, and domestic violence” to the list of problems to solve, but it’s essentially the same program as Obama’s and will achieve as little.
What we can’t do is clear. “The United States is not responsible for solving the transnational crime, migration management, and border security issues in Mexico and northern Central America,” the report concludes.
What the administration can do, the senators recommend, is “use all available tools to secure the border” right now, including Title 42 and the Migrant Protection Protocols.
In the longer term, they recommend targeting U.S. assistance to “strengthen the capacity, funding, and staffing of migration management and law enforcement agencies” in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries to process refugees there, and signing Asylum Cooperative Agreements or similar undertakings with them to stem the flow into the U.S.
The senators also recommend working with our southern neighbors to prosecute the organized criminals who are making money through the misery of both migrants and the tens of thousands of Americans who overdose annually on drugs smuggled in through Mexico.
There’s even more to be done, as outlined in a May 2022 joint letter to Congress from independent public policy groups, including The Heritage Foundation, former Trump administration officials, and others.
Those measures would reestablish the successful “Remain in Mexico” agreement, correct regulatory overreach, limit prosecutorial discretion, and generally get control of the border through proper enforcement of existing laws.
Only once the border is no longer an unmitigated chaos can the country begin to think about reforming immigration laws in the greater national interest.
Until then, warming over the cold hash of foreign aid and social justice programs that have been tried and failed before is only going to make Americans poorer, less safe, and less confident in their government’s ability to protect them.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/06/24/senate-republicans-report-condemns-bidens-border-crisis/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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29 June, 2022
Texas lawmakers blast Biden after 46 migrants found dead in tractor-trailer
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has lashed out and blamed President Joe Biden for the deaths of 46 migrants whose bodies were found abandoned in a tractor-trailer in sizzling temperatures in a suspected smuggling attempt.
Hours after the bodies were discovered in the back of an 18-wheeler in San Antonio Monday evening, the Republican governor fired off a tweet saying, “These deaths are on Biden.”
“They are a result of his deadly open border policies,” he added. “They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.”
A number of fellow Republicans also blamed Biden’s immigration policies for the tragedy, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz tweeting, “How many more people have to die before Dems give a damn?”
“Today in San Antonio it was 102 degrees. Imagine being abandoned inside an 18-wheeler left to die … will [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas] even mention their names?” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) tweeted.
The bodies were only discovered after a city worker heard a cry for help from the truck shortly before 6 p.m., Police Chief William McManus said.
Officers arrived to find one of the bodies on the ground outside the trailer. By nightfall, dozens of body bags lay spread across the ground and some of the victims were still inside the trailer.
Authorities said 16 survivors, including four children, were rushed to hospital to be treated for heat-related illnesses. Fire Chief Charles Hood said the patients were hot to the touch and dehydrated.
“They were suffering from heat stroke and exhaustion,” Hood said. “It was a refrigerated tractor-trailer, but there was no visible working AC unit on that rig.”
Temperatures in San Antonio reached a high of 103 Monday amid an ongoing heat wave.
Three people were taken into custody, but it wasn’t clear what their involvement was.
https://nypost.com/2022/06/28/greg-abbott-ted-cruz-blast-biden-for-tractor-trailer-migrant-deaths/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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28 June, 2022
Rising wages for the poor? The left’s solution: more immigration
Back when Democrats were the party of the working man, they would have welcomed news that low-wage workers were in a position to demand higher pay.
Not anymore.
Whether under President Donald Trump or in today’s tight labor market, the left’s transformation into the party of large corporations and the professional-managerial class is evident from its discomfort with low-wage workers being able to raise their earnings.
Before COVID, the Trump administration proved we could combine rapid economic growth with reduced immigration — creating a tight labor market in which workers, especially those in the lowest-paying jobs, were able to increase their real (inflation-adjusted) pay for the first time in generations.
The immigrant population continued to grow under Trump, of course, but much slower than under his predecessor. We estimate that the total foreign-born population (legal and illegal) grew by an average of 42,000 a month under Trump before COVID, compared with 76,000 a month during President Barack Obama’s second term.
That slower immigration had tangible results: In late 2019, after 40 years of stagnant or falling real wages, the bottom 10th of workers saw their earnings jump 7% from the year before while full-time workers without a high-school degree got a hefty 9% raise — both far above the low inflation at the time.
COVID crashed all that, but as the economy revived, a tight labor market returned — and with it increased worker power to negotiate for higher pay.
The left was uncomfortable with that worker power under Trump because Orange Man Bad; The New York Times even highlighted “ethical concerns” with black Americans getting higher-wage jobs after an immigration raid removed illegal workers from a Mississippi chicken plant.
The problem today with greater economic power for workers is that it supposedly contributes to inflation (which it somehow did not do under Trump). And the solution? As always, more immigration!
Of course, the main reason for today’s inflation is the federal government printing too much money. Better pay for maids and landscapers plays virtually no role; even huge pay cuts for lower-paid workers through big increases in immigration could have only the most trivial effect on inflation because less-skilled workers just don’t account for very much of gross domestic product.
But that’s not stopping important voices on the left from warning that blue-collar workers have to be put in their place through immigration-driven pay cuts.
University of California economist Giovanni Peri is a favorite of the open-immigration crowd and has made a career of claiming that importing foreign workers has no effect on the earnings of people already here. He says there are 2 million “missing” immigrants who would have been here had immigration not slowed down under Trump and then because of COVID. And the labor shortage caused by those “missing” immigrants is causing wages to go up! But if the lack of immigrants results in higher wages, then their presence must necessarily cause lower wages.
Then there’s the National Immigration Forum, a left-wing pro-amnesty group. It states, accurately enough, “that when businesses struggle to retain and hire workers, they increase wages to become more competitive in the labor market.” It then argues for massive increases in immigration to prevent that, falsely claiming that will tame inflation.
Complaints about increasing pay for workers may be more understandable from Fwd.us, the awkward name of Mark Zuckerberg’s mass-immigration lobby in Washington. It promoted the immigration increases in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better proposal by touting complaints from academics and others about increased worker leverage, quoting one professor who said, “People will bid up wages in order to deal with the shortages of workers.” But again, if less immigration results in higher pay, doesn’t that mean Fwd.us’s frequent assurances that mass immigration doesn’t harm American workers are false?
In fact, immigration-pushers know perfectly well their policies hurt American workers. Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) confessed in an unguarded moment to a reporter that the arrival of additional immigrant workers is “bad for blue-collars,” but that was OK because it would help elect more Democrats, who would pass bills to help workers (retroactively, I guess).
No one is surprised when the Chamber of Commerce calls for increased immigration to keep American workers down. But when ostensibly pro-worker voices argue the same thing, it’s clear that the left’s animating idea is Immigration Above All Else — whether inflation is high or low, whether there’s a recession or expansion, the solution is always the same: more immigration!
https://nypost.com/2022/06/22/rising-wages-for-the-poor-the-lefts-solution-more-immigration/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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27 June, 2022
‘Unprecedented’ upheaval in immigration courts from Biden’s bid to reshape the agency
The Biden administration has been quietly packing the nation’s immigration courts, ousting Trump-hired judges and installing judges deemed to be friendlier to the immigrants whose cases they hear, in what one Justice Department official called an “unprecedented” injection of politics into the courts.
At least a half-dozen judges hired during the Trump years have been axed, including two this month in Arlington, Virginia.
They are part of a massive upheaval in the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which has seen four of its top officials pushed out of their jobs. The director was among the four and, for the first time in the agency’s history, was removed involuntarily.
“It’s an attempt to weaponize the courts along ideological lines,” said Matthew J. O’Brien, one of the two judges ousted from Arlington, Virginia. “It’s court packing on steroids. It’s court packing by deletion and then addition, because they’re getting rid of judges and they’re replacing them with people who meet their ideological framework.”
Mr. O’Brien was coming up on the end of his two-year probationary period, and the Justice Department, which runs EOIR, declined to convert his post to a permanent judgeship.
He said it’s exceptionally rare to use the probation period ouster, and it’s usually only done for cases of serious job misconduct such as sexual harassment. Trump administration officials said they couldn’t recall a single judge ousted after a probationary period because of politics.
The Biden administration has done it in more than a half-dozen cases, in addition to firing four senior officials.
“This turnover is unprecedented in the history of EOIR, and it all appears to be politically motivated in an effort to install Biden allies and pro-Democrat advocacy group supporters in both leadership and adjudicatory positions,” said one Justice Department official, who requested not to be named out of fear of retaliation.
Immigration judges, or IJs, are administrative positions hired by the Justice Department and don’t go through Senate confirmation.
There are about 590 judges, and they handle civil immigration matters, deciding whether a migrant challenging a pending deportation wins their case and gets to stay.
That makes immigration judges a central part of the Biden administration’s push to clear the dockets and grant leniency to longtime immigrants without documentation who don’t rise to the level of priority cases for deportation. Critics deride it as a “shadow amnesty.”
Mr. O’Brien said he had heard just two or three substantive cases over the last couple of months. A normal workload would have been many dozens of cases each month.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jun/20/doj-engaged-court-packing-steroids-immigration-jud/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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26 June, 2022
50 illegal migrants on terror watch list have been caught at the border so far this year - more than total number apprehended in last five years COMBINED
More illegal immigrants on a terror watch lift have been caught crossing the southern border so-far this year than during the last five years combined, figures reveal.
Since the fiscal year began in October, 50 migrants who appeared in the federal Terrorist Screening Dataset have been intercepted while trying to cross into the US between official checkpoints at the southern border, according to Customs and Border Patrol statistics.
That's up from just 15 for the 2021 fiscal year, three in 2020, none in 2019, six in 2018 and two in 2017 according to the enforcement statistics data released on Wednesday by CBP.
It comes as overall illegal border crossings surge to new records and President Biden is blasted for what many see as his lax attitude to illegal immigration, compared to Donald Trump's unashamedly hardline stance during his time in office.
In May, encounters at the southern border hit a new all-time high of 239,416, according to figures released earlier this week.
A 21-year-old Saudi national with ties to a Yemeni terror group was stopped for illegally crossing the United States-Mexico border in Yuma, Arizona, on December 18, 2021
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich said he believes that individuals with terror ties are attempting to take advantage of the chaotic situation on the border to sneak into the country. 'These aren't people that are coming here because they want to work at a hotel or a restaurant,' Brnovich told Fox News in an interview.
'These are people clearly that are using this crisis, this lack of border security in order to endanger our national security. And that's why we're seeing these unprecedented numbers.'
The subject of potential terror suspects using the southern land border to enter the US unlawfully has gained increasing attention in recent months. CBP only resumed publishing its data on the subject last month, following pressure from Republican lawmakers.
Soon after President Joe Biden took office, CBP stopped posting updates on terror watchlist encounters, labeling the issue 'law enforcement sensitive'.
In March, Republican Representatives James Comer and John Katko urged Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandra Mayorkas to publicly release the numbers of migrants who were stopped at the southern border and whose names are listed on the Terror Screening Database.
'It is no secret that terrorists and other bad actors attempt to exploit weakness in border security and vetting to enter the United States,' the lawmakers wrote.
'Reporting indicates that multiple individuals with terrorist ties have been recently apprehended after illegally crossing the border, and that such encounters may be increasing. The American people deserve to know whether President Biden's weak border policies are allowing terrorists to enter our homeland.'
In December - which is part of the ongoing 2022 fiscal year - U.S. Border Patrol agents from the Yuma Sector busted a 21-year-old Saudi Arabian national with ties to a Yemeni terror group.
While the man's name was not released, the sector confirmed him 'as a positive match linked to several Yemeni subjects of interests.'
In an unusual twist, the suspect was wearing a volunteer paramedics jacket from an ambulance company in Central Oneida County, New York.
Homeland Security officials have said that border resources are exhausted when agents face 5,000 migrants per day. Last month, they saw nearly 8,000 per day.
Border agents say there were a higher-than-usual number of repeat crossings in May due to the fact that migrants expelled under Title 42, a pandemic-era restriction currently tied up in court, face no legal repercussions if they try to cross again.
The number of unique individuals attempted to cross in May was 177,793, and 25 percent of those stopped by agents had attempted to cross at least once before in the prior 12 months, according to CBP. The average re-encounter rate prior to Title 42 was 15 percent.
Most migrants attempting to cross in May were not families but single adults - 69 percent.
And unlike previous months, Title 42 is no longer the main authority under which migrants are expelled, only 42 percent of migrants were removed under the CDC's health order.
Most of the migrants expelled under Title 42 were single adults - only about one in six who came in families with children under 18 were subject to Title 42. Unaccompanied children are exempt from the rule.
Fifty-eight percent were expelled under Title 8. Under Title 8, a U.S. immigration policy used when migrants who try to cross unlawfully cannot establish any 'credible fear' basis for being in the country. DHS has said it will expand use of Title 8 once Title 42 is gone.
The Biden administration planned to end Title 42 on May 23 but a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the move three days before.
Migrants have been expelled more than 2 million times without a chance to seek asylum since the rule took effect in March 2020.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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24 June, 2022
Biden’s Relentless War on the Border Targets Law Enforcement, Not Illegals
President Joe Biden’s attack on America’s southern perimeter continues without mercy. Indeed, the U.S.–Mexico “border” is dissolving at a quickening pace.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered 239,416 illegal aliens in May alone. This is yet another monthly record, as Biden becomes the Babe Ruth of border destruction.
May’s figure was “the highest number in DHS history,” Fox News Channel’s intrepid southern-boundary correspondent Bill Melugin told Fox Radio’s Guy Benson. Melugin added that May’s total encounters with illegal aliens shattered “the record, which was set last month in April, which was 234,000, which broke the record for March, which was 221,000. So the last three months in a row have all been record-breaking months and May being the highest at nearly 240,000.”
In Biden’s first full 16 months in office (from February 1, 2021, through May 31, 2022), Border Patrol agents confronted a staggering 2,975,135 illegal aliens. These law-breaking interlopers exceed the 2,731,994 people who inhabit Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates. If these 2.73 million individuals established their own state — call it Rio Grandia — they would be nearly as populous as Kansas and entitled to two U.S. senators and four U.S. House representatives. Perhaps that is the point.
Compare? these 2,975,135 to the 754,538 such encounters during President Donald J. Trump’s final 16 months in office (October 1, 2019, through January 31, 2021 — including Biden’s first 11 days). Since Trump jetted to Mar-a-Lago, these hard numbers confirm, illegal-alien apprehensions have ballooned under Biden by a mind-blowing 394 percent.
Joe Biden must be vying for the Border-Elimination Hall of Fame. By now, he deserves his own dedicated wing.
And these statistics do not include so-called “got-aways.” Border Patrol detects these illegal aliens but is unable to intercept them. The Center for Immigration Studies calculates that 706,667 illegals have gotten away and entered America under this administration. Biden’s got-aways slightly overshadow Washington, D.C.’s 705,749 denizens.
At least these “got-aways” can be estimated. Other illegals invaded the USA while being neither perceived via infrared equipment nor observed through binoculars.
How many people broke into America completely surreptitiously?
Your guess is as good as any.
Biden now plans to plunge his border-demolition tactics from merely queasy to fully vomit-inducing. While Biden gives illegals free cell phones and tickets to ride virtually anywhere in America, he punishes diligent Border Patrol agents for doing their jobs.
Last September, several equestrian Border Patrolmen resisted scores of Haitians as they tried to penetrate U.S. soil at Del Rio, Texas. These federal officers rode atop horses that galloped back and forth while these Haitians waded up from the Rio Grande.
Leftists screamed that these agents used whips to beat the Haitians into submission.
“This is another clear demonstration of just how much our immigration system is rooted in anti-Blackness,” said Jane Bentrott of Justice Action Center, a public-interest law firm that represents these Haitians.
“As we all know, it also evoked images of some of the worst moments of our history, where that kind of behavior has been used against the indigenous people of our country, has been used against African Americans during times of slavery,” Vice President Kamala Harris demagogued on ABC’s The View.
Not be outdone, Biden decried the officers’ actions.
“It was horrible what you see, what you saw — to see people treated like they did, with horses barely running them over and people being strapped,” Biden told journalists at the White House. “It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay.” Biden added, “There will be consequences.”
But the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general begged to differ. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, the IG “cleared the agents of criminal wrongdoing” and declined further investigation.
Moreover, federal attorneys must have missed Biden–Harris’s “guilty as charged” memo. On June 10, administration attorneys walked into the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to argue the case of Haitian Bridge Alliance et al. v. Biden et al. While POTUS and VPOTUS condemned these Border Patrolmen and likened them to slave drivers, federal lawyers fought a class-action suit by Haitian illegal aliens who complained of racial discrimination, in addition to these supposed whippings.
But rather than apologize to these Haitians and Zelle them damage payments, the Biden administration told them to pound riparian sand.
“Individual plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate that they have standing to bring their claims,” Biden’s attorneys pleaded. Translation: Get lost — your case doesn’t deserve to be heard. With that, these lawyers, who work for Biden, did not assure that these “horrible” Border Patrol agents “will pay.” Instead, they moved to dismiss the Haitians’ case.
So, the mounted Border Patrol agents rode into the sunset.
Not so fast.
Biden ignored the DHS IG’s lack of interest in these purported whippings. He disregarded his own administration’s rejection of the Haitians’ complaints. Biden even spurned the objections of Agence France-Presse photographer Paul Ratje, whose images ignited this controversy.
“I didn’t ever see them whip anybody,” Ratje told KTSM, NBC’s El Paso, Texas, affiliate. “That’s something that can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
Facts be damned. Biden stayed on mission.
The Washington Examiner reported last week that Biden’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection planned to hammer these federal officers with “administrative violations” for whippings that never occurred and hurt no illegal aliens. These agents slapped reins at horses but never snapped whips at Haitians.
This revolting development merits an abuse-of-power lawsuit against Biden by these once-mounted Border Patrol agents. For now, they are relegated to desk jobs and forbidden to defend America’s boundaries on horseback. Team Biden prohibits them from practicing this very special skill.
Rather than the “nice guy” who captured the White House by promising to Make Washington Normal Again, Americans are stuck with a snarling, vindictive old man who takes the U.S.–Mexico “border” even less seriously than his former boss’s tragicomic Syrian “line in the sand.”
https://spectator.org/biden-war-border-targets-law-enforcement-not-illegals/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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22 June, 2022
Leftist groups are taking cues from Biden and helping migrant caravans
“Do not come.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’s message to illegal immigrants doesn’t seem to be getting through. A big new caravan set out Monday from the southern Mexican border town of Tapachula, with hopes of attracting as many as 15,000.
And why wouldn’t they come? Weak borders invite illegal immigration. In April, more than half of the 200,000 people Border Patrol “encountered” on the Mexican border were let go into the United States, either immediately or after brief detention. All told, the Biden-Harris administration has released more than 1 million illegal border-crossers into the United States, few if any of whom will ever be made to leave.
With odds like that of getting past the border, of course there will be more caravans.
These caravans are not entirely spontaneous. This latest version seems to have been organized by Centro de Dignificación Humana, a Mexican leftist group that has been involved in several illegal-immigrant caravans over the past couple years. Other leftist groups have masterminded earlier caravans.
But these aren’t efforts that require a lot of money. Migrants in Central America or bottled up by authorities in southern Mexico are looking for options to head north, and if they don’t have something already arranged, tagging along with a caravan is worth a try. They don’t have to pay smugglers, and there’s safety in numbers from criminal predators. The large groups can also help overwhelm Mexican law enforcement and paramilitary units trying to block the roads north.
And they get help along the way. When the first Central American caravans made news in 2018, local communities greeted the groups with mariachi bands and provided food and water. As the flow of foreigners through their country has continued, the welcome has worn thin, but local church groups and others still offer assistance. And American immigration lawyers hold workshops for caravaners to coach them on how to game the US asylum process.
The United Nations also helps some of the migrants. The world body’s refugee arm gives cash cards to foreigners so they can support themselves while waiting in southern Mexico for temporary visas to allow them to legally continue to the US border. The UN also funds therapists to help migrants appealing Mexican asylum rejections to recover “repressed memories” of persecution, in a (usually successful) gambit to get accepted.
Choking off this assistance might help reduce the illegal flow through Mexico a little, but only at the margins. Caravans are mainly political stunts by leftist groups competing among themselves for attention and often aimed at weakening Mexico’s own border-control policies. The migrants themselves are cannon fodder and are only present because they’re drawn by feckless American immigration policies.
The “root cause” of the caravans, then, isn’t George Soros in his Alpine lair, instructing his minions to launch another assault against America’s borders; it’s Joe Biden in the Oval Office (or whoever is in charge there), dismantling our immigration laws and extending “La Invitacion” to anyone in the world who can make up a story about “persecution.” With proper border and immigration controls — not just walls but wholesale asylum reform, plugging legal loopholes, detention of border-jumpers — caravans would either disappear or become irrelevant.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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21 June, 2022
Texas and Arizona Have Humiliated Joe Biden, Sending 79 Buses With 2,500 Illegals Straight to Washington, DC
If President Joe Biden isn’t willing to solve the border crisis, the people running two of the biggest border states are more than happy to send the problem his way.
According to a report in the Washington Examiner last week, an effort spearheaded by the Republican governors of Arizona and Texas has led to over 2,500 migrants apprehended at the border being shipped to Washington, D.C. — all to bring the crisis home to the legislators who created.
That’s 79 buses of individuals who were released from Border Patrol custody, all with the terminus right in the president’s backyard. And who said Republicans can’t use government-sponsored transportation to solve taxpayer problems?
The buses, which are provided by the state free of charge, have taken the illegal immigrants from the border towns where they’ve been detained straight to the nation’s capital.
“These people are wanting to go somewhere else. They’re not wanting to stay in Arizona,” said Morgan Carr, spokeswoman for Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.
“From what we’re seeing, they’re all primarily [headed to] the East Coast.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was the first to announce an initiative to provide the buses, stating in April that he planned to “take the border to President Biden.”
“Texans demand and deserve an aggressive, comprehensive strategy to secure our border — not President Biden’s lackluster leadership,” Abbott said in a statement.
“As the federal government continues to roll back commonsense policies that once kept our communities safe, our local law enforcement has stepped up to protect Texans from dangerous criminals, deadly drugs and illegal contraband flooding into the Lone Star State.”
The move was made in response to the administration’s decision to end Title 42, a World War II-era public health policy that allowed immigrants to be summarily deported without an asylum hearing if communicable disease is a concern.
The measure was first invoked under former President Donald Trump’s administration in response to COVID-19 and kept mostly in place by the Biden administration. However, they had planned to roll back the protections in May — until they were stopped by a district court judge’s ruling.
In late May, Abbott announced Texas had already sent dozens of the buses to Washington, calling the program a “relief valve” for border communities.
“And we’re up to our 45th bus now, when you add a zero to that, I think Washington, D.C., is going to soon find out they’re going to be dealing with the same consequences as we’re dealing with,” the governor said.
While Abbott had pledged to drop the migrants off at the U.S. Capitol, the buses have dropped them near Union Station, the District’s main transport hub.
“Migrants typically board trains and long-distance buses at Union Station to continue on to destinations where they have family or friends. The state’s buses are free of charge to migrants, only costing taxpayers,” the Examiner reported.
Arizona, meanwhile, has come up with its own unique spin on the plan: Unlike Texas, they’re sending the migrants and the bill to the Biden administration.
“This is a problem caused by Washington. We’re bringing it to Washington, and we expect Washington to foot the bill. We’re going to send them a bill,” said C.J. Karamargin, a spokesman for Ducey.
While most of the buses have come from Texas, Arizona had sent 14 buses with 523 people aboard to the nation’s capital since mid-May.
Mind you, this is only a drop in the bucket as the border crisis continues apace. In May, over 239,000 illegal immigrants were encountered at the southern border, according to data from Customs and Border Protection. This, yet again, was the highest number in decades.
However, if it’s a drop in the pond, it’s one that gets noticed. In Washington, lawmakers don’t usually share the same concerns that residents of border towns do regarding immigration. At the very least, these 79 buses have managed to export the crisis to the place where it originated — in a town run by an administration that wants to look the other way.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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20 June, 2022
Supreme Court Ends Trump-era Public Charge Rule
Donald Trump had a crazy idea when he was president. He came up with the radical idea that if you wanted to come into this country, you should be able to contribute, not work the system.
Well, thanks to the Supreme Court, that will no longer be the case.
Believe it or not, other countries have similar rules in place. Somehow, though, their policy is not considered racist.
When Trump put this policy in place, Democrats, the media, and liberals were all accusing Trump and his administration of being just that.
When the Biden administration took over, it chose not to enforce the rule.
This led to several states suing the administration to keep the rule in place, as it was written under Trump. The case landed in the wrong courtrooms, eventually landing in the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court shot down the rule, even stating that it never should have taken on the case in the first place.
So, Joe Biden now gets his wish, and he can flood the country with immigrants that have no money, no job, and will do nothing more than be a drain on the system.
This is exactly what we need during a recession.
https://quicknewsupdates.com/supreme-court-ends-rule/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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19 June, 2022
In Northern Mexico, Illegal Immigration Has Become A Vast Black Market
Over the past year, illegal immigration along the southwest border has reached historic highs, with nearly 2.5 million arrests since last April. U.S. border authorities apprehended on average more than 6,725 illegal immigrants every day in April, the highest number ever recorded. (As of this writing, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has yet to release numbers for May, which will almost certainly be higher than April’s.)
(UPDATE: CBP released May numbers on Wednesday, June 15, after press time. There were a record 239,416 encounters with illegal immigrants along the southwest border last month, the highest monthly total ever, surpassing April’s record. So far in the 2022 fiscal year, about 1.5 million illegal immigrants have been arrested by Border Patrol. With four months remaining in FY2022, border arrests are almost certain to surpass 2 million.)
Why are so many coming now? We asked that question to every migrant we spoke to in Mexico and Texas, and nearly every one of them at some point said that they had heard it was a good time to come, that they would be able to get in. They’re not wrong.
What they find upon arriving in northern Mexico, however, is not what many of them expected. For some, like Osniel, Title 42 still represents a real obstacle (although since Joe Biden took office, fewer and fewer illegal immigrants are being expelled under its authority). All of them, though, are drawn into a vast criminal enterprise run by cartels that have in recent years transformed illegal immigration into an industrialized black market. Elias Rodriguez, director of a migrant shelter run by the Catholic Diocese of Matamoros, told us bluntly that “everyone who arrives here has paid.”
Indeed, migrants transiting Mexico must not only make sure they have paid whichever cartel controls the area of the border they intend to cross, they often have to pay off Mexican officials en route to the border. More than one person told us how the bus they were on was stopped in Monterrey, or outside Reynosa, and boarded by federal or state officials who asked for everyone’s papers. Those without papers had to pay.
Setting aside the impossibility of confirming these accounts, the proof of such official corruption on a mass scale is the mere fact that hundreds of thousands of migrants arrive at northern Mexican border cities each month. They are here, and they could have gotten here only by paying their way.
About 1,500 migrants are housed at the Senda de Vida shelter, including many families and small children.
Signs of this illegal immigration black market lurk behind nearly every individual migrant’s story. We don’t know, for example, why Osniel changed his mind about crossing the river. At the shelter, he told us he was going to wait there because it was too dangerous to leave. He said men had tried to assault him when he ventured out into Reynosa at one point, and that it wasn’t safe anywhere outside the shelter’s walls.
Maybe he realized there was no other way into the United States. Maybe he was unwilling to wait any longer at the shelter. He’d told us that he follows the news about U.S. border policy closely, so maybe he saw that a U.S. judge recently ordered the Biden administration to keep Title 42 in place instead of ending it on May 23 as planned.
Whatever changed Osniel’s mind, his plight is shared by tens of thousands of other migrants in Reynosa, Matamoros, and Mexican cities all along the border. They are caught between a black market smuggling industry run by ruthless cartels and a mercurial U.S. immigration bureaucracy that seems to adopt new policies and rules every week.
For a certain segment of the migrant population in Mexico, that means they’re stuck. For those who can’t afford to pay the cartels, crossing the river without permission is dangerous. It’s unlikely that Osniel was actually pursued across the river by armed men, but he was lucky to slip by them in Reynosa and make it over to the north bank. In Matamoros, we were told of several migrant groups that tried to cross without paying, and cartel members actually went out into the river and forcibly returned them to the Mexican side.
Others simply refuse to cross illegally, even with the aid of cartel-affiliated smugglers. These are mostly Haitian migrants, and they make up the vast majority of those staying at the shelters in Reynosa and Matamoros. Many of them say they will not cross illegally because they fear being arrested and deported to Haiti, a country most of them left many years ago.
The vast majority of Haitian migrants now in Mexico had until recently been living legally in Chile, Brazil, and other countries in South America. Indeed, of the dozens of Haitian migrants we interviewed, not one had recently lived in Haiti, and none wanted to return there.
For these people, being deported back to Haiti — as thousands were last fall after CBP cleared the encampment near Del Rio, Texas — would be the worst possible outcome. So they wait in Mexican border towns for something to change.
One Haitian man we spoke to, Gerard Estinfils, was among a group of at least a hundred others waiting outside a migrant resource center near the international bridge in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas, on a recent weekday morning, hoping to meet with a lawyer about applying for asylum in the United States.
Estinfils told us he has been in Mexico for ten months with his wife and three children, and they have no money left now. But even if they did, he said he would not pay a smuggler or a cartel to help him cross illegally. He says he and his wife have medical problems, and like some of the other Haitian migrants waiting outside the resource center that day, he hopes to get a medical exemption to enter the United States.
He might well end up getting such an exemption. We spoke to people who were recently discharged from CBP custody in Texas who had been admitted that way. But there is only so long people like Estinfils, who had been living for years in Chile before traveling north, can safely wait in these Mexican border towns. (The U.S. State Department issued a “do not travel” advisory for the entire state of Tamaulipas last June that is still in effect. It forbids U.S. government employees from traveling between cities in Tamaulipas using interior Mexican highways, citing “gun battles, murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, forced disappearances, extortion, and sexual assault” activity along the northern Mexican border.)
All of which to say: it’s not safe for Estanfils and his family to be living in these streets, but that’s where they are for the simple reason that there are not enough shelters in these cities, and more people are arriving every day.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/16/border-dispatch-part-i-everyone-who-arrives-here-has-paid
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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17 June, 2022
Migrant ruling sparks UK threat to ditch European court
The judges of the court are political appointees who often have little judicial background. More on the dubious background of many of the judges here
Britain has refused to rule out abandoning a European human rights pact after a judge dramatically blocked the government’s plan to fly asylum-seekers to Rwanda, sparking fury among Conservative Party MPs.
Home Minister Priti Patel said the government “will not be deterred from doing the right thing” and that plans for further flights “have already begun”.
But government sources have said the Home Office would not book another flight until it was sure it would not be grounded by judges in Strasbourg.
The last-gasp intervention by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) forced the government to cancel the first flight on Tuesday night, after the number of claimants aboard had already been whittled down by UK legal challenges.
Ms Patel attacked the “usual suspects” among lawyers’ firms and rights groups for defying the “will of the British people”, as well as “evil” gangs behind a flourishing cross-Channel trade in migrants.
The court is unrelated to the EU, which Britain left in January 2020. But Tory backbenchers, fresh from rebelling in large numbers against Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s leadership, said the ruling infringed on British sovereignty.
“Yes, let’s withdraw from European Court of Human Rights and stop their meddling in British law,” MP Andrea Jenkyns tweeted, echoing others in the party and banner headlines in right-wing newspapers.
Attorney-General Suella Braverman said many in Britain would be frustrated at the role played by a “foreign court”.
“We are definitely open to assessing all options available as to what our relationship should be, going forward, with the European Court of Human Rights,” she told BBC Radio.
The European convention was enshrined in British law in 1998 by Tony Blair’s Labour government. It notably underpins the Good Friday Agreement of the same year, which brought peace to Northern Ireland after three decades of bloodshed.
The Prime Minister’s spokesman said “we keep all options on the table” to facilitate the deportation plan.
“We would do nothing that would in any way jeopardise the Good Friday Agreement.”
Mr Johnson’s government is already in a bust-up with the EU over post-Brexit trading rules for Northern Ireland, and critics allege it is picking a separate fight over asylum-seekers to distract from economic trouble and political scandals.
The convention has been used frequently by human rights lawyers to frustrate Mr Johnson and
Last month, in the Queen’s Speech opening a new session of parliament, the government committed to replacing the 1998 act with a new bill of rights.
Mr Johnson’s maternal grandfather, James Fawcett, helped to write the European convention and was the commission’s president for a decade in the years after World War II.
Anneke Campbell, a cousin to Mr Johnson’s late mother, wrote in the Byline Times newspaper last week that Fawcett would have been “appalled” at the government’s actions.
Under Britain’s agreement with Rwanda, all migrants arriving illegally in the UK are liable to be sent to the east African nation for processing and settlement.
More than 10,000 migrants have crossed the Channel from northern France since the start of the year.
On Wednesday about 150 more people including two dozen children were taken ashore in the English port of Dover from two dinghies that appeared partially deflated.
Enver Solomon, head of Britain’s Refugee Council, said the ever-rising numbers of crossings disproved the government’s claims that it was putting people-smugglers out of business.
Its determination to press on with the Rwanda plan heightened “the human suffering, distress, and chaos the threat of removal will cause with far-reaching consequences for desperate people”, he said.
Various legal challenges had highlighted concern over human rights in Rwanda. But the government in Kigali insists it is a safe country.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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16 June, 2022
Will the UK government stand up to mob rule?
A very big week is in store for the government’s strategy to tackle illegal immigration with all eyes on the planned first air transfer of irregular migrants to Rwanda, due to take place on Tuesday.
Whether the flight takes off at all [it didn't] and how many migrants will be on board is yet to be seen. But the policy has already attracted strong adverse commentary from leading lights in Britain’s unelected establishment, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the heir to the throne.
But another struggle over the enforcement of immigration law is being waged at ground level, with the springing up of networks of local activists seeking to prevent immigration enforcement officers accompanied by the police from detaining illegal immigrants to facilitate their deportation.
Only occasionally do the activities of this ‘anti-raids’ movement hit the headlines. In May of last year, two men from India were released from the back of a police van in Glasgow after a large crowd assembled to prevent the vehicle from driving away. As the Guardian later reported, the protesters were summoned to the scene by a group called the No Evictions Network.
Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, the MSP for the constituency involved, was naturally outraged. But not by the rabble who acted to prevent due enforcement of the law. No, her beef was squarely with the immigration officers and the police, who she accused of having created ‘a dangerous and unacceptable situation’.
This weekend something very similar occurred in Peckham, south-east London. When immigration officers and later the police arrived outside a property on a local estate seeking to detain its occupant, anti-raids groups went into overdrive, using social media to summon 200 people to the scene to hem in the Border Force van.
Again, the tactic worked, with the intended detainee being allowed to leave the van as the crowd chanted ‘shame on you’ and ‘let him go’ and police officers sought to calm an increasingly fraught situation.
Once more a left-wing elected politician got involved in the effort to thwart due enforcement of the law. This time it was local Labour councillor Reginald Popoola, who helped summon people to the scene by tweeting: ‘Block the van from taking one of our neighbours. Come and join us now.’
Later he posted a celebratory tweet declaring: ‘Here’s the moment he was released from the immigration van. Really proud of our community for turning out today and resisting. Peckham people power!’
It will be instructive to see what stance the former Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer – now a semi-obscure political figure – takes towards a Labour councillor wilfully obstructing the legal authorities in this way and then celebrating their defeat. But as a stickler for due process, one must hope that he will see the merits of the rule of law over ‘Peckham people power’, which seems like a polite way of describing mob rule.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/06/will-the-government-stand-up-to-mob-rule/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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15 June, 2022
Texas Judge Blocks Federal Policy Letting ‘Criminal Aliens’ ‘Roam Free’
Texas and Louisiana have successfully sued the Biden administration over an immigration policy that saw “criminal aliens” released from custody into the community instead of being deported.
U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton on Friday ruled in favor of Texas and Louisiana, finding that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued rules via “self-styled” memorandum meant to govern “civil immigration enforcement.”
These “unlawful agency memoranda” allowed illegal aliens convicted of felonies to “roam free” in America, Texas and Louisiana argued in their lawsuit (pdf).
Tipton said the legal issues in the case were “varied and complicated” but at its core, the case was about whether the Biden administration “may require its officials to act in a manner that conflicts with a statutory mandate imposed by Congress.”
“It may not,” Tipton wrote.
Texas and Louisiana argued that the DHS policy to allow U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to exercise discretion in deportation cases conflicted with detention mandates under federal law.
In defending against this claim, Tipton found that the Biden administration’s “explanations fall short.”
“The Executive Branch may prioritize its resources. But it must do so within the bounds set by Congress,” Tipton said. “Using the words ‘discretion’ and ‘prioritization,’ the Executive Branch claims the authority to suspend statutory mandates. The law does not sanction this approach.”
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in September 2021 that the policy was just and the agency was stretched, The Hill reported.
“The fact that an individual is a removable noncitizen should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them. We focus our resources because they are limited, and because of our dedication to doing justice,” he said.
The Epoch Times reached out to the DHS for further comment.
The attorney generals of Louisiana and Texas celebrated the win on Twitter.
“A federal judge has just ruled with us that the Biden Administration can no longer refuse to detain criminal illegal immigrants. This is a major win for our [National Security] and the [rule of law]!” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry wrote.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared he had “dealt Biden another massive defeat” in federal court.
“[Biden] tried to throw out immigration law, saying DHS didn’t have to detain criminal illegals. The court now says he must. I will always hold the line with the Dems and the rule of law,” Paxton wrote.
According to court documents, when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) incarcerates a criminal alien it informs the ICE agency. The agency would normally then issue a detainer request if the alien is due to be deported when their sentence expires. TDCJ would then hold the alien instead of releasing them into the community.
Louisiana has a similar procedure except there are more federal detention facilities available where federal detainees are held until they can be deported.
However, since the inauguration of President Joe Biden in January 2021, federal agencies have “rescinded dozens of detainer requests previously issued to TDCJ, and ICE has declined to take custody of dangerous criminal aliens that it had previously sought.”
Louisiana and Texas argued that the Biden administration’s actions are in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, binding agreements that DHS negotiated with Texas and Louisiana, and the U.S. Constitution.
These policy changes, the two states argued, have “resulted in a ‘crisis on the border.'”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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14 June, 2022
Britain divided as first group of illegal immigrants sent to Rwanda
Britain is attempting to mirror aspects of Australia’s offshore migrant processing policy, with the country’s first plane load of illegal immigrants scheduled to be transferred to Rwanda on Tuesday.
Under a $200m deal with the East African nation, the British government is to expel a first tranche of illegal migrants, mainly single men who have transited through multiple “safe countries”, before arriving in the United Kingdom, to Rwanda for assessment.
A High Court legal challenge to try and stop the removals was dismissed last week, paving the way for the first planeload to leave this week amid planned protests.
The offshore policy, designed to stem a flood of illegal arrivals by small boats into the UK, was reportedly described by Prince Charles as “appalling” in overheard private comments, The Times reported. Clarence House later insisted that Charles, who will attend the Commonwealth heads of Government meeting in Kigali, the Rwandan capital later this month, remains politically neutral.
In papers submitted to the High Court, the Home Office said removals under the deal with Rwanda were “intended to deter people from making dangerous journeys to the UK to claim asylum, which are facilitated by criminal smugglers, when they have already travelled through safe third countries”.
They added: “In particular, but not exclusively, this is aimed at deterring arrivals by small boats.”
In 2021 more than 28,000 people crossed the Channel to claim asylum in Britain and this year there have already been more than 10,000 illegal arrivals.
British prime minister Boris Johnson adopted many aspects of Australia’s points based immigration model for post-Brexit Britain, and two months ago on a day when 600 illegal migrants landed in Calais, he said: “We cannot sustain a parallel illegal system, our compassion may be infinite, but our capacity to help people is not.”
The illegal immigrants tend to come from Iran, Iraq and Sudan and three quarters of them are single men aged under 40.
Denmark has been in discussions to send illegal migrants to Rwanda for more than a year, while Israel has a scheme for refugees from Sudan and Eritrea to be resettled in Uganda and Rwanda.
Under the British scheme, the asylum seekers will be given accommodation and support in Rwanda and would be free to come and go from their lodgings. Those who have their asylum claims accepted will be assisted to build a new life in Rwanda with five years of education and support. Those who are rejected will be returned to their country of origin.
But the plan has divided the country. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said Britain cannot subcontract out its moral responsibilities and said the plan was “the opposite of the nature of God”. Football pundit, Gary Lineker, has spoken against the plan as have other high profile identities.
The failed court challenge had been initiated by the Public and Commercial Services union, which represents most Border Force staff, and ws supported by refugee campaign and charity groups such as Care4Calais, Asylum Aid and Detention Action.
Kerry Smith, chief executive of Asylum Aid, said Rwanda was not a safe country for asylum seekers, particularly for survivors of trafficking, torture and LGBTQ+ people.
“If the flight goes ahead it will put all those targeted in danger and will expose vulnerable individuals to devastating harm and risks,” she said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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13 June, 2022
Australia: Public sympathy won’t pay costs of false refugee status
JENNIFER ORIEL
On the day Labor won the election, illegal immigrants set sail for Australia. Under the Coalition government, there had been no boat arrivals for two years. In the three weeks since Labor came to power, three vessels from Sri Lanka have been intercepted. Border security and immigration played a key role in Labor’s demise as a political force for nearly a decade. It is already showing weakness on national security and adopting a populist approach where firmer resolve is required.
By ministerial intervention, Sri Lankan couple Nades and Priya Murugappan were granted bridging visas last month. After fighting deportation for years, the Murugappans have a kind of celebrity status in the Australian media. Their protracted fight to gain citizenship is depicted as a battle between the persecuted poor and a conservative government that insisted on strong border security. Labor pledged to release them from detention if it came to power and made good on the promise when Jim Chalmers, acting as interim home affairs minister, intervened to grant them a bridging visa.
The media has painted the Murugappan story in a sympathetic light, portraying them as victims. New Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined the chorus of lament, describing the Murugappans being taken in the middle of the night by authorities and saying Australia should do better than that. Ethnic Communities Council of WA president Suresh Rajan said: “Despite everything we as a nation have thrown at them, they appear to be incredibly loving and incredibly fond of Australians.”
The widespread sympathy is at odds with reality, given multiple court proceedings found the Tamil family were not refugees. After the High Court of Australia rejected an application to hear an appeal from them last year, then immigration minister Alex Hawke said it “followed a series of previous decisions by the Department of Home Affairs, Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Federal Circuit Court, Federal Court, Full Federal Court and High Court in relation to the family”.
One of the most notable decisions was made by the Federal Circuit Court, which rejected the Tamil family’s appeal against deportation. Justice Caroline Kirton found the initial Immigration Assessment Authority denying them refugee status was valid. She noted the Sri Lankan civil war had ended in 2009 and Nades, who claimed a fear of persecution, had returned to Sri Lanka three times during the civil war without harm. Former home affairs minister Peter Dutton said the Murugappan case was “completely without merit in terms of their claim to be refugees”.
A Department of Home Affairs spokesperson told the ABC the Tamil family’s case had been assessed over many years by various tribunals and courts and consistently found not to warrant refugee status. The spokesperson said: “Foreign nationals who do not hold a valid visa are expected to depart voluntarily.” But the Murugappans declined to do so and in January, Federal Circuit Judge Heather Riley ruled that three members of the family could reapply for bridging visas.
The victory for the Tamil couple in gaining prime ministerial support for their permanent residency bid could be a green light to people-smugglers. Sri Lankan authorities have suggested the country’s current economic woes are a major push factor driving illegal boat arrivals on Australian shores. Yet it was a major issue back in 2019 when Dutton visited Sri Lanka.
Speaking to The Weekend Australian, Sri Lankan navy spokesman Indika de Silva said the navy had been apprehending at least one boat a week for the past month. He noted that people-smugglers are fooling the population into believing they will have a better life in Australia, even though Labor has not announced plans to welcome illegal boat arrivals. The Labor government has committed to maintaining the Coalition’s key border security policy, Operation Sovereign Borders. But people-smugglers are liars and cheats. They exploit legal loopholes, look for signs of weakness in government policy and play the victim when caught. One common tactic is to plead refugee status falsely. Some use boats to bypass proper vetting procedures because their passengers are economic migrants, not genuine refugees. Others ferry criminals across borders to escape justice in their home countries where the law may be less liberal. The reality of terrorists exploiting weak border policy was brought into gruesome clarity by the jihadi attacks on Western soil at the height of Islamic State power.
Albanese knows the history of Labor government includes disastrous border security failures. When last in office, Labor dismantled Howard-era policy for what it claimed was a more humane approach to people seeking asylum. The compassionate approach resulted in more than 50,000 people arriving by boat and 1200 dying at sea. More than 8000 children were left in detention. The Coalition cleaned up the mess and estimated the cost at more than $17bn.
In recent months, Australia has followed the rest of the developed world in facing inflationary pressures as a result of the Covid pandemic. Rising interest rates and the high price of basic necessities will force many Australians into financial hardship. The priority of the government must be ensuring a return to prosperity. Short-term feel-good policies must give way to long-term strategic planning. At the last census, more than 116,000 Australians were homeless. In the turbulent economic times ahead, priority must be given to helping existing citizens including newly settled refugees and migrants. We should welcome those who demonstrate respect for our country and rule of law by undertaking proper processes to gain visas.
The Murugappan case might be the exception to the rule, but people-smugglers will sell it as the rule. However well liked by the Biloela community, their case will encourage other foreign nationals to think they have a chance of permanent residency in Australia even with asylum claims not recognised by the courts. Labor will be faced with the consequences and taxpayers will be left with the bill.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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12 June, 2022
Yuma’s Long-Distance Migrants
How far are those illegal migrants traveling to get to the sunny border city?
This fiscal year, Border Patrol agents have apprehended 39,650 Cubans, more than 34,700 Venezuelans, nearly as many Colombians, almost 18,200 Brazilians, 6,212 Indian nationals, and 4,300-plus Nicaraguans.
CBP reporting on apprehensions breaks down migrants into 20 separate nationalities, and one catchall “other”. In FY 2022, Border Patrol agents in Yuma sector have caught nearly 11,250 of those “other” aliens.
How do those aliens get to the middle of the Sonoran Desert? The Times explains that many fly into Mexicali, Mexico, and then take charter buses to spots along the U.S. border like the “Yuma Gap”, a break in the border fence across from the Morelos Dam on the Colorado River I described in March.
As I explained then, illegal border-crossers congregate on the levee on the U.S. side of the Yuma gap waiting to be picked up by Border Patrol to begin their processing. There were even some chairs there for them to sit in when I stopped by, and bottles of water to drink.
Processing occurs at a largely hidden soft-sided facility behind the Yuma sector headquarters. From there, most are released into the interior of the United States.
Of the 114,240 Brazilians, Colombians, Cubans, Haitians, Indian nationals, Nicaraguans, and “others” apprehended in Yuma sector thus far in FY 2022, fewer than 4,000 — 3.4 percent of the total — were expelled under CDC orders issued under Title 42 of the U.S. Code in response to the pandemic. The rest are here indefinitely, if not forever.
Haute Couture and Heavy Bags.
In my nearly 30 years in immigration, I have never before seen migrants coming across the border wearing haute couture styles more appropriate for the catwalk than the back roads. Under the Biden administration, however, such high-end attire is not exactly common, but it’s not rare, either.
One woman that I spotted walking from the banks of the Rio Grande in Del Rio in August had switched into a smart scoop neck sweater on the U.S. side, while others were shod in toney footwear. The House of Versace was a new one for me, but I assume that it is the new normal, too.
Nor at any point in the past three decades have I seen migrants schlepping more than a backpack. Airport roller bags were a regular sight in Del Rio, however, and for the Border Patrol to set weight limits on the amount of luggage that aliens can bring on its transport buses reveals that mine was not a one-off experience.
The Times refers to this as “glam migration” — a pretty apt tag. What I would conclude from Lankford’s descriptions and my own observations (and what the agents plainly know, too) is that few of these are the wretched refuse of anyone’s teeming shores. Most if not all are people who have made shrewd economic decisions in the past (or are the children of those who did), and for them, coming to the United States illegally in the Age of Biden is just the latest smart-money bet.
Again, some might have legitimate asylum claims, but they could make those claims in Mexico more easily than they can make them here. Another apt Times’ description is that “Yuma has become a key crossing point for well-to-do migrants from across the globe.”
That even those few upper-crust foreign nationals with valid claims would pick and choose their country of refuge is just the latest argument for limits on the American peoples’ humanitarian largesse. Only those coming here directly from the country of their alleged persecution should be allowed to apply for asylum in the United States.
The rest — the upper-class migrants simply seeking even better economic opportunities in this country — are just playing the American people for suckers. I believe in asylum, but I know my fellow citizens, too.
If refuge were only extended to the truly needy, the people of the United States would support it into perpetuity. When the asylum system is being abused by glam migrants in the latest fashions, however, you can expect Americans to pull back the helping hand — and likely sooner rather than later.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Illegal-Glam-Migrants-Yuma-Ariz
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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10 June, 2022
Fraud in the U.S. Student Visa Program?
Allegations in a recent whistleblower lawsuit raise serious questions about the extent of fraud in the foreign student program and the ability of the federal government to provide proper oversight.
More than 15,000 school campuses in the United States host more than 1.2 million foreign students. All of these schools are certified by a division within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) called the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). Each school names a staff liaison, called a Designated School Official (DSO), to maintain records in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a national security database created after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The New York Post recently reported that a DSO at Columbia University filed a lawsuit against the school, claiming to have been fired for refusing to enter false information about some foreign students into SEVIS the school’s request.
In today’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, Jon Feere, a former ICE Chief of Staff and the Center’s Director of Investigations, calls on SEVP to launch a review of Columbia University’s foreign student program. He explains how schools that fail to abide by important national-security-focused regulations may lose the privilege of enrolling new foreign students for at least one year. Will SEVP act? If not, will Congress?
CIS fellow David North has long covered so-called “visa mills”, schools that provide little in the way of education and exist mainly to provide foreigners with visas and work permits. But potential visa fraud at a top-ranked school stands out; is it merely the tip of the iceberg?
In his closing commentary, Mark Krikorian, the Center’s Executive Director and host of Parsing Immigration Policy, highlights a Washington Post article on Mexican law enforcement tracking American fugitives and deporting them to the U.S. No one in the article expressed concern with Mexico deporting a criminal alien, even one who claimed to have gone to Mexico "for a better life". But in the United States, the scene plays out differently, both as a policy matter and in the media.
https://cis.org/Parsing-Immigration-Policy/Fraud-US-Student-Visa-Program
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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9 June, 2022
Sri Lankan asylum-seekers deported from Australia after boat intercept
Australia knows how to send illegals back
Asylum-seekers were brought to shore on Christmas Island and then taken to a waiting charter flight to be returned to Colombo airport in Sri Lanka
Residents of the Australian island have told The Australian they watched as the asylum- seekers were brought ashore in the early hours of Thursday morning by what appeared to be Operation Sovereign Borders.
They were taken to a waiting Skytraders Airbus that is due to land shortly in Colombo, according to flight tracking data online. A total of 45 people boarded the plane, including government officials.
It is unclear when the asylum-seekers reached Australian waters. The Australian has been told they were recently intercepted and have been on an Operation Sovereign Borders vessel.
The Sri Lankans boarded the Airbus shortly after 2am Christmas Island time (5am AEST).
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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8 June, 2022
Latest DHS Report on Overstays in 2020 Brings Mixed News
The recent arrest of Shihab Ahmed Shihab, a citizen of Iraq who arrived in the United States on a visitor’s visa in September 2020, filed an asylum claim just before his authorized duration of stay expired, and proceeded to work on a plot to assassinate former President George W. Bush, has once again raised questions about how our temporary visa vetting could have again failed so spectacularly.1 According to the Department of Homeland Security’s latest overstay report, more than 400 Iraqis overstayed visitor visas in 2020. While not all overstayers are terrorists, obviously, our temporary visa system repeatedly has been exploited by terrorists who overstayed. Besides, overstays are believed to be about 40 percent of the illegal alien population residing in the United States, contributing to illegal employment and undermining the integrity of our immigration laws. This Backgrounder examines the statistics published in the DHS report and offers recommendations to address the persistent problem of visa overstays — those foreign visitors who enter on a temporary visa and fail to depart within the authorized duration of stay.
The newest edition of the DHS overstay report has good news and bad news.2 Overall, the number of overstays in 2020 went up very slightly from 2019, as did the rate of overstays. This is bad news, considering that for half of the fiscal year international travel was drastically curtailed due to the pandemic and fewer visas were issued in the second half of the year. The good news is that the number and rate of student and exchange visitor overstays continued to decline significantly, and the number of temporary worker overstays also declined notably. The most concerning news is that short-term visitor overstays, which is by far the largest category, generating more than half of all overstays, worsened significantly. And certain countries and categories remain a problem, both in the number of overstays they generate and the poor rates of visa compliance.
To improve visa compliance and prevent visa overstays from contributing to illegal immigration, Congress should direct the executive branch to boost interior enforcement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and direct the State Department, which issues visas to foreign travelers, to take more vigorous steps to reduce approvals and improve vetting for categories of applicants who are most likely to overstay. Finally, Congress should consider creating and imposing more meaningful consequences for employers, schools, and other organizations that sponsor visitors who do not comply with visas.
Key findings:
DHS counted 684,500 overstays in 2020, up very slightly (about 1 percent) from 2019, when 676,400 overstays were counted, and just below the levels in 2016 and 2017.
Approximately 100,000 of people who overstayed had subsequently departed the United States by the end of the 2020 calendar year, leaving about 567,000 remaining in the country as overstays.
The most problematic category of visitors for generating overstays is short-term visitors who enter on the standard “B” visa. More than half of all overstays are in this category (353,000 overstays out of 684,500), and these visitors have one of the worst compliance rates of the broad categories identified in the report.
Student visa compliance improved considerably in 2020. There were nearly 49,000 student visa overstays in 2020, a drop of 39 percent since 2016. The student visa overstay rate declined by 50 percent between 2016 and 2020.
Approximately 105,000 foreign visitors who entered under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) overstayed in 2020, which is similar to the number in recent years. The United Kingdom had the most VWP overstays, while VWP travelers from Portugal had the worst rate of compliance.
Compliance in the category that includes temporary workers improved considerably in 2020, with overstays dropping by nearly 30 percent from 2019, the largest drop in any category. This drop was driven primarily by a large decrease in overstays by citizens of India.
More here:
https://cis.org/Report/Latest-DHS-Report-Overstays-2020-Brings-Mixed-News
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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7 June, 2022
Foreign-Born Population Hit Record 47 Million in April 2022
An analysis of the Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) shows that the total foreign-born population (legal and illegal) in the U.S. hit 47 million in April of 2022 — a record high in American history. The foreign-born population includes all persons who are not U.S. citizens at birth. The size and growth of the foreign-born population in the CPS are important because, unlike arrival figures for legal immigrants or border apprehensions, the CPS measures the total number of legal and illegal immigrants actually living in the country, which is what ultimately determines immigration’s impact on American society.
There is a good deal of variation month-to-month in the data, but the two million increase in the foreign-born population since President Biden took office last January is both large and statistically significant. The dramatic growth is also quite striking because for the foreign-born population to grow at all, new arrivals must exceed both emigration and deaths, as all births to immigrants in the U.S., by definition, add only to the native-born population.
The 47 million foreign-born residents (legal and illegal) in the country in April of 2022 is the largest number ever recorded in any U.S. government survey or decennial census.
The total foreign-born population (legal and illegal) increased by two million in the first 16 months of the Biden administration — January 2021 to April 2022 — twice as fast as the U.S.-born population grew.
We preliminarily estimate that illegal immigrants accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the foreign-born population since January 2021 — 1.35 million.
Taking a longer view, since 2000, the total foreign-born population has grown by 50 percent; it’s doubled since 1990, tripled since 1980, and quintupled since 1970.
As a share of the total population, the foreign-born now account for 14.3 percent of the population, or one in seven U.S. residents — the highest percentage in 112 years. As recently as 1990 they were one in 13 U.S. residents.
If present trends continue, the foreign-born share of the population will reach 14.9 percent of the U.S. population in September 2023, higher than at any time in the nation’s 246-year history.
On average the foreign-born population has grown by 132,000 a month since President Biden took office, compared to 59,000 per month in Obama’s first term, 76,000 per month in Obama’s second term, and 42,000 per month under Trump before Covid-19 hit.
While much of the recent increase in the total foreign-born population is due to illegal immigration, those in the country legally still account for three-fourths of all foreign-born residents.
The states with the largest increase in the total foreign-born population from January 2021 to April 2022 are California (up 527,000), Florida (up 390,000), Pennsylvania (up 375,000), Michigan (up 247,000), Georgia (up 152,000), Arizona (up 148,000), New York (up 145,000), Tennessee (up 130,000), and South Carolina (up 128,000).
https://cis.org/Report/ForeignBorn-Population-Hit-Record-47-Million-April-2022
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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6 June, 2022
Why immigration and the border are taking a backseat in Tuesday's primary races
Joseph Long might have voted Democratic in Tuesday's California primaries — if, he says, those candidates had made a strong argument on immigration.
Instead, the 25-year-old construction worker and political independent is casting his ballot for Republican primary candidates because he's worried about inflation and a rising cost of living.
"Both (parties) are missing something" on the immigration debate, he said.
Analysts say Long is hardly alone in his thinking.
With majorities of Republicans embracing the far-right white nationalist great replacement theory and Democrats failing to lead on immigration, analysts and voters say worries like surging prices, gun violence and more are crowding out what is nonetheless a vital issue for much of the country.
Long is a white man in an adopted Hispanic family. His grandfather came to America from Mexico on a visa, ended up joining the military and became a doctor in the Air Force.
Immigration issues in California and across the country “should probably receive more attention” right now, he said.
Economy overshadows immigration
Among the states with primaries on Tuesday, California has more than 11 million immigrants – more than any state in the U.S. At least 1 in 4 New Jersey residents is an immigrant, and immigrants make up 9% of the New Mexico population, according to the American Immigration Council.
Immigrants are essential workers on farms and in food service and hospitality sectors, among a range of other industries.
But immigration and troubles at the border are being overshadowed by other anxieties on the minds of voters, including historic inflation, brutal acts of gun violence, expected overhauls to reproductive rights and the ongoing pandemic.
https://www.yahoo.com/video/why-immigration-border-taking-backseat-090033140.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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5 June, 2022
Biden’s border conveyor belts bring-in illegal migrants into the US
Under Biden’s loosen border policy, hundreds of single adult aliens and families from South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are entering the United States on a regular basis. Experts fear, members of various terrorist and jihadist groups are also using Biden’s liberal policy in entering the US under various disguise. Although on May 20, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the Biden administration must continue expelling border-crossing aliens under Title 42, it seems that, under Biden administration, Title 42 would be dead.
The Biden administration released more than 1.1 million border-crossers to all four corners of the United States in the 13 months through February 2022, according to earlier DHS filings in the federal lawsuit.
One other data indicator supports the idea that the announcement of Title 42’s retirement sparked a major surge on the border. Border Patrol apprehensions spiked from 147,820 in January and 159,060 in February before the announcement, to 210,749 in March and another 201,800 in April.
According to Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the Louisiana court ruling has proven to be no imposition at all for Team Biden, which is continuing the expansion of its “conveyor belt” of buses and airplanes “that are distributing thousands of previously expellable border crossers into American cities out of ear shot or sight of the American public”.
CIS reported that it had recently witnessed Team Biden’s immigration conveyor belt in action during a visit to the Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector, one of nine along the southern border where Title 42 expulsions are still supposed to be happening.
Reporting for CIS, Todd Bensman noted the immigration group “recently observed seven-days-per-week bus and plane transports into America’s interior from the Del Rio Sector and learned that these operations are not only spiking, but likely evidence of a border-wide development. The likely culprit is that, in Del Rio Sector and likely other busier Texas Border Patrol sectors, single adult aliens and families from South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East came in greater numbers on news that Title 42 would be ended, and then discovered the Biden administration was exempting them from the expulsion policy in any case”.
CIS also discovered that the Biden administration is giving free passage to significant numbers of a new nationality that has discovered the Title 42 loophole. About 500 Peruvians a week are hopping on Team Biden’s immigration conveyor belt, a senior Border Patrol official told CIS. Peru recently elected a communist government and is experiencing food riots.
“DHS is permitting so many to stay that chartered bus services in Del Rio, as well as American Airlines planes at the nearby Del Rio International Airport, now move them into America for hours on end seven days per week”, Bensman noted.
Tiffany Burrow, operations director at the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition, a non-profit immigrant assistance organization of volunteers, said her organization has been helping immigrants from more than 30 non-Mexican countries make their way in rising, almost overwhelming numbers to Florida, New Jersey, New York State, Oregon, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, Nevada, Utah, California, Minnesota, Wyoming, and Colorado.
Burrow said Border Patrol brought to her group 5,028 illegal border-jumpers from 33 different countries in March, the most in her organization’s history for a single month. The nonprofit helped transport another 9,000 into the country in April and May.
CIS observed the conveyor belt in action in Del Rio, where incoming Border Patrol buses leave their passengers fresh from processing stations right next to outbound Greyhound buses.
“The incoming and outgoing buses dance like this in the parking lot for hours every day, Title 42 apparently posing no obstacle whatsoever for the lucky beneficiary groups”, Bensman noted.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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3 June, 2022
Immigration: Is US-Mexico border seeing a surge in migrants?
President Joe Biden's immigration policies are being heavily criticised by Republicans, as large numbers of undocumented migrants cross the US-Mexico border.
Former president Donald Trump says migrants are coming over the border "like this country has never seen".
So what are the numbers?
The number of migrants intercepted at the border had been steadily rising since April 2020, but since President Biden took charge in January there has been a sharp increase.
In May, the latest month with published data, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded its highest monthly total in more than 20 years of just over 180,000 migrants, mostly single adults.
In May, US border patrol intercepted the most migrants crossing the southern border since April 2000
The head of homeland security in the US, Alejandro Mayorkas, said in March: "This is not new. We have experienced migration surges before - in 2019, 2014, and before then as well."
During the Trump administration, migrant encounters hit a monthly high of more than 144,000 in May 2019.
There has also been an increase in the number of children crossing the border since President Biden took office.
https://www.bbc.com/news/57656959
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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2 June, 2022
4,000 illegal immigrants crossed border over Memorial Day weekend in Rio Grande Valley sector alone
'There’s no effort to actually secure the border,' former border patrol chief says
The border crisis took no time off this Memorial Day weekend as thousands of migrants continued to pour over the southern border.
More than 4,000 migrants illegally crossed the border via the Rio Grande Valley over the course of the long weekend, Fox News has learned.
Former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott blasted the Biden administration for not addressing what he described as a growing national security crisis.
"There’s no effort to actually secure the border and to figure out who and what's coming in when you create a chaotic situation like this, and they have created this through their policies," Scott said.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol has encountered 1,219,920 undocumented migrants so far in 2022, and that number appears far from slowing amid the administration’s efforts to end Title 42, a health order that allows the U.S. to turn away undocumented migrants seeking asylum.
The Department of Justice announced it will appeal a decision handed down last week by a federal judge that blocked the administration from ending Title 42, however the DOJ has not officially filed the appeal.
Border Patrol agents work a checkpoint at an entry near the Del Rio International Bridge.
Border Patrol agents work a checkpoint at an entry near the Del Rio International Bridge. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Once Title 42 expires, the Department of Homeland Security predicts up to 18,000 migrants could cross the border daily.
Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz announced Friday that agents had nabbed 10 sex offenders, a slew of deadly drugs, and other illegal immigrants wanted for serious crimes in three days.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/4000-illegal-immigrants-border-memorial-day
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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1 June, 2020
Biden's failed immigration policies turned every state into a border state
In April 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 234,088 migrants at the southern border. This is the highest number of monthly apprehensions in CBP’s history, and a 1,268 percent increase compared to April 2020.
What has changed over the last two years? In 2020, we had a president who worked to secure our border and shield American citizens from drug traffickers trying to smuggle illicit substances into our country. Now, we have a president who has welcomed illegal immigrants into our country with open arms. Due to President Joe Biden’s open-door immigration policies, every state in America is now a border state. Through his failed border policies, President Biden has surrendered operational control of America’s southern border to drug cartels.
In his first 100 days in office, President Biden issued more than 90 executive actions on immigration, including stopping the construction of President Trump’s border wall, which cost taxpayers $72 million, and ending the Trump administration’s successful "Remain in Mexico" policy, which required migrants seeking asylum to wait in Mexico until their court date in the United States. Because of President Biden’s efforts to dismantle America’s border and immigration enforcement system, drug-overdose deaths reached a new record last year.
The Wall Street Journal reports that over 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2021. Provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that roughly two-thirds of these deaths came from synthetic opioids like fentanyl. To date, CBP has seized over 5,000 pounds of fentanyl in Fiscal Year 2022. This is enough to kill 2.4 billion people – nearly one-third of the Earth’s entire population. Fentanyl can be 50 times stronger than heroin, and it is easier for drug cartels to manufacture because it can be made from common chemicals.
Drug cartels are extremely violent and tactical. They have built intricate tunnels that allow them to smuggle drugs into our country undetected, they often send floods of migrants to the southern border to overwhelm Border Patrol agents, and they force their migrants to act as drug mules, carrying marijuana and poppy seeds so their growers can operate on American soil.
Merrick Garland, President Biden’s U.S. Attorney General, has made it clear that the Department of Justice would avoid cracking down on marijuana use in states that have legalized cannabis. This has encouraged drug cartels to produce cannabis "grows" in pro-cannabis states farmed by thousands of migrants illegally trafficked across the southern border
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-immigration-border-policies
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.
The "line" of this blog is that immigration should be SELECTIVE. That means that:
1). A national government should be in control of it. The U.S. and U.K. governments are not but the Australian government has shown that the government of a prosperous Western country can be. Up until its loss of office in 2007, the conservative Howard government had all but eliminated illegal immigration. The present Leftist government has however restarted the flow of illegals by repealing many of the Howard government regulations.
2). Selectivity should be based on "the content of a man's character, not on the color of his skin", as MLK said. To expand that a little: Immigrants should only be accepted if they as individuals seem likely to make a positive net contribution to the country. Many "refugees" would fail that test: Muslims and Africans particularly. Educational level should usually be a pretty fair proxy for the individual's likely value to the receiving country. There will, of course, be exceptions but it is nonetheless unlikely that a person who has not successfully completed High School will make a net positive contribution to a modern Western society.
3). Immigrants should be neither barred NOR ACCEPTED solely because they are of some particular ethnic origin. Blacks are vastly more likely to be criminal than are whites or Chinese, for instance, but some whites and some Chinese are criminal. It is the criminality that should matter, not the race.
4). The above ideas are not particularly blue-sky. They roughly describe the policies of the country where I live -- Australia. I am critical of Australian policy only insofar as the "refugee" category for admission is concerned. All governments have tended to admit as refugees many undesirables. It seems to me that more should be required of them before refugees are admitted -- for instance a higher level of education or a business background.
5). Perhaps the most amusing assertion in the immigration debate is that high-income countries like the USA and Britain NEED illegal immigrants to do low-paid menial work. "Who will pick our crops?" (etc.) is the cry. How odd it is then that Australians get all the normal services of a modern economy WITHOUT illegal immigrants! Yes: You usually CAN buy a lettuce in Australia for a dollar or thereabouts. And Australia IS a major exporter of primary products.
6). I am a libertarian conservative so I reject the "open door" policy favoured by many libertarians and many Leftists. Both those groups tend to have a love of simplistic generalizations that fail to deal with the complexity of the real world. It seems to me that if a person has the right to say whom he/she will have living with him/her in his/her own house, so a nation has the right to admit to living among them only those individuals whom they choose.
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