Jeff Sessions Warns Sanctuary Cities About Missing out on Help to Fight Crime

/0 Comments/in , /by

Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited a reported sexual assault by an illegal immigrant in Portland, Oregon, to explain why the Justice Department will continue cracking down on sanctuary cities that receive federal funds.

If a municipality wants access to its National Public Safety Partnership resources, the Justice Department announced Thursday, the local jurisdiction will have to demonstrate a commitment to cooperating with federal immigration agencies.

The program is aimed at providing federal training assistance to local law enforcement to combat violent crime. The program is designed to enable cities to consult with and receive coordinated training services and other resources from the Justice Department.

“By protecting criminals from immigration enforcement, cities and states with so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies make all of us less safe,” Sessions said. “We saw that just last week, when an illegal alien who had been deported 20 times and was wanted by immigration authorities allegedly sexually assaulted an elderly woman in Portland, a city that refuses to cooperate with immigration enforcement.”

Sessions was referring to reports that Sergio Jose Martinez, 31, was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a 65-year-old woman in Portland. Martinez had been deported at least 20 times to Mexico.

The charges against Martinez reportedly include robbery, kidnapping, burglary, and sexual abuse.

Sessions said sanctuary policies are driven by politics, with disregard for the safety of a jurisdiction’s residents when officials don’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The attorney general added:

By forcing police to go into more dangerous situations to re-arrest the same criminals, these policies endanger law enforcement officers more than anyone. The Department of Justice is committed to supporting our law enforcement at every level, and that’s why we’re asking ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions to stop making their jobs harder.

By taking simple, commonsense considerations into account, we are encouraging every jurisdiction in this country to cooperate with federal law enforcement. That’s what 80 percent of the American people want them to do, and that will ultimately make all of us safer—especially law enforcement on our streets.

he Public Safety Partnership program, announced in June, offers training and technical assistance to help local jurisdictions address violent crime.

The Justice Department initially selected 12 locations: Birmingham; Indianapolis; Memphis; Toledo; Baton Rouge; Buffalo; Cincinnati; Houston; Jackson, Tennessee; Kansas City, Missouri; Lansing, Michigan; and Springfield, Illinois. These are not sanctuary cities.

The Justice Department plans to consider other cities. In letters to officials in Albuquerque; Baltimore; San Bernardino, California; and Stockton, California, the agency asks these questions:

(1) Does your jurisdiction have a statute, rule, regulation, policy, or practice that is designed to ensure that U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel have access to any correctional or detention facility in order to meet with an alien (or an individual believed to be an alien) and inquire as to his or her right to be or to remain in the United States?

(2) Does your jurisdiction have a statute, rule, regulation, policy, or practice that is designed to ensure that your correctional and detention facilities provide at least 48 hours advance notice, where possible, to DHS regarding the scheduled release date and time of an alien in the jurisdiction’s custody when DHS requests such notice in order to take custody of the alien?

(3) Does your jurisdiction have a statute, rule, regulation, policy, or practice that is designed to ensure that your correctional and detention facilities will honor a written request from DHS to hold a foreign national for up to 48 hours beyond the scheduled release date, in order to permit DHS to take custody of the foreign national?

(For more from the author of “Jeff Sessions Warns Sanctuary Cities About Missing out on Help to Fight Crime” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Government Has No Clue How Much Land It Bought With $815 Million

/0 Comments/in , /by

Interior Department officials have no idea how much land they bought for $815 million, nor if the properties are being used for their intended purpose, a government watchdog reported Wednesday.

The department’s officials couldn’t provide its inspector general with data about land purchase programs, the watchdog’s report said. The inspector general consequently surveyed 108 programs and found that 16 of them awarded 701 grants between 2014 and 2015 to purchase $815 million worth of land.

The Interior Department “does not centrally track information about grants awarded for the purpose of acquiring land,” the inspector general said, adding:

As such, [the Interior Department] is unable to identify how much grant money has been used to purchase land, how much land has been purchased and whether that land is being used for its intended purpose. Without an adequate process in place to monitor funds used to purchase land, [the department] is potentially exposed to significant risk of wasted funds.

Additionally, less than half of the 278 grant recipients reported their land inventories to the department programs that funded them, which violated federal regulations, according to the report. (Read more from “Government Has No Clue How Much Land It Bought With $815 Million” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

New York Times ‘Voter Suppression’ Video Game Is Pure Propaganda

/0 Comments/in , /by

An “Oregon Trail”-style “Op-Doc” video game released by The New York Times just days before the 2016 election asks readers to “find out if your vote can survive the great, flawed adventure of American democracy.”

The premise: The race of the character you choose determines whether your vote survives “the GOP’s tactics.”

This biased game presents race and geography as the determining factors in one’s ability to vote, while disregarding the alarmism and stereotypes it perpetuates.

The game offers three characters: a white programmer from California, a Latina nurse from Texas, and a black salesman from Wisconsin.

The first choice leads through a sunny street in California, where you “stroll” to your polling place in pleasant weather. The game tells you that your frustration is nonexistent, and there is no line.

You enter the voting booth, cast your vote, and immediately see an image of the White House and an American flag. The screen reads, thick with sarcasm, “Congratulations! You have cast your vote. It has been a tough journey.”

In contrast, the Texan Latina nurse must take a bus across town to her polling place, which has a long line. The screen reads, “GOP tactics that cut back on polling places and workers are causing huge lines!”

While waiting, you’re told that your son has dysentery—yes, dysentery—and you’re given the option to leave the line or continue. If you leave, your vote is declared dead. If you stay, the voting machines malfunction.

Then, your daughter needs to be picked up from day care, and another child calls you crying for help (all within an hour).

If you ignore all of these pleas, you see old, white men in red hats “inspecting the line,” and you must run away from expletives they fling at you. If you’re hit, a gravestone appears and reads, “Voter intimidation tactics worked.”

If you are lucky enough to outrun the evil line inspectors, you find that the polling place requires photo identification, and you don’t have it.

You have three options: give up, cast a provisional ballot that you are told will not be counted (a factually incorrect statement), or get your ID and return to vote, at which point the screen reads, “I hate voting but I love my country!”

It’s an equally grim scene for the black salesman from Wisconsin.

You once again take a bus across town, and learn that “the GOP’s voter fraud initiatives are causing major lines at the polls!”

You’re left to wait as your boss docks your pay and takes away your shifts, you get stuck in the freezing rain, and your co-worker gets (you guessed it) dysentery, and hates you for not being able to cover his shift.

Once you enter the polling place, you must also defeat the red-hatted men throwing “insults and angry rhetoric” at you, and if you make it past them, you, too, have forgotten your ID and face the same options as the Latina nurse.

After playing the game, one is left with a clear picture of what The New York Times thinks of America: a largely segregated land where everything, from Republicans to the weather itself, works to keep minorities from voting.

Think about the stereotypes that this game relies on, and worse, that it perpetuates.

African-Americans and Hispanics must ride the bus, the inference evidently being that “they are poor.” They are apparently also, in the eyes of The New York Times, incapable of dealing with simple tasks like obtaining an ID or remembering it on Election Day.

Apparently, the idea did not cross the game designers’ minds that nearly everyone has an ID, that they carry it with them as a matter of routine, and use it almost daily for things like buying alcohol or driving a car.

The Times’ staff and the game’s designers are hardly the only enlightened progressives to hold these ignorant views. One has to wonder where they get these distorted ideas.

Oh, yes, the Justice Department under President Barack Obama.

In a 2014 lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s voter ID requirement, the elimination of same-day registration, and the shortening of early voting, a Justice Department expert witness—professor Charles Stewart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—testified that North Carolina’s law was discriminatory.

Stewart said that early voting and same-day registration are “well situated for less sophisticated voters, and therefore, it’s less likely to imagine that these voters … can figure out or would avail themselves of other forms of registering and voting.”

Who are those less sophisticated voters? According to Stewart, they “tend to be African-Americans.”

Infantilizing minorities in the name of protecting them is the epitome of paternalistic prejudice, and it is exemplified in “The Voter Suppression Trail.”

This game is completely asinine. It is shallow identity politics, and little else.

The game’s designers utterly ignore contrary facts. Consider, for example, that minority voter turnout increased after North Carolina, Georgia, and Indiana adopted voter identification laws.

In fact, despite claiming in lawsuits last year that voting laws in North Carolina and Texas were crafted deliberately to suppress minority turnout, the Justice Department could not identify any disenfranchised voters.

As for those fictional, slur-spewing, voter-intimidation squads, let’s not forget the real-life incident in 2008, when two members of the New Black Panther Party were charged with voter intimidation for standing outside a Philadelphia polling location with wooden bats and wearing military-style uniforms, while shouting racial slurs at white voters.

The Justice Department dropped these charges shortly after Obama took office. Any form of voter intimidation, regardless of the race of the perpetrator or the victim, is illegal and should be punished.

This type of cheap rhetoric trivializes the real issues our country is facing with election fraud. Indeed, The Heritage Foundation has documented nearly 1,100 proven instances of fraud in 47 states.

When someone rigs an election, votes without being eligible, or casts multiple ballots, legitimate voters are essentially disenfranchised, to say nothing of the damage done to the integrity of the process and of the results.

Efforts to reform and enhance our electoral security have been met with the common allegation that they hide racist motives. Consider this Slate article,“The Dark Prince of Voter Fraud Alarmism is Joining the Trump Administration,“ which personally attacked Hans von Spakovsky, one of Heritage’s own legal scholars.

Von Spakovsky and fellow commissioner J. Christian Adams recently responded to these critics.

Anti-election integrity activists are free to resort to name-calling if they wish, but the fact is, this should be a nonpartisan issue.

Efforts to secure the ballot box against fraud are spurred by concern for the security and legitimacy of the voting process—perfectly valid goals given that issues like voter impersonation and intimidation are real problems that should be addressed.

Surely the majority of rational people would play this game and realize its ridiculousness. However, we need to look at the implications of such cheap rhetoric perpetuated by the left and the effect it has on civil discourse in the public sphere.

By shying away from honest debate and relying solely on attention-grabbing sophisms, we risk burying our heads in the sand, to our collective detriment. (For more from the author of “New York Times ‘Voter Suppression’ Video Game Is Pure Propaganda” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Trump Backs TRUE Immigration Reform With RAISE Act

/0 Comments/in , /by

For far too long, much as with health care reform, the Washington Cartel has hijacked the meaning of immigration reform. Until now, it has meant mass amnesty for illegal immigration, endless expansion of the current failed legal immigration system, and ignoring the needs of the American citizen.

Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and David Perdue, R-Ga., with the re-introduction of the RAISE (Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy) Act, have flipped the paradigm on its head. Most importantly, the White House is actually taking an active role in promoting this legislation — an imperative in promoting any conservative idea.

There is broad consensus among the public that immigration should a) be limited to those who have unique skills; b) cultivate the assimilation of American values and the English language; and c) that it should be a net positive for all Americans, not just the corporate-D.C. cartel.

This is the message Trump ran on, and it is the message that Cotton and Purdue have restored with this legislation (after a several-month detour by the White House). If the president continues to use the bully pulpit to sell this plan, he could go a long way toward staving off a looming disaster in the midterms and actually making the party stand for something important again.

The problem: The 1965 immigration bill

As I chronicle in detail of Chapter 7 of my book, “Stolen Sovereignty,” the 1965 immigration bill killed our immigration system long before illegal immigration and the 1986 amnesty became the dominant issues.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was sold by its proponents as the exact opposite of what it has actually done. It was sold as in line with our history and tradition of only bringing in those who will patriotically assimilate and not become a drain on the public purse.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, the lead sponsor of the bill, famously declared, “The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” He thundered at a Senate hearing how “the bill will not permit the entry of subversive persons, criminals, illiterates, or those with contagious disease or serious mental illness” or “to a person who is likely to become a public charge.”

Sensing what the public wanted from immigration, the LBJ administration echoed a similar sentiment. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach predicted that the ’65 bill would induce a net increase of only about 60,000 immigrants per year.

A complete lie. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 wound up being the most extreme policy implemented during the latter part of the 20th century, as measured against the criteria laid down by the bill’s own supporters. Here are some points from my book:

Overwhelming numbers of immigrants: Whereas 18.2 million immigrants came during the Great Wave in 1890-1919, over 61 million immigrants have come since passage of the bill (not including illegal immigrants, who are largely influenced by the drive to reunite with relatives as a result of the record legal immigration.)

Living in poverty: According to Pew, in 1970, 18 percent of immigrants were living below the poverty line. At present, 28 percent of immigrants are living in poverty. The poverty rate among natives, on the other hand, has held steady between 13 and 15 percent. More than 50 percent of all immigrant households receive welfare benefits, compared to only 30 percent of native households in the United States that receive welfare benefits.

Dramatic shifts in countries of origin: What about the promise not to fundamentally change the orientation of the country? In 1910, 89 percent of immigrants were from Europe; today that number is just 10 percent. It’s not just a cultural transformation, it affects the economy as well. As of 2013, the median family income for immigrant families from Europe was $66,600, roughly twice the income of those from Mexico ($31,100), the Caribbean ($31,100), Africa ($34,800), and central/South America ($37,400). This, despite the fact that most of the recent job growth has gone to the immigrant population.

Dramatic imbalance: What about Ted Kennedy’s promise that his bill would not “inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area?” Fifty percent of all immigrants since 1965 have come from Latin America — 29 percent from Mexico alone. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2010, Mexicans were the largest immigrant group in thirty-three states, with immigrants from other Latin American countries winning first place in six other states. At the height of the first great wave in 1910, on the other hand, Germans held the distinction of the most represented immigrant group in just seventeen states.

Criminal activity: What about criminals? There are 2.1 million illegal and legal immigrants convicted of crimes, but 1.2 million criminal aliens remain at large in the United States and have not been deported.

Language assimilation problems: A record 63.2 million, or one in five U.S. residents, speak a language other than English at home. In six states, that number exceeds 30 percent and is as high as 44 percent in the state of California. Thirty-four of the major metropolitan areas in the country have a third or more residents who speak foreign languages at home; sixty-seven metropolitan areas top 25 percent in foreign-language speakers.

California a canary in the coal mine: California demographics speak for themselves. Orange County was once the bread basket of GOP politics in the state and was a big part of the GOP’s dominance during the Nixon and Reagan eras. Thirty percent of the county’s population is now foreign-born and 45.5 percent of residents speak a foreign language at home.

As leading immigration historian Aristide Zolberg has observed, “Whether hailed or deplored, there is no gainsaying that this development was contrary to the tacit agreement to maintain immigration as a minor feature of American existence that underlay the 1965 reform.”

The new RAISE Act: What would it do?

The main problem of the 1965 bill, which was exacerbated by a 1990 immigration bill, is that it forced immigration officials to prioritize family ties over skills.

Thus, once the initial burst of immigrants was predominantly low-skilled and from third-world countries, it set off a phenomenon of “chain migration,” whereby the majority of future immigrants were from similar socio-economic backgrounds.

The result is that just 15 percent of our green cards (1.6 million of the 10.8 million legal permanent residents over the past decade) are allocated based on any skill, and most of those green cards are not awarded for broad-based skills and ability to assimilate — but rather in crony visa programs.

Which brings us back to the RAISE Act. This bill fulfills the blueprint I laid out in “Stolen Sovereignty” for cutting immigration by 40-50 percent by merely getting rid of the non-skilled, extended-family categories. By getting rid of the diversity visa lottery and extended-family visa preferences, this bill charts a path toward re-empowering Americans to determine who gets to join the civil society.

Deeply rooted in the preamble of the Declaration and in consent-based governance is that the citizenry must decide every important policy issue. And the most important decision is the future orientation of the society. Converting our system to a skills-based criterion rather than a family-based one will place the keys of our immigration system back in the hands of the citizenry rather than special interests and the immigrants themselves. It will end the stolen sovereignty.

On the employment side of the ledger, rather than submit the future of our society to individual corporations that lobby the most for visas, this bill would revamp the current visa system and replace it with 130,000 visas to be allocated based on a points system that prioritizes education, English-language proficiency, high-paying job offers, merit, and entrepreneurial initiative. Those with the most points will get first preference.

This system would completely cut out the cronyism and is the sort of holistic reform of immigration that many of us want for health care. When you appeal to broad common-sense principles and cut out the crony middlemen, the American people are empowered and much of the politics goes by the wayside.

On paper, even Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and an array of Democrats have said they want a system that is based on merit rather than family ties. Now is their time to back up their words. Do they really care about the immigration issue beyond the obsession with amnesty?

Thankfully, President Trump is leading on this issue and actually endorsing a good piece of legislation. He should deliver a special address before Congress laying out the vision and unite the party behind it. A united GOP (one could only dream!) behind this issue would open up an entirely new front in the 2018 midterms.

It’s time we stop ceding the ground of common-sense reform to those who seek to perpetuate the failed status quo. (For more from the author of “Trump Backs TRUE Immigration Reform With RAISE Act” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Teacher Jailed for Watching Live Stream of Six-Year-Old Boy Being Raped in AMERICA

/0 Comments/in , /by

A primary school teacher who watched a live stream of a six-year-old boy being raped has been jailed for 20 months.

Wayne Brookes, 43, joined 45 other paedophiles online to watch the horrific abuse, which took place in America.

He accessed the online chat room in which the rape was streamed after being given a 10-digit code by another paedophile.

Married Brookes, of Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, also used the site to watch a recording of a six-month-old baby being abused.

Bristol Crown Court heard Brookes, who had worked as a teacher for 10 years, lost his job once the offences came to light. (Read more from “Teacher Jailed for Watching Live Stream of Six-Year-Old Boy Being Raped in AMERICA” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Mom Goes to War Stop Minor Child’s Gender Change

/0 Comments/in , /by

A Minnesota mother is trying to deal with the fallout of a violation of her parental rights that led to her son being pushed through sex-change treatments without her knowledge.

Anmarie Calgaro is appealing District Judge Paul Magnuson’s decision to dismiss her lawsuit over the actions by the local county, school district and health officials.

The Thomas More Society said Magnuson “admitted that the boy was not legally emancipated by a court order and agreed that Calgaro’s parental rights ‘remained intact.’”

Despite those facts, the judge decreed that the de facto emancipation of Calgaro’s minor son by the county, school and medical care providers did not constitute an infringement of her constitutionally protected parental rights.

Calgaro is suing St. Louis County, Fairview Health Services, Park Nicollet Health Services and the St. Louis County School District, among others, with the help of the Thomas More Society. (Read more from “Mom Goes to War Stop Minor Child’s Gender Change” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Oregon Controversially Removes Children From Home After Parents Are Determined to Have ‘Low IQ Scores’

/0 Comments/in , /by

An Oregon couple is fighting to regain custody of their two children, after the state determined they were incapable of caring for them because their low IQ.

“They’re thinking that because we have this disability, we can’t safely parent our children,” the mother, Amy Fabbrini, told KTVZ-TV in a recent interview.

According to court documents, the 31-year-old and her partner Eric Ziegler, 38, have “limited cognitive abilities” that leave them incapable of providing a safe living environment for their children. Psychological evaluations revealed Fabbrini has an IQ of 72, placing her in the category of “extremely low to borderline range of intelligence.” Ziegler scored a 66, which is considered in “mild range of intellectual disability.” The average IQ is between 90 and 110.

“We personally think that IQ shouldn’t have anything to do with it,” Fabbrini said. “As long as you have the abilities of being able to support for your child, being able to care for your child.”

The couple’s battle began four years ago, when the Oregon Department of Human Services took away their first son, Christopher, just four days after his birth. Crime Online reported that Fabbrini didn’t even realize she was pregnant with Christopher until she gave birth—chalking her symptoms up to reoccurring kidney pain. Fabbrini, meanwhile, told KTVZ-TV that the state intervened after a friend who was living with them reported Ziegler was “neglecting” the child and not “picking up on his cues.” (Read more from “Oregon Controversially Removes Children From Home After Parents Are Determined to Have ‘Low IQ Scores'” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Bombshell Dropped on Seth Rich Murder Mystery

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh appears to have dropped a bombshell in audio released Tuesday – pointing out that the DNC emails obtained by WikiLeaks stopped pouring in after the mysterious murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich in 2016.

In the audio, Hersh also claims an FBI report described to him by an insider confirms that Rich, the DNC voter-expansion data director, had taken some emails to WikiLeaks and requested payment for a full trove of DNC emails during the presidential campaign.

In fact, the latest DNC email released by WikiLeaks was dated May 18, 2016 – just weeks before Rich was shot twice in the back with a handgun.

“There are no DNC or Podesta emails that exist beyond May 21 or 22, last email from either one of those groups. What the report says is that some time in late spring … he makes contact with WikiLeaks, that’s in his computer,” Hersh says in audio almost certainly recorded by financier Ed Butowsky, who hired private investigator Rod Wheeler to investigate the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich last July.

Hersh continued: “Anyway, they found what he had done is that he had submitted a series of documents — of emails, of juicy emails, from the DNC.” (Read more from “Bombshell Dropped on Seth Rich Murder Mystery” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Clinton Pay to Play? Just Check These New Emails From Huma

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin used her personal email account to transmit classified documents and coordinate favors for Clinton donors, according to emails obtained by Judicial Watch Wednesday.

Judicial Watch obtained the documents as part of a lawsuit filed after the State Department failed to respond to a March 2015 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The newly-obtained documents include 91 Clinton email exchanges that were not turned over to the State Department, contradicting Clinton’s claim that, “as far as she knew,” she had turned over all of her government emails.

The emails reveal multiple instances in which Abedin used her personal account to send and receive classified documents as well as arrange personal favors for Clinton donors and political allies on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s behalf.

“Pay to play, classified information mishandling, influence peddling, cover ups—these new emails show why the criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s conduct must be resumed,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

In one particularly blatant example of nefarious activity, Miguel Lausell, a Puerto Rican Telecom executive and donor of over $1 million to the Clinton Library, requested through Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band that a specific candidate be considered for the U.S. ambassadorship to Puerto Rico. The following day in April 2009, a Clinton aide passed Lausell’s message to Clinton’s special assistants and instructed them to “make sure there is a response.” It remains unclear whether the person in question received the ambassadorship as the name is redacted. (Read more from “Clinton Pay to Play? Just Check These New Emails From Huma” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Who Are the Top Candidates to Replace Gen. John Kelly at DHS?

/0 Comments/in , /by

With the appointment of Gen. John Kelly as President Trump’s chief of staff, the top vacancy at the Department of Homeland Security has again opened up.

Since the George W. Bush administration created the DHS in 2001, the DHS secretary has engaged in a variety of roles. But in the Trump era thus far, the department has seemingly been refined to focus on border security, illegal immigration, and Islamic terror issues.

Here’s a look at the potential candidates to become the next homeland security chief.

Rick Perry

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Energy Secretary Rick Perry has emerged as a possibility for the post. His position on immigration, however, might disagree with president’s nationalist base. As governor of Texas, Perry supported programs that allowed illegal immigrants to obtain in-state tuition. In the 2012 Republican presidential primary, Perry controversially said his rivals didn’t have enough “heart” on the immigration issue.

Rep. Michael McCaul

Before Gen. Kelly was appointed as DHS head, Texas Rep. Michael McCaul was rumored as a frontrunner for the post. McCaul, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, is regarded by immigration hawks as a “pro-amnesty” politician who isn’t liable to make good on President Trump’s campaign promise to secure the border. Nonetheless, Politico recently described McCaul as a “leading candidate” for the job, citing several White House officials.

Jeff Sessions

The sitting attorney general and former Alabama senator has fallen out of favor with the president, leading some to believe he would be better suited at DHS. Sessions has long been seen as an ally to the president’s nationalist supporters on border security and immigration.

Elaine Duke

While the search for an official replacement continues, deputy secretary Elaine Duke will continue to lead DHS as its acting director. She has worked in government (in both Democrat and Republican administrations) for almost 30 years as a civil servant.

Kris Kobach

Like AG Sessions, the Kansas secretary of state is a border and immigration hawk. He is currently leading President Trump’s commission on voter fraud.

Who else?

Other reported candidates for the position include Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert, acting ICE director Thomas Homan, former DHS deputy secretary James Loy, and Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

Before Trump assumed office, potential nominees for the post originally included Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, N.J. Governor Chris Christie, former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, California Rep. Duncan Hunter, former Pennsylvania Rep. Robert Smith Walker, Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, and Ambassador John Bolton. (For more from the author of “Who Are the Top Candidates to Replace Gen. John Kelly at DHS?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.