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28 March, 2024

Illegal migrant charged with shooting dead 25-year-old Michigan woman was deported under the Trump administration

The illegal migrant suspected of killing a 25-year-old Michigan woman was deported during the Trump administration and subsequently re-entered the country again illegally.

Brandon Ortiz-Vite, 25, is alleged to have shot and killed Ruby Garcia, 25, whose body was left at the side of highway U.S. 131 in downtown Grand Rapids on Friday night.

Michigan State Police are still carrying out an investigation into her death but believe she may have been the victim of a car-jacking at around 11:38pm on Friday.

Ortiz-Vite is awaiting arraignment on an open murder charge. He was booked on Sunday and is expected to be arraigned on Tuesday.

The accused is facing one count each of homicide/open murder, carjacking, felony firearm, illegally carrying a concealed weapon, operating while intoxicated and driving on a suspended or revoked license, records show, The Midwesterner reports.

Fox News Digital reports that the alleged killer was previously 'arrested by Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Detroit on Aug. 31, 2020, and served a notice to appear.

'He was ordered removed by an immigration judge with the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) Sept. 24, 2020, and was removed to Mexico Sept. 29, 2020,' according to an ICE spokesperson.

'At an unknown date and location Ortiz-Vite reentered the United States without inspection by an immigration official.'

Following his arrest for murder last week, a detainer has been lodged against the illegal migrant from Mexico.

Garcia's family are now helping to raise funds for her funeral and have set up a GoFundMe page that has raised $15,000.

Ruby's sister, Mavi Garcia, paid tribute to her sibling, describing her as 'a great person all around.'

'She would brighten up the room with her beautiful smile and laugh,' Garcia wrote on Facebook. 'She loved to travel, was dedicated to her work and enjoyed being with her family on her free time.

'She was a great daughter, sister, aunt and friend. She will be remembered as being full of life and laughter, those who were around her would know she was silly and made everyone laugh,' Garcia said.

'Her loss has impacted the lives of many people. Her life was taken too soon. She deserved to live life, travel the world, have kids and follow her dreams.

'She loved to travel … she had so many plans this year on traveling,' Garcia went on. 'I feel like her motivation in life were my mother and her nieces and nephews. She definitely was a strong person.'

It is not clear what, if any relationship existed between Ruby and Ortiz-Vite, who is originally from Puebla, Mexico.

'I prefer not to give out information on their relationship,' Mavi Garcia stated. 'He is currently in custody that's all we know as of right now and he is/was here illegally.'

'I can't thank you all enough for the big help the Garcia family is receiving in these tough times,' Garcia posted to Facebook.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13242269/Illegal-migrant-killer-deported-Trump-Mexico.html

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27 March, 2024

NYC begins handing out migrants taxpayer-funded, pre-paid debit cards at Roosevelt Hotel shelter, with 450 people set to begin receiving up to '$18,200-a-year'

Migrant families in New York city have begun receiving prepaid debit cards as part of a controversial scheme that could see them receive up to $18,200 a year.

Officials began distributing the cards to the first ten new arrivals at the city's Roosevelt Hotel shelter on Monday.

The cards are preloaded with a week's worth of funds and will be rolled out to 115 families, equivalent to 450 people by the end of the week.

Mayor Eric Adams is pressing ahead with the $53 million scheme, despite a furious backlash amid fears the cards are open to abuse.

The debit cards can only be used at supermarkets and bodegas, the city leader said. A family of four with two children could receive up to $350 per week, depending on the children’s ages.

Participants will also have to sign an affidavit swearing they will only use the cards for food or baby supplies at the risk of being removed from the program.

But critics including Adams' rival on the migrant crisis, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Queens born rapper, 50 Cent have questioned why migrants are receiving the cards ahead of struggling New Yorkers.

Abbott blasted the 'offensive' scheme as 'insanity,' but supporters say it will help the city deal with the strain on its services caused by a surge in migrants in recent months.

In the last two years 180,000 asylum seekers entered New York, with 65,000 still in shelters.

Adams insists the debit cards will save the city $600,000 a month, or $7.2 million annually, by allowing migrants to spend money that will go back into the local economy instead of the city spending funds on boxes of food.

Joseph Borelli, the City Council's Republican minority leader, acknowledged there would be a saving, but questioned the amount being spent on migrants.

'A lot of New Yorkers are going to take this as something that's fundamentally unfair,' he told the New York Times. 'There are plenty of New Yorkers struggling to pay their bills.'

 His administration was criticized for entering into the $434 million contract with DocGo, a medical services company whose work on the migrant crisis has been mired in controversy.

Adams has spent $570,000 on the contract so far, including a $125,000 starting fee for the company, advance funds for the cards and $3 per card to create them.

CEO Wole Coaxum insisted the digital coding on the cards ensures they will only work in preapproved stores, with families also being asked to save receipts.

His said company has worked on  universal basic income cards in other cities, including Los Angeles and Newark, N.J. where they were not abused.

'What we've found in each of these instances is that people spend the money on the intended purpose,' he said in an interview.

The city can remove people from the program if they are found to be committing fraud. Officials intend to gather data on the first families to receive the cards before rolling it out further.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13240229/nyc-migrants-taxpayer-debit-cards-roosevelt-hotel-shelter.html

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26 March, 2024

Strange Bedfellows: Texas Joins Biden Admin. in Suing Massive Illegal-Immigrant Development

AUSTIN, Texas — The State of Texas has now joined federal agencies in alleging a vast land sales fraud and foreclosure abuse scheme by the developers of perhaps the largest illegal immigrant colonia in the United States, a 60-square-mile city of at least 50,000 (and up to 75,000) northeast of Houston named Colony Ridge.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office alleges that Colony Ridge Development owners John and Trey Harris — once large Republican campaign donors to Gov. Greg Abbott — ran aggressive “predatory” land sales and “foreclosure mill” schemes that systematically defrauded tens of thousands “Spanish speakers” from “international communities” for more than a decade.

Many of the state’s allegations mirror federal ones that Biden administration-led agencies filed on December 20, 2023, in an 11-count civil rights complaint. The federal civil charges seeking payback damages allege that since at least 2016, the Harris brothers ran a large-scale “illegal land sales scheme” predicated on “predatory” and false advertising that tricked tens of thousands of Latinos into buying do-it-yourself, flooding-prone home building lots despite extremely high interest, foreclosure, and property-flipping rates.

No one knows how many illegal immigrants bought land in Colony Ridge from the Harris family. But local residents, law enforcement officials, business owners, and elected office holders almost uniformly believe the majority who bought into the massive colonia bought do-it-yourself home plots at high interest rates because they were not legally present in the United States; the company required no proof of income or credit.

While none of the lawsuits spell out that marketing and sales targeted illegal immigrants, the state filing and press release about marketing and selling to “international communities” suggest that former Colony Ridge employees are poised to later say so.

“Among other things, former employees of Colony Ridge have represented that the company instructed them to avoid selling to customers who could speak English or who did not appear to be of Latino or Hispanic heritage,” it said.

The brothers have colorfully denied all of the federal allegations, telling a local news outlet that the lawsuit was “total bullshit”, its allegations completely false.

“I don’t understand why we are being made into the bad guys,” Trey Harris said. “There are thousands of people who were living in apartments and rent houses who now have their own houses and are earning equity. If they are paying slightly higher interest rates, it is still better than paying rent and not earning equity.”

The brothers, though clearly eager to defeat the civil lawsuits and the massive business-killing penalties they portend, may soon have to expand their defense to new battlefields.

The New York Post has reported that the IRS and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have opened investigations on Colony Ridge’s developers and operations, and The Daily Wire has reported that the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 6 office has an active investigation, too.

https://cis.org/Bensman/Strange-Bedfellows-Texas-Joins-Biden-Admin-Suing-Massive-IllegalImmigrant-Development

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25 March, 2024

Border Patrol chief admits national security threat as terrorists may be among migrants illegally crossing border

“They dictate what the flow is going to look like and we respond to it,” Owens said in an interview that aired on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday when asked if smugglers are “setting the rules of engagement.”

“We try and get out in front of it and deny them the ability to use these areas,” he went on. “But at the end of the day, there’s over 1,900 miles of border with Mexico.”

Under the Biden administration, the US has endured record levels of migrants pouring across the southern border, including thousands who claim asylum and are then released into the country.

Border Patrol has reported 1,151,448 encounters at the southern border, according to the most recent tally of numbers through the 2024 fiscal year. The prior year saw 2,475,669, according to the agency.

Owens fretted that there could be terrorists and other dangerous people slipping through.

“That number is a large number, but what’s keeping me up at night is the 140,000 known got-aways, it’s not part of that,” he said, referring to the official count. “And that’s just what we know.

“That is a national security threat. Border security is a big piece of national security and if we don’t know who is coming into our country, and we don’t know what their intent is, that is a threat,” he continued. “They’re exploiting a vulnerability that’s on our border right now.”

The border chief noted that most of the encounters are with individuals who are turning themselves in and are fleeing dire economic conditions.

“[That] doesn’t make them bad people, it’s just that they’re not being respectful of the laws that we’ve established as a country,” he said.

Still, there are dangerous people buried in that population that do pose risks to the US, Owens contended.

“There are still people that we’re finding in those groups though that have criminal backgrounds, that have been convicted sexual predators, that had been convicted gang members — a very small amount in that population, but they’re still there,” he explained.

This fiscal year alone, Owens said the US has encountered migrants “from 160 countries or more” ranging from Latin America to Africa, that he attributed to various smuggling organizations.

Owens argued that more stringent penalties against offenders could help slow the crisis.

“I’m talking about jail time. I’m talking about being removed from the country and I’m talking about being banned from being able to come back because you chose to come in the illegal way instead of the established lawful pathways that we set for you,” he said.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/24/us-news/border-patrol-chief-admits-national-security-threat-as-terrorists-may-be-among-migrants-illegally-crossing-border/

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24 March, 2024

'Absolute Chaos': Illegal Alien Mob Overruns Texas National Guard at the Border

While President Joe Biden, impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and Border Czar Kamala Harris continue to insist that their policies are not responsible for the border crisis — one the White House & Co. denied existed for years — while also erroneously stating they're powerless to do anything about the chaos, the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border continues to get worse.

In a scene that looks more like the border of some war-torn third-world country, and after multiple months of record-setting illegal alien crossings on Biden's watch, a horde of illegal aliens have now stormed Texas authorities in an attempt to forcibly and unlawfully enter the U.S. To call it an "invasion" is anything but hyperbole.

Watch as Texas National Guard soldiers on the U.S. side of the border near El Paso became overrun on Thursday afternoon, via the New York Post's Jennie Taer (warning: language).

"Absolute chaos," indeed. Notably, this is the kind of chaos President Biden and his administration — including through the federal Department of Justice — are seeking to incentivize and normalize by suing Texas to block state efforts to secure the border, a duty in which Biden is entirely derelict.

As Townhall reported earlier this week, the Supreme Court of the United States on Tuesday gave Texas the green light to implement SB 4, a state law allowing Lone Star State officials to arrest, detain, and deport illegal aliens. But almost immediately after the Supreme Court ruled that Texas could proceed under SB 4 pending a ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, that court again blocked Texas from operating under the state law to allow the removal of illegal aliens.

As a result, Texas officials are left only able to try dissuading illegal aliens from unlawfully entering the U.S. after which most of them are processed and released into the country's interior pending an asylum hearing, dates for which are now stretching more than a half-decade into the future — even when a significant majority are ineligible for asylum.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2024/03/21/watch-as-illegal-migrant-riot-storms-texas-n2636821

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21 March, 2024

‘We’re So Sick of It’: Northern Border Crisis Gets Worse

HIGHGATE, Vt.—At dawn or dusk, Kristy Brow used to enjoy alone time walking in the woods on her 21-acre property in Highgate, Vermont, a small rural town near the U.S.–Canada border.

Lately, however, she’s cautious—she’s worried about potential encounters with illegal immigrants along the remote logging trail.

“I don’t go out by myself anymore—especially at night,” said Mrs. Brow, who runs a dog obedience business from her home.

“It’s unsettling. You can’t feel relaxed anymore,” she said. “You want to be safe in your own house and on your property.

“It’s getting bad. Sometimes, you see them on the interstate, looking for a ride.”

Mrs. Brow and her husband are both avid hunters and have deer stands set up on their property. Their game cameras often record illegal immigrants passing through.

The illegal immigrants travel alone or in small groups, discarding unwanted belongings as they trudge further south into Vermont, headed for destinations unknown.

“We find clothes out here. We found shoes and a bicycle. We see Border Patrol out there on snow dogs following footprints,” Mrs. Brow told The Epoch Times.

Once a place of peace and solitude, she said the woods behind her house are now a shortcut for illegal immigrants.

And it’s only gotten worse since President Joe Biden took office, she said.

In fiscal year 2023, border officials encountered 189,401 illegal and inadmissible immigrants along the U.S.–Canada border, including at the ports of entry. Of those, 10,021 were caught crossing illegally between ports of entry.

In fiscal 2021, that number was 916.

Mrs. Brow’s property falls within the Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Swanton Sector, a 295-mile stretch of largely unguarded border with Canada.

Swanton Sector Chief Patrol Agent Robert Garcia wrote on social media earlier this month that border agents in his sector apprehended more illegal immigrants in fiscal year 2023 than “the prior 11 fiscal years combined.”
The Swanton Sector encompasses 24,000 square miles and includes all of Vermont and several counties in New Hampshire and New York State.

Traveling on foot in the area is especially challenging during the winter months.

Border officials have encountered illegal immigrants marching across miles of snow-covered wilderness, swamps, muddy fields, and meadows in sub-freezing temperatures.

Many succumb to the elements.

This month, eight illegal immigrants from Albania and India died while trying to cross the St. Lawrence River in New York State.

In February, a Mexican man traveling in a group near Holland, Vermont, collapsed and died after crossing illegally into the United States.

“It cannot be stressed enough: not only is it unlawful to circumvent legal means of entry into the United States, but it is extremely dangerous, particularly in adverse weather conditions, which our Swanton Sector has in incredible abundance,” Mr. Garcia said in a statement.

Border officials often use snowmobiles and tracked all-terrain vehicles to pursue illegal immigrants.

“Despite sub-freezing temperatures, Swanton Sector continues encountering family groups with young children, including infants, illegally crossing from Canada into the U.S.,” according to the CBP website.

A woman who lives in New Hampshire told The Epoch Times an illegal immigrant swam across Wallace Pond in Canaan, arriving soaking wet on her neighbor’s doorstep asking for help.

In a separate incident, Mrs. Brow recalled her neighbor returning home one afternoon to find an illegal immigrant sitting on her front steps.

“He wanted to charge his phone at her house,” Mrs. Brow said.

While the neighbor allowed the man to charge his cellphone outside the house, she also called Border Patrol, who came and arrested him.<i>[And then let him go]</i>

https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/were-so-sick-of-it-northern-border-crisis-gets-worse-5607148?ea_src=au-frontpage&ea_med=most-read-3

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20 March, 2024

Supreme Court Lets Texas Enforce Law Allowing Police to Arrest Illegal Immigrants

The Supreme Court allowed Texas’ law enabling local police to arrest illegal migrants to take effect Tuesday.

After extending a pause on the law multiple times, the Supreme Court allowed Texas’ SB 4 to take effect Tuesday, declining the Biden administration’s effort to halt it while litigation continues. The Department of Justice first filed its lawsuit against Texas to prevent enforcement of the law in January.

“The Court gives a green light to a law that will upend the longstanding federal-state balance of power and sow chaos, when the only court to consider the law concluded that it is likely unconstitutional,” Justice Sonia Sotomyaor wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “This law implicates serious issues that are subject to ongoing political debate, and Texas’s novel scheme requires careful and reasoned consideration in the courts to determine which provisions may be unconstitutional.”

Justice Elena Kagan also wrote in a dissent that she would not have allowed the law to take effect.

U.S. District Court Judge David Alan Ezra, a Reagan appointee, blocked Texas’ law from taking effect in February, finding it “threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice.”

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay early March allowing the law to take effect while it considered the appeal, prompting the Biden administration to file an emergency application with the Supreme Court.

“So far as I know, this Court has never reviewed the decision of a court of appeals to enter—or not enter—an administrative stay,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in a concurrence joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “I would not get into the business.”

“Texas’s motion for a stay pending appeal was fully briefed in the Fifth Circuit by March 5, almost two weeks ago,” Barrett wrote. “Merits briefing on Texas’s challenge to the District Court’s injunction of S. B. 4 is currently underway. If a decision does not issue soon, the applicants may return to this Court.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/19/supreme-court-lets-texas-enforce-law-allowing-police-to-arrest-illegal-immigrants/

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19 March, 2024

Almost no NYC migrants are accepting free plane, bus tickets after shelter evictions, data shows

Less than 2% of adult migrants per day are accepting free plane or bus tickets to leave the Big Apple once they are booted from the city’s overflowing shelter system, newly released data shows.

Of the roughly 1,600 asylum seekers who flock to the city’s East Village intake center each day, an average of just 30 per day have been willing to relocate to another city or state, according to data obtained by Gothamist from the city’s emergency management agency.

In September, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration cut the time that adult migrants can stay at city-run shelters to 30 days, in a bid to free up space in the already overburdened system.

As a result, hundreds of adult migrants have for months been flooding the intake center — located at the former St. Brigid School on East 7th Street.

Hundreds of adult migrants have for months been flooding the intake center -- located at the former St. Brigid School on East 7th Street

Once there, the migrants can either re-apply for taxpayer-funded temporary housing, which could see them sent to hotels upstate — or take up the offer of a free one-way bus or plane ticket.

The data, collected between Dec. 17 to March 3, shows that just 15% of the migrants, on average, were able to secure another bed after trying to re-enter the shelter system at the East Village intake center after getting their 30-day eviction notice.

The city has so far coughed up $7.6 million to reticket migrants out of the Big Apple since spring 2022, a City Hall spokesperson told The Post.

The top destinations include other parts of New York state, Illinois, Texas, Florida, Colorado, Minnesota, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Hundreds of adult migrants have for months been flooding the intake center -- located at the former St. Brigid School on East 7th Street -- after the city started capping the time a single adult migrant can remain in a shelter

It wasn’t immediately clear how much of that $7.6 million has been forked out at the East Village center. Asylum seekers can also get reticketed at other shelters, including the city’s main Roosevelt Hotel intake center. The data for the other reticketing sites was not immediately available.

City officials, however, insist that roughly 60% of the migrants who have come through the Big Apple’s shelter system since spring 2022 — or about 113,000 — have already “taken the next steps in their journeys.” This includes asylum seekers who are no longer in the city’s care because they either support themselves or left using their own means.

“We’re laser-focused on using intensive case management, reticketing, and legal support to help more people move out of shelter as they desire more self-sufficient lives,” the City Hall rep told The Post.

“While we are grateful for the assistance we have received thus far from our federal partners, we need more. We need the federal government to finish the job they started by providing more asylum seekers with expedited work authorization, sending additional financial support to New York City, and implementing a comprehensive decompression and resettlement strategy.”

https://nypost.com/2024/03/11/us-news/less-than-2-of-nyc-migrants-are-accepting-free-plane-bus-tickets-after-shelter-eviction/

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18 March, 2024

Australian philanthropist's urgent warning to Australia as a record influx of new immigrants move Down Under

Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith says a record influx of new immigrants is a 'disaster for families' and young people wanting to own their own home.

The electronics chain founder, who turns 80 next week, wants Australia's net immigration slashed to 75,000 a year to ease Australia's rental and housing affordability crisis.

This would take immigration levels back to where they were in 1997, before the overseas intake doubled within a decade, only to double again after the pandemic.

'Every Australian family has a population plan to have the number of children they can give a good life to, but at the rate we are going, it means the average Australian family will have less,' Mr Smith told the Daily Telegraph.

Australia's population is estimated to double in the next 50 years, with big business interests advocating high immigration to boost the supply of labour.

Mr Smith said 'billionaire political donors' only promoted high population growth to expand their wealth.

New Australian Bureau of Statistics data released on Thursday showed Australia welcomed 125,410 permanent and long-term arrivals in January, marking the highest January on record.

Accounting for departures, the net growth in permanent and long-term arrivals for January reached 55,330, surpassing the previous highest intake in January 2009 by 40 percent.

Treasury economists are expecting Australia's overseas intake, covering skilled migrants and international students, to slow to 375,000 in 2023-24.

This would be lower than the record 518,000 intake for 2022-23 and below January's annual increase of 481,620.

But this would still be almost double the pre-pandemic level of 194,400 in 2019-20, before Australia was closed from March 2020 to December 2021.

Official data showed the majority of new arrivals are settling in NSW and then Victoria, leading to more congestion in Australia's two biggest cities.

Most migrants begin as renters, leading to more competition for accommodation in Sydney and Melbourne.

High population growth is also creating problems in other states, with Brisbane the recipient of high interstate migration, as south-east Queensland attracts residents from NSW and Victoria in search of more affordable housing and warmer weather.

Daniel Wild, the deputy executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs think tank, said high immigration was behind Australia's housing crisis.

'It is clear that the federal government's migration program is unplanned, out of control, and out of step with community expectations,' he said.

'On top of this it has failed to address Australia's worker shortage crisis, the very thing the federal government uses to justify such rapid increases in intake.

'It is clear this lazy approach to solving worker shortages is not working and there should be a greater focus of getting Australian pensioners, veterans and students into work.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13199425/Dick-Smiths-urgent-warning-Australia.html

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17 March, 2024

Illegal Immigrants Leave US Hospitals With Billions in Unpaid Bills

Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are flooding into U.S. hospitals for treatment and leaving billions in uncompensated health care costs in their wake.

The House Committee on Homeland Security recently released a report illustrating that from the estimated $451 billion in annual costs stemming from the U.S. border crisis, a significant portion is going to health care for illegal immigrants.

With the majority of the illegal immigrant population lacking any kind of medical insurance, hospitals and government welfare programs such as Medicaid are feeling the weight of these unanticipated costs.

Apprehensions of illegal immigrants at the U.S. border have jumped 48 percent since the record in fiscal year 2021 and nearly tripled since fiscal year 2019, according to Customs and Border Protection data.

Last year broke a new record high for illegal border crossings, surpassing more than 3.2 million apprehensions.

And with that sea of humanity comes the need for health care and, in most cases, the inability to pay for it.

In January, CEO of Denver Health Donna Lynne told reporters that 8,000 illegal immigrants made roughly 20,000 visits to the city’s health system in 2023.

The total bill for uncompensated care costs last year to the system totaled $140 million, said Dane Roper, public information officer for Denver Health. More than $10 million of it was attributed to “care for new immigrants,” he told The Epoch Times.

Though the amount of debt assigned to illegal immigrants is a fraction of the total, uncompensated care costs in the Denver Health system have risen dramatically over the past few years.

The total uncompensated costs in 2020 came to $60 million, Mr. Roper said. In 2022, the number doubled, hitting $120 million.

He also said their city hospitals are treating issues such as “respiratory illnesses, GI [gastro-intenstinal] illnesses, dental disease, and some common chronic illnesses such as asthma and diabetes.”

“The perspective we’ve been trying to emphasize all along is that providing healthcare services for an influx of new immigrants who are unable to pay for their care is adding additional strain to an already significant uncompensated care burden,” Mr. Roper said.

He added this is why a local, state, and federal response to the needs of the new illegal immigrant population is “so important.”

Colorado is far from the only state struggling with a trail of unpaid hospital bills.

Dr. Robert Trenschel, CEO of the Yuma Regional Medical Center situated on the Arizona–Mexico border, said on average, illegal immigrants cost up to three times more in human resources to resolve their cases and provide a safe discharge.

“Some [illegal] migrants come with minor ailments, but many of them come in with significant disease,” Dr. Trenschel said during a congressional hearing last year.
“We’ve had migrant patients on dialysis, cardiac catheterization, and in need of heart surgery. Many are very sick.”

He said many illegal immigrants who enter the country and need medical assistance end up staying in the ICU ward for 60 days or more.

A large portion of the patients are pregnant women who’ve had little to no prenatal treatment. This has resulted in an increase in babies being born that require neonatal care for 30 days or longer.

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986 requires that public hospitals participating in Medicare “must medically screen all persons seeking emergency care … regardless of payment method or insurance status.”

The numbers are difficult to gauge as the policy position of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is that it “will not require hospital staff to ask patients directly about their citizenship or immigration status.”

In southern California, again close to the border with Mexico, some hospitals are struggling with an influx of illegal immigrants.

American patients are enduring longer wait times for doctor appointments due to a nursing shortage in the state, two health care professionals told The Epoch Times in January.

A health care worker at a hospital in Southern California, who asked not to be named for fear of losing her job, told The Epoch Times that “the entire health care system is just being bombarded” by a steady stream of illegal immigrants.

“Our healthcare system is so overwhelmed, and then add on top of that tuberculosis, COVID-19, and other diseases from all over the world,” she said.

A newly-enacted law in California provides free healthcare for all illegal immigrants residing in the state. The law could cost taxpayers between $3 billion and $6 billion per year, according to recent estimates by state and federal lawmakers.

In New York, where the illegal immigration crisis has manifested most notably beyond the southern border, city and state officials have long been accommodating of illegal immigrants’ healthcare costs.

Since June 2014, when then-mayor Bill de Blasio set up The Task Force on Immigrant Health Care Access, New York City has worked to expand avenues for illegal immigrants to get free health care.

“New York City has a moral duty to ensure that all its residents have meaningful access to needed health care, regardless of their immigration status or ability to pay,” Mr. de Blasio stated in a 2015 report.

The report notes that in 2013, nearly 64 percent of illegal immigrants were uninsured. Since then, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants have settled in the city.

“The uninsured rate for undocumented immigrants is more than three times that of other noncitizens in New York City (20 percent) and more than six times greater than the uninsured rate for the rest of the city (10 percent),” the report states.

The report states that because healthcare providers don’t ask patients about documentation status, the task force lacks “data specific to undocumented patients.”

Some health care providers say a big part of the issue is that without a clear path to insurance or payment for non-emergency services, illegal immigrants are going to the hospital due to a lack of options.

“It’s insane, and it has been for years at this point,” Dana, a Texas emergency room nurse who asked to have her full name omitted, told The Epoch Times.

Working for a major hospital system in the greater Houston area, Dana has seen “a zillion” migrants pass through under her watch with “no end in sight.” She said many who are illegal immigrants arrive with treatable illnesses that require simple antibiotics. “Not a lot of GPs [general practitioners] will see you if you can’t pay and don’t have insurance.”

She said the “undocumented crowd” tends to arrive with a lot of the same conditions. Many find their way to Houston not long after crossing the southern border. Some of the common health issues Dana encounters include dehydration, unhealed fractures, respiratory illnesses, stomach ailments, and pregnancy-related concerns.

“This isn’t a new problem, it’s just worse now,” Dana said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/illegal-immigrants-leave-us-hospitals-with-billions-in-unpaid-bills-5604492

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14 March, 2024

How Rich People Create Poverty

This is a standard economist's case for immigration but it omits sociological considerations, not least of which is the many crimes committed by immigrants, particularly by their children.  It also omits mention of the fact that many of the present crop of illegal immigrants come from the basically Fascist countries of Latin America, where the promise of taxing the rich to help the poor is axiomatic.  They tend to bring those values with them, which delivers disaster once those immigrants get access to the voting booth.

Fascism is basically democratic.  Even Hitler was fairly elected, so it differs from Communism.  Both systems are economically destructive but the failures of Communism are much more evident.  For that reason refugees from Communist and Fascist counties differ, with refugees from (say) Cuba tending to skepticism towards socialist promises

So on sociological grounds there is a strong case for SELECTIVE immgration.  Considering economic theory only is naive

It’s popular within the academy and fashionable intellectual circles to blame rich Westerners for global poverty, or rich Americans for national poverty. Rich people shoulder a lot of the blame for poverty, but not for the reasons you might think.

It’s worth revisiting why rich Westerners share so much blame for poverty. It’s not because we have high standards of living. Rather, it’s because we enthusiastically embrace immigration restrictions that make it hard for people to move to where their labor is most valuable and tariffs that make their labor less valuable by reducing their customer base—and we make ourselves worse off in the process. In October 2023, President Biden announced plans to resume construction on the border wall he’d pledged to stop while running for President. We’re not blameworthy because we’re richer. We’re blameworthy because we refuse to further enrich ourselves by letting foreigners trade.

People blame the wants of the many on the luxuries of the few. This is incorrect, zero-sum thinking, which holds that there is, always and everywhere, only a fixed amount of stuff to go around. By this reasoning, the fact that I have indicates that someone else has not. Someone goes thirsty because I’m drinking a can of club soda or sparkling water. My opulence causes their want. If that’s true, it’s only true in the very, very short run. People don’t have much because they don’t produce much, and while it’s true that we could redistribute everything and raise the poor’s living standards considerably, we could do so only once (and if we did, we would find the same inequalities emerging immediately). Regular confiscations and redistributions don’t exactly provide people with strong incentives to invest and produce a lot in the first place. One person’s wealth does not cause another’s poverty in a commercial society. It’s a bit more complicated when the rich person is a powdered lord getting ever-richer by taxing the peasants.

A related argument blames global capital, suggesting that we owe our high standards of living to the low standards of living of the farmers and factory workers in poor countries. You might periodically see something float across social media explaining how little of the price of a chocolate bar goes to chocolate farmers or claims that you can buy cheap textiles because people around the world make them for you in (by Western standards) horrific conditions. There are alternative, more accurate explanations. First, the chocolate example shows how little of the value added to a chocolate bar comes from chocolate cultivation, rather than the process’s shipping, processing, marketing, and other parts. Second, the poor conditions in “sweatshops” are due to the workers’ low productivity combined with their lousy alternatives. As Paul Heyne has argued, it seems odd (and morally questionable) to suggest that we are obliged to refrain from offering them slightly better alternatives.

A few sentences ago, I wrote that (some) people don’t have much because they don’t produce much. That isn’t because of any innate deficiency. It’s because of the incentives they face in the societies they inhabit. Making people more productive is a laudable goal, but it has a checkered history. The real gains come from people moving to where their labor is more valuable—and that’s in high-income countries like the United States. The problem is, we rich Westerners won’t let them come. We consign them to lives of low productivity and the attendant poverty by building walls and saying, “No foreigners allowed.” The kicker? We impoverish ourselves in the process. We impoverish ourselves by keeping markets from working and, therefore, keeping others poor.

At the end of 2020, I expressed a wish that we would roll back border socialism. Those policies are among the main reasons why people in low-income countries continue to “enjoy” low incomes. If we allowed them to move to the United States, they might remain poor by American standards, but become rich by global standards.

There is another interesting consideration here, as well. Adam Smith famously wrote that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. Immigration and trade restrictions deliberately limit the extent of the market. Smaller markets mean less specialization and a coarser division of labor, meaning we’re worse off, on net. Some people might be made better off by such policies (which is why they support them), but their net gains are smaller than the rest of our net losses.

This is especially true in the long run. Larger markets mean a finer division of labor and a finer division of knowledge. In “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” F.A. Hayek quotes Alfred North Whitehead, who said that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” Thanks to the division of knowledge, I can write articles like these on a machine I couldn’t design myself, using software I couldn’t write, and I don’t have to think about any of these things. An extensive social division of knowledge means I can concentrate on composition.

In left-wing versions of the popular imagination, rich Westerners are rich because we exploit poor people in the rest of the world. We do share a lot of blame for global poverty, but not because of theft or exploitation. Rather, we are blameworthy because policies like immigration restrictions actively and forcibly prevent people worldwide from improving their lives by moving to where their labor is more productive.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14857&omhide=true&trk=title

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13 March, 2024

How ‘Sanctuary Cities’ Are Costing American Lives

According to a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, ICE asked police in Montgomery County, Maryland, 119 times this year to detain and hand over criminal aliens they had arrested. The criminals’ records included “convictions for assault, robbery, illegal firearms, sex abuse of a minor, rape, and MS-13 gang membership,” former official John Feere said. Montgomery County didn’t honor a single request.

 

ICE “detainers” are a request from federal law enforcement to their state and local colleagues to let them know when a foreign national (“alien” in immigration law) is going to be released from custody after having been arrested or after having served time for a criminal conviction. This is so ICE can take them into federal custody pending removal, or during any legal process needed to deport them.

Illegal aliens are deportable under immigration law simply for being here illegally, but they can apply for relief such as asylum. Some have legitimate asylum cases, fearing for their lives if they are returned to their home countries, but the majority clog the system with bogus claims so they can stay in the United States for years—oftentimes, indefinitely. But being convicted of a crime makes illegal aliens doubly deportable under other sections of the law.

When detainers are honored, ICE can lock potentially violent alien suspects or convicts safely away from the public. Unfortunately, many local and even state governments in the U.S. have “sanctuary” policies, one of which is to refuse to inform ICE when they arrest or release an alien.

What this means for Americans from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Zebulon, New Mexico, is that convicts who are highly likely to reoffend are being released into their neighborhoods every day. For the leftists currently controlling U.S. immigration policy, the ideology of open borders and defunding law enforcement trumps your safety and security every time.

Here are a few examples of how sanctuary jurisdictions’ refusal to honor detainers puts Americans at risk.

In October 2019, Carlos Orlando Iraheta-Vega, a 20-year-old illegal alien, was charged with beating a 16-year-old high school student to death with a baseball bat after an argument. Iraheta-Vega entered the U.S. illegally when he was under 18, benefiting from immigration policy that coddles “unaccompanied alien minors,” and joined (or rejoined) the Salvadoran gang MS-13.

As reported in the Washington Times, back in November 2018, Iraheta-Vega was arrested for stealing a car. Shortly after, he was arrested for drunk driving. He added another DUI arrest to his record in the summer of 2019. Each time, the “sanctuary” policies of King County, Washington, set Iraheta-Vega free before ICE could pick him up. Local police and prison authorities ignored all of ICE’s detainer requests and cut him loose without informing the agency.

Iraheta-Vega was able to live the gangster life—despite being an illegal alien—with impunity. Until he killed someone.

Now remember—this was back in 2019, when ICE had White House support in asking sanctuary jurisdictions to help them deport dangerous criminals. Imagine how things are now under President Joe Biden and his enforcement-averse secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas.

Sanctuary cities and counties can be found all over the country, in blue states and red. But their effects are the same everywhere: heightened, preventable risks to the public from criminal convicts who have no right to remain in the country.

In another example, in June 2021, an unnamed Honduran man was caught entering the U.S. illegally near Roma, Texas. Under the Biden “catch-and-release” policy, the Border Patrol gave him a notice to appear in court (many months later) and released him. We don’t know if he showed up for his first, or any, immigration hearings, but in July 2023, police in Herndon, Virginia, arrested and charged him with felony rape, abduction, and assault on a family member.

ICE sent a detainer request to the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center, but the center ignored it and released him in August without letting ICE know. Despite Fairfax County’s refusal to assist them, ICE agents from Washington, D.C., arrested the Honduran on Oct. 12 and served him with (another) court notice to attend deportation proceedings. We can only hope that ICE has him detained now, so he can’t assault anyone else.

In October 2023, ICE arrested an unnamed Peruvian illegal alien who was charged with several sex crimes against a minor. Border Patrol first encountered the man in March 2022, but, like millions of others, he was released into the country pending the usual delayed, dragged-out immigration court process to remove him. Then in October 2022, the Peruvian was arrested in Fairfax, Virginia, for petit larceny, but his conviction was deferred by the court, and he was let go.

In July 2023, he was again arrested, on eight sex-crime charges against a victim under 13 years old. The day after his arrest, ICE lodged a detainer, but the Fairfax County detention center ignored it and released this predator into the community. Finally, after almost a month on the loose, the man was taken into custody by ICE in late October.

Unlike Fairfax County, some liberal jurisdictions are finally waking up to public anger at the consequences of their sanctuary policies.

The Washington Times reported in late February that Montgomery County, Maryland, will now “add more crimes to the county’s list where it will cooperate” with ICE and will give ICE 48 hours’ notice ahead of releasing criminals to give the agency time to pick them up and hold them, pending deportation, if a judge orders it.

The list isn’t a complete one, and Montgomery County’s executive (similar to a mayor, in charge of the executive branch of the county government) thinks he shouldn’t have to inform ICE about arrests for charges he doesn’t consider serious. But he may not have the full picture of someone’s criminal record to judge the risk. Regardless, local police should inform ICE every time they cite and arrest, and especially before they release any illegal alien.

As Manhattan Institute fellow and member of the Council on Criminal Justice Rafael Mangual wrote in his book “Criminal [In]justice,” “Criminals don’t specialize. ... Nearly 40 percent of violent felons were on probation, parole, or pretrial release when they committed their offense.”

Jose Ibarra, the man accused of murdering Georgia nursing student Laken Riley in February, was previously arrested in New York for riding with a child on a moped without helmets (or a license) but then released by notoriously lax New York City prosecutors. Later, he and his brother were caught shoplifting in Georgia but only given misdemeanor citations and steered toward a woke “pre-arrest diversion program”—which clearly didn’t divert him from wrongdoing. Ibarra committing another crime, even if not a horrific murder, was entirely predictable.

What it took for Montgomery County to grudgingly pare back its “sanctuary” policy was the shooting and killing of a two-year-old boy by an illegal alien police had arrested—and then released—twice before without honoring ICE detainers. This one county is increasing collegial cooperation with federal authorities in the interests of public safety. How many more innocent victims will have to die before hardcore “sanctuary” cities like New York, Chicago, and Portland come around?

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/how-sanctuary-cities-are-costing-american-lives-5605975

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12 March, 2024

Refugees and Asylees Don’t Pay Their Own Way

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently issued a report claiming that refugees and asylees as a group are net fiscal contributors, meaning they pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. This claim deserves more than a little skepticism. The U.S. labor market rewards workers for their skills, and the government then redistributes some of the rewards through progressive taxation and spending. Logic dictates — and empirical analysis confirms — that high-skill workers tend to be net contributors, while the less-skilled tend to be net consumers.

Refugees fall toward the lower end of the skill distribution. According to the Annual Survey of Refugees (which does not include asylees), just 11 percent of recent refugees age 25 or older arrived with a bachelor’s degree, and 53 percent arrived without a high school diploma. It’s implausible that a group with such a low average skill level could be making a net contribution — especially considering that, unlike most other immigrants, refugees are immediately eligible for the full panoply of welfare benefits. Asylees would need to have quite a positive fiscal impact to make up for the low skill level of refugees alone.

So where does the report go wrong? Its main problem is that it excludes costs associated with “congestible” public goods, such as police, highways, and parks. The report’s authors argue that the marginal cost of congestion is negligible because refugees and asylees are such a small portion of the national population, but that’s valid only if they are spread evenly throughout the country. Refugees and asylees can certainly be large portions of local populations, and congestion costs in those places add up. Based on prior research from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that the authors acknowledge on page 30, assigning refugees and asylees the average per-capita cost of congestible goods likely turns their fiscal impact negative.

Even without the exclusion of congestible goods, the report’s findings would be of limited value due to the lack of policy-relevant subgroup analyses, such as the potential difference between refugees and asylees mentioned above. The two programs could be separately expanded or contracted depending on their independent impacts — but only if policymakers know what those independent impacts are.

Similarly, the report combines recent arrivals with those who became refugees or asylees decades ago, reducing its usefulness for evaluating present-day policies. While the U.S. once took in several groups of higher-skill refugees, such as Soviet dissidents in the 1980s and Eastern Europeans in the 1990s, today refugees come mainly from less-developed parts of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, which has caused the average refugee’s education level to plummet. Should the experience of Soviet dissidents arriving in the 1980s really inform our expectations of Somalis who enter today? Breakdowns of the fiscal impact by education or regional origin would help mitigate this interpretive problem, but, again, the report does not provide them.

In 2020, the Center estimated the fiscal impact of recent refugees (not including asylees) by applying their age and education levels to cost estimates developed by the National Academies. Taking into account all taxes and benefits, the average refugee's lifetime fiscal cost was $60,000 in net present value, with those entering as adults costing $133,000 each. Perhaps this is a price that the U.S. should be willing to pay to further its humanitarian goals, but the price is real nonetheless. Advocates should not deny the trade-off.

https://cis.org/Richwine/Refugees-and-Asylees-Dont-Pay-Their-Own-Way

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11 March, 2024

Gallup: Immigration Surges to the Top of Americans’ Concerns

With Super Tuesday ended and the 2024 presidential electoral matchup pitting former President Donald Trump against current President Joe Biden set (for now), immigration is now Americans’ leading concern according to a poll released last week by Gallup. That survey is no outlier, and the question now is whether the incumbent and Congress can address voters’ angst over the crisis at the Southwest border in the next eight months. If they can’t, they may be looking for new jobs come January.

Gallup. The results of that poll were released on February 27, with 28 percent of respondents identifying “immigration” as “the most important problem facing this country today”. That puts the issue in first place out of 15 topics polled, solidly beating out “government” (20 percent), the “economy in general” (12 percent), “inflation” (11 percent), and “crime” (3 percent).

Even if you combine the economy and inflation — closely intertwined issues — immigration is still a bigger concern. That is nothing short of tectonic, especially since just one month earlier, immigration was just the second biggest issue for Americans, at 20 percent, trailing the economy by one point.

It’s not entirely clear why Americans are suddenly focused on immigration, given that the Southwest border is in no better or worse shape than two years ago, but migrant crises in northern cities, the Senate’s failure to pass a border bill, and recent high-profile crimes committed by migrants have likely played a major role.

Separately, that poll revealed that 55 percent of Americans view “large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally” as a “critical threat” to the United States over the next 10 years. Gallup has been polling on this question since 2004, and never in that two-decade period have Americans’ concerns about the unauthorized population been so heightened.

By contrast, at the outset of the Trump administration in 2018, just 38 percent of Gallup respondents said that illegal immigration would be a critical threat in the succeeding decade. When the question was first asked, in 2004 with September 11 fresh in Americans’ minds, just half of those polled saw illegal immigration as a critical threat.

There was, not surprisingly, a partisan split on this question, with 90 percent of Republicans viewing illegal immigration as a critical threat (up from 84 percent a year ago), compared to just 29 percent of Democrats. That said, 29 percent is a nine-point rise on the issue among the president’s fellow partisans over that period.

The biggest reasons for the increase on this issue, however, are rising concerns about illegal immigration among Independents, 54 percent of whom now view it as a critical threat, compared to 40 percent who took that position in 2023.

Wall Street Journal. On March 3, the Wall Street Journal released the results of its latest poll of 1,754 registered voters, conducted between February 21 and 28.

It revealed that “immigration” will be the most important issue on voters’ minds when they head to the ballot box in November, the choice of 20 percent of respondents, up from 13 percent in the same poll conducted two months before.

Immigration switched positions with the “economy” — the biggest issue for 14 percent of respondents in the latest poll compared to 21 percent in December — as voters’ number-one electoral concern. As the Journal noted, this is “a rare instance of any issue topping the economy as most prominent on voters’ minds”.

Separately, according to that poll, just 29 percent of voters approve of the job President Biden is doing when it comes to handling immigration (just 7 percent “strongly” approving) and just 30 percent are pleased with his performance in “securing the border” (with only 9 percent “strongly” in approval).

By contrast, 66 percent of the electorate disapproves of Biden’s immigration performance (54 percent strongly so), and 65 percent disapprove of the president’s efforts to secure the border (53 percent of whom strongly disapproved on that question).

And respondents to that poll think things are only getting worse, with 71 percent of voters saying that immigration and border security are headed in the “wrong direction”, compared to just 16 percent who think those issues are headed in the “right direction”.

Neither Trump nor congressional Republicans should be patting themselves on the back or taking victory laps, however.

That’s because while 45 percent of respondents agree with the statement “President Biden reversed Trump's executive orders on the border which opened our borders, and he failed to use the power he has had all along to seal the border and clamp down on illegal immigration,” 38 percent agreed that “Republicans killed a bipartisan deal they and Democrats negotiated that would reduce the number of migrants coming into the country only because Trump told them he didn't want to help Democrats.”

It’s safe to say the electorate is tired of excuses as to why the border is insecure and illegal immigration is out of control — they just want it fixed.

Fox News. Finally, on March 3, Fox News released the results of its latest poll, conducted between February 25 and 28, of 1,262 registered voters.

In that poll, 66 percent of respondents disapproved of the president’s handling of immigration, compared to less than a third, 31 percent of voters, who approved. That ties Biden’s lowest approval rate on immigration, reached in a similar poll Fox News conducted in November 2021.

That said, just 59 percent of the voters in that earlier poll disapproved of the job the president is doing on immigration, the difference between now and then being 10 percent of respondents who hadn’t yet made up their minds.

Apparently, 7 percent of them have now decided, and they don’t like the job Joe Biden is doing on immigration: that 66 percent disapproval rate for the president’s handling of immigration in the most recent Fox News poll is the highest it’s ever been in the 34 months the outlet has polled on this question.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Gallup-Immigration-Surges-Top-Americans-Concerns

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10 March, 2024

Bloodthirsty Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua sets up shop in US as border authorities sound alarm

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is warning agents to be on the lookout for members of a notorious Venezuelan prison gang coming across the southern border -- just as the socialist country is refusing to take its citizens back.

A CBP source provided Fox News with an internal CBP intelligence bulletin revealing tattoos and identifiers for Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang. Members of that gang have been entering the U.S. illegally through the southern border.

Fox News reported this week that the brother of the suspect in the killing of Georgia student Laken Riley has ties to the gang. Both the suspect and his brother are Venezuelans who entered the U.S. illegally.

Federal authorities have been warning that the gang, also known as TdA and known for its violent turf wars as it expanded into other countries in South and Central America, is trying to establish itself in the U.S., where police are already linking it to organized crime. The FBI has also warned that the gang could team up with the bloodthirsty MS-13.

Last month two suspects in the assault of two NYPD officers were revealed to be members of TdA.

But CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sources have expressed frustration to Fox News that Venezuelan gang members are extremely difficult to deport because Venezuela is currently not taking them back.

Only 834 Venezuelans were deported in FY 2023, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data, despite there being over 335,000 encounters at the border. The administration had started returning illegal immigrants from Venezuela directly to the socialist dictatorship in October as part of a way to discourage the flow to the border.

While the administration took heat for the flights from immigration activists, who argued Venezuela was not an appropriate country to return migrants due to its human rights abuses, administration officials told reporters in January that it was looking to increase the number of flights.

One official said that "we do have the intention of ramping up repatriation flights to Venezuela" and that the administration sees it as a "critical part" of the broader immigration strategy.

"It’s an important deterrent," they said, with officials also saying they were pleased that Mexico was also now flying migrants straight to Venezuela.

In December, the administration had made limited exceptions to sanctions on a Venezuelan airline to help facilitate deportation flights from Canada and Latin America.

But last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Maduro regime has stopped flights of deported migrants from both the U.S. and Mexico after the U.S. reimposed some economic sanctions. The flights ended at the end of January, officials told the outlet, after around 1,800 returns.

Before beginning the flights last year, the administration had  extended deportation protections to nearly 500,000 Venezuelans already in the U.S. in September. Venezuela is also part of a controversial parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans (CHNV) which allows 30,000 migrants with sponsors to fly into the U.S. each month.

Fox is told that Venezuelans can still be removed to Mexico, but that many then typically re-enter the U.S. illegally as a "gotaway."

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bloodthirsty-venezuelan-gang-tren-de-aragua-sets-up-shop-in-us-as-border-authorities-sound-alarm

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7 March, 2024

Government Admission: Biden Parole Flights Create Security ‘Vulnerabilities’ at U.S. Airports

Thanks to an ongoing Center for Immigration Studies Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the public now knows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has approved secretive flights that last year alone ferried hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app.

The Biden administration’s legally dubious program to fly inadmissible aliens over the border and directly to U.S. airports has allegedly created law enforcement vulnerabilities too grave to release publicly.

But while large immigrant-receiving cities and media lay blame for the influx on Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, CBP has withheld from the Center – and apparently will not disclose – the names of the 43 U.S. airports that have received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023, nor the foreign airports from which they departed. The agency’s lawyers have cited a general “law enforcement exception” without elaborating – until recently – on how releasing airport locations would harm public safety beyond citing “the sensitivity of the information.”

Now, though, CIS’s litigation has yielded a novel and newsworthy answer from the government: The public can’t know the receiving airports because those hundreds of thousands of CBP-authorized arrivals have created such “operational vulnerabilities” at airports that “bad actors” could undermine law enforcement efforts to “secure the United States border” if they knew the volume of CBP One traffic processed at each port of entry.

In short, the Biden administration’s legally dubious program to fly inadmissible aliens over the border and directly to U.S. airports has allegedly created law enforcement vulnerabilities too grave to release publicly, lest “bad actors” take advantage of them to inflict harm on public safety. Or, more specifically, here’s how CBP’s lawyers, in email communications with CIS and summarized in a CIS Joint Status Filing, characterized FOIA’s law enforcement exception (b)(7)(E) in explaining their refusal to release just the domestic U.S. airport locations:

Exception (b)(7)(E) has been applied to the identifying information for air ports of entry, which, if disclosed would reveal information about the relative number of individuals arriving, and thus resources expended at particular airports which would, either standing alone or combined with other information, reveal operational vulnerabilities that could be exploited by bad actors altering their patterns of conduct, adopting new methods of operation, and taking other countermeasures, thereby undermining CBP’s law enforcement efforts to secure the United States borders.

The agency’s attorneys floated a similar argument for withholding the locations of foreign departure airports, adding only that “bad actors” abroad who found out about the “resources expended toward travelers arriving from particular airports” could “extrapolate” from the numbers leaving foreign airports to identify the receiving U.S. airports and then undermine law enforcement’s ability to secure the border (which includes international airports).

The program at the center of the FOIA litigation is perhaps the most enigmatic and least-known of the Biden administration’s uses of the CBP One cell phone scheduling app, even though it is responsible for almost invisibly importing by air 320,000 aliens with no legal right to enter the United States since it got underway in late 2022. It remains part of the administration’s “lawful pathways” strategy, with its stated purpose being to reduce the number of illegal border entries between ports of entry. The countries whose citizens are eligible are Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, and Ecuador.

Under these legally dubious parole programs, aliens who cannot legally enter the country use the CBP One app to apply for travel authorization and temporary humanitarian release from those airports. The parole program allows for two-year periods of legal status during which adults are eligible for work authorization.

The government characterizes these programs as “family reunification programs”.

While seven of the nationalities, excluding Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, can claim eligibility under older family reunification parole programs, all can also just fly in if they can show they have a non-family financial sponsor (which can even be “an organization, business, or other entity”) and meet other requirements, such as owning a valid passport and passing security checks based on biometric information provided through CBP One.

Upon receiving authorization from Washington, they buy air passage to U.S. international airports where CBP personnel process them for release in short order. All are said to be responsible for paying for their own airfare.

They and inadmissible aliens from many dozens of other countries also get this parole benefit at eight U.S.-Mexico land ports of entry. That separate parole program has brought in another 420,000 immigrants from nearly 100 nations from May 2021 through December 2023, according to CIS lawsuit data updated through December 2023.

https://cis.org/Bensman/Government-Admission-Biden-Parole-Flights-Create-Security-Vulnerabilities-US-Airports

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6 March, 2024

Senators Rip FEMA on Poor Handling of Illegal Immigrant Travel

Key Senate Republicans blasted the Federal Emergency Management Agency for shoddy record-keeping regarding the transportation of illegal immigrants throughout the U.S.

FEMA distributes grants to nonprofit organizations for shelter and travel expenses for illegal immigrants, but last month informed The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project that it has no documentation about how that taxpayer money has been spent. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)

“It is becoming clearer every day that the Democrats’ open-border catastrophe is not only being orchestrated by the Biden administration, the American taxpayer is unwittingly being forced to pay for this invasion,” Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told The Daily Signal. The committee oversees border and immigration issues.

The FEMA admission that it lacks documentation for expenses comes less than a year after an internal federal audit stated FEMA is responsible for “a detailed accounting of all program funds.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said this is part of President Joe Biden’s larger intention of “an open border with as little oversight as possible.”

“Despite FEMA’s lack of a mechanism to track where these funds are sending illegal aliens, Biden still insists that Congress appropriate over $1.4 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to transport illegal aliens all over the country,” Cruz told The Daily Signal in a statement.

The Texas senator called the Biden administration policies on the border “reckless and morally reprehensible.”

“We heard reports a 22-year-old college student, Laken Riley, was murdered by an illegal alien,” Cruz said. “We have also heard of a two-year-old boy being shot outside of D.C., an adolescent being raped in Massachusetts, and a teenager being sexually assaulted in Louisiana—all by illegal aliens. The human cost continues to rise as a result of this full-fledged invasion. We must secure our border now.”

A FEMA spokesperson forwarded a Daily Signal request for comment to the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal for this story as of publication time.

In mid-February, the agency did inform The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project that it had no responsive records regarding the expenses.

“Based on the original request you provided, we do not have reason to believe that FEMA would have records responsive to this request,” a FEMA official said in response to a public records request from the Oversight Project on Feb. 12. “Accordingly, we are administratively closing the request without prejudice.”

The request specifically asked for fiscal year 2023 information about “records regarding the Transportation Eligible Reimbursement” for the Emergency Food and Shelter National Board Program, the Emergency Food and Shelter Program, and FEMA’s Office of Chief Procurement Officer.

The Oversight Project posted on X, formerly Twitter, of FEMA: “They have admitted that they have zero documentation of where illegals travel to on taxpayer-funded resettlement trips.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General issued a report in March 2023 stating that FEMA doled out $81.6 million to 25 nonprofit organizations in California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.

These nonprofits “did not always provide the required receipts or documentation for claimed reimbursements,” the inspector general’s report said. Some of the nonprofits “were unable to provide supporting documentation for families and individuals to whom they provided services.”

“These issues occurred because FEMA did not provide sufficient oversight of the funds and instead relied on local boards and fiscal agents to enforce the funding and application guidance,” the report said. “As a result, FEMA, as the  [Emergency Food and Shelter] National Board Chair, cannot ensure the humanitarian relief funds were used as intended by the funding and application guidance.”

FEMA is the chairing organization of the Emergency Food and Shelter National Board, which also includes the United Way Worldwide, Catholic Charities, Salvation Army, American Red Cross, Jewish Federations of North America, and National Council of Churches of Christ in USA.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/04/morally-reprehensible-senators-rip-fema-poor-handling-illegal-immigrant-travel/

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5 March, 2024

Joe Biden is losing the war for the border to Donald Trump

On Thursday, President Biden and Donald Trump offered Americans a split-screen view of the border in Texas — Biden in Brownsville, on the Gulf end of the Rio Grande, and Trump upriver in Eagle Pass.

Each location was carefully chosen, Biden from what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott termed a “sanitized location,” and Trump on the border itself, to showcase Texas’ efforts to fill Biden’s enforcement void and do what the administration won’t — secure its border with Mexico.

As Abbott noted after Trump’s remarks, concertina-wire barriers and state personnel, elements of a Texas border effort called Operation Lone Star, have “wired” Brownsville “shut.”

The results are telling.

Apprehensions in that area fell from 30,000-plus in January 2022 to about 15,000 one year later, before falling below 7,500 this January.

Plainly, Biden didn’t want to be shown up by Texas’ barriers and troopers.

The tip of the Lone Star spear is Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, where Trump appeared.

Overall, rank-and-file agents are grateful for Texas’ aid, but the state’s wire barriers there rankled somebody in Biden’s Department of Homeland Security.

So agents were ordered to cut and remove them last September.

Texas sued to stop that destruction, so the Justice Department went to the Supreme Court to win the administration’s right to keep cutting Texas’ wire.

While the justices were deliberating, Texas upped the ante and seized Shelby Park, a border recreation area, and laid down even more wire.

By the time the court ruled in Biden’s favor 12 days later, he must have felt like the dog that caught the car.

The legal battle to destroy the wire barriers undermined his claims that he was doing all he could to secure the border.

You’ll notice DHS hasn’t touched the wire since the justices ruled.

Shelby Park is the new Alamo, and Biden doesn’t want to be seen as the modern-day Santa Anna.

In his border remarks, Biden blamed Republicans for not passing the “comprehensive” immigration bill he introduced on Inauguration Day and for blocking recent “bipartisan” Senate border legislation.

The former is a massive amnesty bill that even Democrats wouldn’t touch, while the latter would cost billions and give Biden even more power to release illegal migrants.

Trump’s remarks focused on migrant crime, a salient topic following the killing of Laken Riley in Georgia last week, allegedly at the hands of a Venezuelan migrant Biden’s DHS released.

That killing has sparked a debate over whether illegal migrants commit more or fewer crimes than Americans.

The Washington Post fact-checker weighed the evidence — including an analysis from my employer, the Center for Immigration Studies (which found the data suggested “more”) — and concluded on Thursday that “the results can remain subject to dispute and interpretation.”

That’s not only not helpful, but it also misses two key points.

First, legal immigrants show that they have clean records before they’re allowed in.

Illegal migrants don’t, and the perfunctory vetting DHS does before it releases them depends on its ability to access their records back home.

Venezuela’s government has no interest in helping us.

https://nypost.com/2024/02/29/opinion/joe-biden-is-losing-the-war-for-the-border-to-donald-trump/

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4 March, 2024

Ex-Gov. Paterson backs NYC Mayor Adams’ bid to ease ‘sanctuary’ rule for violent migrants

Former Gov. David Paterson on Sunday endorsed Mayor Eric Adams’ bid to roll back New York City’s “sanctuary” protections for migrants accused of violent crimes and with prior rap sheets.

“He has evolved to the point where I think his take on the migrant issue is better than anyone else who is talking about it,” Paterson told host John Catisimatidis of Adams on “The Cats Roundtable” 770 WABC AM radio.

Hizzoner on Friday said his administration is looking into its legal options after the City Council swatted down his bid to change the Big Apple’s “Sanctuary City” policy to more easily deport migrants accused of serious crimes.

The mayor has suggested the city should better cooperate with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to potentially deport those “suspected” of carrying out “serious” crimes in light of a recent spate of violence involving migrants, some linked to gangs and with growing rap sheets.

Right now, the city’s self-declared “Sanctuary City” status is designed to help protect even those migrants from deportation.

Paterson added that even without changing the Big Apple’s status as a “sanctuary city,” the 200,000 migrants who have come to the city in the past two years are too much to handle.

Noting the the shelter, food and other services provided to arriving migrants, Paterson said, “That kind of benefit that we were allowing people, we can’t do that right now.”

https://nypost.com/2024/03/03/us-news/ex-gov-paterson-backs-nyc-mayor-adams-bid-to-ease-sanctuary-rule-for-violent-migrants/

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3 March, 2024

How the Border Crisis Hit a Small Wisconsin Town

WHITEWATER, Wis.—The migrants began to trickle into Whitewater, a sleepy town of 15,000 an hour west of Milwaukee, toward the end of 2021.

Prior to their arrival, local news and political debates generally revolved around school fundraisers or the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater's D3 athletics. Today, residents are focused on their 1,000 new neighbors, who mostly hail from Nicaragua and Venezuela and largely keep to the shadows because they lack official identification. Locals say the real number of migrants in the town could easily be double the number reflected in the police department's official statistics.

As the migrant crises in big cities like Chicago and New York receive national media attention, Whitewater residents can only laugh.

Greater Whitewater Committee president Jeffrey Knight is quick to point out that migrants have caused New York's population to grow by 2 percent, while Whitewater's population has grown by almost 10 percent in two years, almost entirely due to the southern border crisis. That would translate into more than 1.5 million new arrivals in New York.

"I don't have a problem with immigration," Knight told the Washington Free Beacon. "The concern is about resources."

Like Knight, all Whitewater residents who spoke to the Free Beacon prided themselves on their hospitality and did not express prejudice toward the town's growing foreign population. But those who live here say they feel the strain migration has placed on their town: schools rushing to hire English as a second language (ESL) teachers, emergency services overwhelmed with unintelligible calls reporting domestic violence, and health providers faced with a flurry of uninsured patients.

Responding to the influx of migrants has put the town in a $400,000 budget hole, a town official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Free Beacon.

"I haven't seen anyone who isn't welcoming, but you have to have blinders on to not see that there have been problems," said Michael Smith, who has lived in Whitewater for more than a decade. "Everything is relatively overwhelmed right now."

No one knows what brought the migrants to Whitewater. It is not a sanctuary city, and no red-state governor is shipping busloads of migrants to Whitewater's doorstep. That Wisconsin is one of a handful of states that will likely decide the next president is just happenstance.

Some residents think the migrants were attracted by the progressive city council's pro-immigrant rhetoric. Others think the sleepy midwestern town is just a good place for illegal migrants to hide.

Whatever brought them, Whitewater's migrant population and its subsequent demographic transformation could offer a glimpse into the next stage of America's immigration saga. As lawmakers fight about what to do with the southern border, the rate of illegal border crossings shows no sign of slowing. With roughly 8.5 million illegal border crossings recorded since President Joe Biden took office, it is almost inevitable that more towns like Whitewater will see migrants flocking their way.

Once the migrants arrive, it is on the town to adapt. The hiring of new ESL teachers for Whitewater Public Schools has cost hundreds of thousands of dollars alone, one city official told the Free Beacon. Some students, the official said, have enrolled in Whitewater schools without knowing more than a few English words and phrases.

An official familiar with the issue says that at least 300 English ESL students are now enrolled in Whitewater Public Schools. That official also expressed concern about internal school reports of migrant students suffering from sexual abuse at home, as some live with distant relatives.

"You're setting up a disastrous situation," the individual said. "There's been an uptick in STDs and other sexual health issues."

But no other issue is as contentious as the town's growth in police responses. Two internal Whitewater Police Department slide shows obtained by the Free Beacon describe considerable strain on local law enforcement, with officers responding to calls that sound like something out of a police procedural.

In March, one slide states, law enforcement responded to a "deceased infant … located in a cardboard box." Another individual familiar with the immigration situation described finding a woman living in a shed with her infant during the Wisconsin winter.

"None of the information in this presentation is intended to vilify any group of individuals; it is solely meant to communicate factual information about trends we are seeing in the City of Whitewater," a slide reads.

Neighboring counties have expressed concern about cartel activity among Whitewater's migrants. One slide describes the surge in fentanyl seizures in recent years.

"All states are now affected, just like southern border States," the slide reads. "Narcotics investigations are a substantial investment of an agency's resources including financial, manpower, physical assets, and time."

Law enforcement officials said last November that they had traced nearly $250,000 worth of funds back to drug cartels in just four months. In the words of one law enforcement official, the migrants perform "farm or factory labor during the day and cocaine sales at night."

Whitewater police chief Dan Meyer, who declined to comment for this story, is one of several state and local leaders who have asked the Biden administration to send aid.

"It is a simple fact that we are not currently providing the Whitewater community with the degree of service that our residents are accustomed to," Meyer told local media in January. "That needs to change for the sake of both long-time residents, as well as individuals who have recently moved here from Central America."

In a letter to the White House, Meyer notes that traffic stops have plummeted as officers devote more of their time to more domestic calls.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.) petitioned Biden in January for "immediate assistance for cities and towns across the State of Wisconsin as migration increases demands on existing state and local government resources."

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D.) visited Whitewater earlier this month to hear concerns from the city council and, according to the city, "expressed his commitment to collaborating with Whitewater officials to address the city's concerns."

A spokesman for Evers did not respond to a request for comment.

Amid all the disruption, Whitewater's government celebrates itself as a progressive oasis nudged between two counties that supported former president Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. The top item at a Feb. 10, 2024, city council meeting was "proactive approaches to address potential NeoNazi activities in the city or on campus." Further down the agenda was a discussion of how to "promote a welcoming and educational environment for new immigrants."

Chuck Mills flies the Israeli, American, and "Blue Lives Matter" flags outside his tow shop. He disagrees with many of the city council's more liberal stances. But when it comes to migrants, he's mostly on board.

"Some conservatives want to paint all these immigrants as, you know, rapists and murderers," Mills said. "I did eventually welcome them here, it's still a fluid situation, knock on wood, but I've had nothing but good experiences."

Mills notes that Whitewater has faced a labor shortage since 2020, as the town's University of Wisconsin satellite campus never fully rebounded from COVID lockdowns and remote learning.

"There businesses around here needed to fill this void that a failing university left behind when they sent all the kids home and many just never came back," Mills said. "You got farms out here that need help, and I'd take one of these immigrants over a college student."

It's unclear, however, where all those workers will live: Whitewater faced a housing shortage before the migrants arrived. As of February 2022, "on average, only seven new, single-family homes have been constructed per year in the past decade," a city housing report concluded.

The report also noted that nearly half of Whitewater households "spend greater than 30% of their average income on housing related costs," more so than in neighboring counties.

"This indicates that many residents in Whitewater are struggling to pay their rent or mortgage and are forced to make choices related to other expenses in order to afford their monthly housing costs," the report continued.

According to Rep. Bryan Steil (R., Wis.), whose district includes Whitewater, this local problem has a "simple" national solution.

"You need to actually enforce our immigration laws," Steil told the Free Beacon. "The challenges that Whitewater is facing are ones communities around the country are facing. We can't just address the symptoms, we have to solve it by securing our border."

Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) made a similar point in November, noting that the arrival of migrants in Whitewater would be "devastating" for the local economy.

But locals understand they are powerless to fix the underlying problems that brought the migrants to Whitewater. Whether federal aid comes or not, they have no choice but to adapt to their new reality.

"We haven't reached our breaking point yet," said Smith. "I don't know where that is, I would love to see Biden take action, but here in Whitewater we're just going to have to figure it out."

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/how-the-border-crisis-hit-a-small-wisconsin-town/

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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://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
    
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
 
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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