Not an Emergency?! 1,744 Percent Spike in Asylum Claims

/0 Comments/in , /by

The media is looking for the emergency at the border. They are looking for data they refuse to recognize when it’s right in front of them.

I’ve written a lot more than 1,000 words explaining why this current wave of illegal immigration is worse than ever, but the following picture is worth a lot more than any words:

Yes, you are looking at an 1,744 percent increase in the number of people taking advantage of our asylum system and uttering the magic words “credible fear” to indefinitely remain in this country, all the while creating a massive economic and strategic decoy for the cartels at the border.

USCIS spokeswoman Jessica Collins explained in a statement to CR how the credible fear claims are the lynchpin of our magnetic border. “The extremely low bar for establishing credible fear is ripe for fraud and abuse,” she said. “This is because once an individual overcomes this low threshold, the vast majority are then referred to an immigration judge and most are released on a promise to appear for a court date weeks, months, or years down the line, regardless of whether they plan to show up. In other words, a credible fear referral doesn’t equal asylum status, but it does earn a free ticket into the U.S., allowing individuals to disappear into the interior to live and work illegally.”

The media like to compare current overall apprehension of illegal immigrants to the highest levels of past decades and conclude that illegal immigration is actually down. Often, they will end their data set at around 2014, before the resurgence of illegal immigration and the inception of the new Central American wave of unaccompanied teens and family units. But what they will never tell you is that the emergency element of the border crisis is born out of a new type of migration from Central America, and increasingly, from other countries around the world – bogus asylum.

It is simply indefensible not to mention the 1,744 percent increase in credible fear applications when analyzing the trends at the border, a trajectory that is growing sharper every few months. Fiscal year 2019 will easily blow out the record if this is not stopped, which in itself demonstrates the urgency to act. Just during the first four months of this fiscal year, 99,901 family units were apprehended, a whopping 294 percent increase over the same time period in FY 2018, which is when we set the existing record of credible fear claims, as indicated by this chart. As of two weeks ago, 58 large groups of aliens came in all at once and surrendered themselves to agents so far this fiscal year, compared to just 13 during the entire FY 2018. We see more almost every day, including last Monday, when we set the all-time record for the most family units apprehended in a single day.

Given that most of these family units are surrendering in larger numbers and are uttering the magic words, a phenomenon our border agents have never experienced before, the FY 2019 numbers could possibly double those of FY 2018 — and 2018’s numbers are in themselves an 1,744 percent increase since Obama took office. Therefore, once the data from this year is posted, our credible fear chart will look even more dramatic.

The only dip in trajectory was in 2017, when Trump first took office and illegal immigration across the board declined on the perception that he would drastically change policies. From the lowest point of the “Trump effect” in April 2017, family unit apprehension at and between point of entry has gone up well over 1,000 percent:

A sharp trajectory is exactly the hallmark of an emergency that needs urgent action. Already last year we were getting twice as many credible fear claims per month as we were in an entire year last decade. It is pretty astounding that the media ignores these statistics.

Now look at the cumulative increase in the backlog at the immigration courts:

All of these people are released into the country pending these hearings, and we are responsible for their medical care, education, crimes, gang activity, and drug trafficking. Oh, and all their kids born on our soil, in the meantime, are erroneously viewed as citizens, even though almost none of them have legitimate asylum claims. That in itself has served as a huge magnet.

Then there is the emergency dynamic at the border created by this unique migration driven by bogus asylum. The central difference between this migration of Central Americans and the previous Mexican migration is the fact that they purposely surrender to agents in droves because of the asylum magnet expanded during the Obama administration and then last year by the courts. This has several consequences.

First, none of the illegal aliens are returned, as the Mexicans were in previous years, often within a few hours. Consequently, while the gross immigration numbers last decade were higher, the net numbers are higher now. Whereas in 2005 we had one million-plus apprehensions, we also had one million-plus returns and turnbacks at the border. Now those numbers are down to 100,000-200,000 a year (not including removals from the interior, which take forever). Most of the migration consists of non-Mexican family units, almost all of whom remain in our country indefinitely.

Second, there is the shutting down of the Border Patrol and the national security problems with the asylum boom enabling the cartels to exploit gaps in coverage while agents are tied down. What happened at the Yuma sector on Tuesday is a perfect illustration of this problem. According to CBP, while border agents were strategically tied down by smugglers processing “25 Guatemalans made up of family members and juveniles” who “surrendered to agents several miles east of the port of entry,” three human smugglers, one of whom was caught with two loaded 9mm pistols, were caught several miles away. “This armed smuggling attempt took place while many of our agents were distracted from their border security duties and instead dealing with groups of surrendering families,” said Yuma Sector Chief Patrol Agent Anthony J. Porvaznik.

Can you imagine how many more dangerous criminals get away because our Border Patrol agents are now spending all their time and resources serving as an ad hoc hospital, transportation hub, food and diaper supply, and essentially being used as pawns for the cartel’s chess game? There are a lot of bad people the cartels want to get in while they tie up the agents.

Then there is the humanitarian problem. Never before have 50-60 percent of the illegal aliens consisted of children – either traveling alone, with families, or with adults who kidnapped them to game out the “child” loophole. Every juvenile must receive a health screening. The cost of manpower and money is immeasurable. As I’ve vividly described the situation in Hidalgo County, New Mexico, the processing of hundreds of children at a time often takes place in the most remote counties in the country. This has the effect of both taking the agents off the field for even longer (exposing our country to more drugs and criminals) and straining the paltry services of those regions.

Sheriff Leon Wilmot of Yuma County told me that “last year alone, 1,700 of these migrants had to be taken to the only local hospital we have, wasting about 10,000-man hours of the border agents forced to sit there with them.” It cost his county $700,000. This year is worse. Just in one month, CBP reports that its agents “spent a total of 19,299 hours providing various levels of support to these hospital visits” in the sectors of Yuma, Tucson, El Paso, and the Rio Grande valley.

CBP reports just one episode: “Transporting 50 individuals to the hospital utilized nearly all available agents.” What are the consequences of this asylum-driven trend of surrendering to border agents? It “severely limit[ed] their ability to process the large group or respond to other border security duties; thus resulting in increased time in custody, delaying custody transfer coordination, and inhibiting response to other illegal cross-border traffic.”

It’s incontrovertibly clear that the crisis driven by bogus asylum and all its cascading harmful effects on our agents, border ranchers, American taxpayers, the Mexican people, and migrants themselves is worse than ever before, at least in the areas of the border where they are coming.

To be clear, there still are counties that have been essentially untouched by the Central American migration, and therefore, are still enjoying the windfall from the historic lull in Mexican migration. However, as the Central American “child” asylum and catch-and-release migration intensifies increasingly every month, they are going to new parts of the border. New Mexico has never seen migration like this before, and there is nothing stopping the migrants in the Rio Grande valley from shifting to west Texas as we step up enforcement in that region. They have already shifted as far as Maverick County, which explains why there has been a 364 percent increase in family unit apprehensions in the Del Rio sector relative to last year.

Do we really need to wait until every single border county is as bad as Hidalgo County, New Mexico, to act? Do we need to sit idly and wait until overall apprehensions set records along with family unit apprehensions to understand the nature and cause of this emergency? (For more from the author of “Not an Emergency?! 1,744 Percent Spike in Asylum Claims” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

The Supreme Court Has an Opportunity to Protect a WWI Memorial and Make Religious Liberty History

/0 Comments/in , /by

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in what may be a watershed case for religion in public life in the United States. At least, that’s what some religious liberty proponents hope will happen.

The question is whether a 40-foot, 93-year-old World War I memorial in the shape of a cross at a busy intersection in Bladensburg, Maryland, violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Here’s my explainer from 2017:

So why could the Supreme Court make legal history on this case? Well, as it stands, the body of precedent on the Establishment Clause gives courts, attorneys, and government officials no clear standards to figure out whether or not a “passive display” that has religious imagery violates the First Amendment or not.

Since 1971, courts have inconsistently applied the three-pronged “Lemon test,” which came out of the Lemon v. Kurtzman case. In short, it tests whether the display in question has a secular purpose, doesn’t advance or inhibit religion, and doesn’t foster “excessive entanglement” between church and state. However, in a 2005 Ten Commandments case, a plurality of the SCOTUS justices opted to forgo the Lemon test, calling it “not useful in dealing with the sort of passive monument” in that case and instead focusing on the “nature of the monument” and “our Nation’s history.”

In addressing the Bladensburg monument, the lower courts have used what the solicitor general’s office calls a “hybrid approach” that combines elements of the standards used the two cases mentioned above, further adding to the confusion.

“Because each test’s application is so context-dependent,” the brief asserts, “disputes often cannot be resolved at an early stage; and even seemingly minor differences between displays can produce divergent outcomes.”

“Cases like these cannot help but divide those with sincerely held beliefs on both sides,” the SG’s brief concluded. “This case presents an opportunity for the Court to adopt a standard for Establishment Clause challenges to passive displays that will reduce factious litigation, provide clarity to lower courts, and promote consistency across cases.”

Jeremy Dys, deputy general counsel at Texas-based First Liberty Institute, which is representing the American Legion in the case, explained things to me this way: “We’ve gotten away from the historic understanding of the Establishment Clause.”

Dys says that he would like to see the Supreme Court “abandon the Lemon Test entirely” and adopt what his team is calling a “coercion test,” which would simply test whether or not the government is coercing people to engage in religious beliefs or behavior; if not, the Establishment Clause “is not offended,” he says.

“There’s all kinds of weird little spin-offs of this,” Dys says. “Nobody knows exactly what is going to come out of any given passive display.”

This state of legal confusion comes with real-world consequences, especially for state and local governments. What happens, Dys asks hypothetically, “when there’s a question mark raised about whether or not you’ve got enough reindeer next to the creche on the city square to ensure that it’s secular enough for it to pass constitutional muster?”

“It’s become completely unwieldy for city councilmen and county commissioners and the like to be able to have confidence that they are going to be able to avoid unnecessary and frivolous lawsuits against public displays that may invoke religious imagery or language.”

But while there’s opportunity for clarity if the cross prevails at the high court, a loss could end up endangering some of America’s most solemn national memorials. If the lower court ruling is allowed to stand, Dys explains, “you’re going to find Arlington National Cemetery under threat.”

The hallowed cemetery for our nation’s heroes is on public land and full of memorial crosses similar to the one in suburban Maryland, such as the Argonne Cross and the Canadian Cross of Sacrifice.

Dys also notes that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier bears the words “known but to God” as part of its inscription. “Is that gonna have to be sandblasted off the side the Tomb of the Unknowns?” He asks. “I’d like to see them try.”

Dys and the solicitor general’s office are not alone in their assessments. Justice Clarence Thomas has repeatedly noted how confusing this area of First Amendment law has become, and he started making that point decades ago.

In his concurring opinion in the 1995 Rosenberger v. Rector decision, Thomas wrote that “our Establishment Clause jurisprudence is in hopeless disarray.” When dissenting against the court’s refusal to hear a case out of Utah in 2011, Thomas also noted that “this Court’s nebulous Establishment Clause analyses” have “confounded the lower courts and rendered the constitutionality of displays of religious imagery on government property anyone’s guess.”

In a 1993 opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia compared the Lemon test to “some ghoul in a late night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad.” (For more from the author of “The Supreme Court Has an Opportunity to Protect a WWI Memorial and Make Religious Liberty History” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

The Case of the Jihadi Bride: How the U.S. Government Fails to Safeguard Our Citizenship

/0 Comments/in , , /by

The New York Times is lamenting how the State Department is not letting a “jihadi bride” back into the U.S. now that she is on the losing side of her treason. But there is another point that everyone is missing from the case of Hoda Muthana: What is government doing to ensure that children of diplomats are not automatically, illegally granted citizenship?

Hoda Muthana is the daughter of one of the many millions of Middle Eastern immigrants we’ve admitted in recent decades who have developed radical jihadist views. She left this country in 2014, married a total of three ISIS fighters (her first two husbands were killed) and even posted a video of burning her U.S. passport. She tweeted messages calling for spilling the blood of veterans on Memorial Day. Now that the caliphate collapsed, she is begging to come back in and is claiming she has changed her views.

Why are children of diplomats being granted American citizen documents?

The presumption in the media when the case first broke was that she was a traditional American citizen, being born in the U.S. to legal permanent resident parents. But the State Department is contending that she was never a legitimate American citizen because she was born to a Yemeni diplomat to the U.N. living here on a special diplomatic visa, such as a G-2 visa.

While the details of this particular case are still murky, it raises a general concern about the thousands of kids born on our soil to diplomats of all stripes from all regions in the world. Even according to those who hold the misguided view that birthright citizenship is not only in the 14th Amendment but applies to people who violate our sovereignty and reside here without permission, that does not extend to children of diplomats. There is no dispute about that. Yet, as the Center for Immigration Studies reported several years ago, the government has been so lax in enforcing this that “children born to foreign diplomats on U.S. soil [are] receiving U.S. birth certificates and Social Security numbers (SSNs) — effectively becoming U.S. citizens.”

In extensive research, Jon Feere of the Center for Immigration Studies found that the lack of enforcement by the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the State Department, and several other agencies has allowed all children

of foreign diplomats to become de facto citizens, with birth certificates and Social Security cards. While the issuance of a birth certificate and Social Security card doesn’t necessarily make someone a citizen, it has the effect of granting him de facto citizenship until the agencies clamp down on this practice.

This is an especially perverse outcome since foreign diplomats and their families are granted diplomatic immunity from prosecution of many laws. Illegally granting these citizenship, against the consent of the citizenry, makes them super-citizens — enjoying the rights of America and free from prosecution for many types of law-breaking.

In this case, if the State Department is correct that Muthana was born here when her father was a diplomat, then how did she hold a U.S. passport? Presumably, because hospitals are given no guidance in handing out birth certificates to anyone born here under any circumstance, and she was granted an official birth certificate and American SSN, which treated her as a citizen from day one.

Dan Cadman, a former ICE agent and fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, expressed concern in an email to CR that this case of de facto stolen citizenship only came to light because of the terrorism angle:

As this case shows, there are no substantive procedural safeguards to prevent the children of diplomats from being vested with the trappings of citizenship, up to and including passports and Social Security cards, because key agencies of government such as the State Department and Social Security Administration don’t meaningfully interact with state vital statistics bureaus. It took the scrutiny of major international media organizations focusing on this three-time jihadi bride before our own government inquired deeply enough to reveal the facts — else she could have spent the remainder of her life living as a citizen.

Another example of why unqualified birthright citizenship is wrong

The jihadi bride case is just one more proof that the entire idea of birthright citizenship for those here illegally was not a deliberate decision born from the consensus understanding of the Wong Kim Ark decision, somehow applying also to those who break into our country, as Justice Brennan suggested in his infamous footnote in Plyler v. Doe.

The federal government has never deliberately decided to grant automatic citizenship to children born to illegal aliens. No national discussion occurred to apply the Wong case to illegal aliens, as indicated in the footnote of the Plyler case. And as I proved conclusively, nobody ever thought to actively grant such a right because it would have contradicted our immigration laws.

It likely evolved from sheer laziness and practicality. Given that all children born to legal immigrants were granted birthright citizenship before the influx of illegal aliens — either as a matter of practice or resulting from the 1898 court decision — the relevant agencies never bothered to enforce verification and give the hospitals forms that required one parent to show his or her Social Security card. It was easier to grant anyone born in an American hospital citizenship, especially because illegal immigration en masse did not occur until the mid-twentieth century.

According to Professor John Eastman of Chapman University School of Law, the passport office up until the late 1960s did not presume birth on U.S. soil meant you were entitled to a passport. “If you were born on US soil that wasn’t sufficient to prove your citizenship to get a passport, you also had to show the status of your parents when you were born on US soil,” said the legal scholar on a podcast in November. Indeed there is no evidence we ever handed out citizenship to children of guest workers during the 1920s.

It was only after the problem became so pervasive and conservatives began calling attention to it in the early 1990s that liberals retroactively created a convoluted legal rationale based on the Brennan’s footnote and a misunderstanding of the obscure Wong case to defeat popular and commonsense efforts to end the practice.

The proof is in the pudding: We all agree children of diplomats are excluded from citizenship, yet there is no enforcement mechanism to stop them other than the honor system.

So why doesn’t our government care to safeguard the crown jewel of our national citizenship? From our earliest days, we’ve always had a vetting process and a probationary period to see if we want to grant citizenship to a given family. The notion that anyone born on our soil, even those here illegally or on non-immigrant visas, which did not require strong vetting or an oath of allegiance, could somehow force their children upon us is absurd. The crafters of the 14th Amendment explained that “subject to the jurisdiction of” meant those who owed all “allegiance” to America.

This case is a superlative example of stolen sovereignty, because the U.N. is full of diplomats from nations who have disdain for our values. The idea that if Muthana’s father was on a diplomatic visa simply because we house the U.N. on our soil, that should entitle his kid to citizenship, even if Muthana’s CAIR lawyer is correct in asserting that she was born after her father was no longer a diplomat, is absurd. If her father did not have a green card at the time of her birth, she should not be a citizen. As Cadman says, “Whether or not her father violated the conditions of his admission or not, he was admitted as a diplomat, and accredited as such, and under the provisions of the U.S. Constitution and international law, he was never ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and thus could not confer citizenship upon his child simply by virtue of birth here.”

We will have to wait for the details on this case as the lawsuit goes on, but it should force action in general to protect our citizenship from people who clearly are not entitled to it, beginning with children of diplomats and eventually including those who willfully steal our sovereignty as illegal immigrants. (For more from the author of “The Case of the Jihadi Bride: How the U.S. Government Fails to Safeguard Our Citizenship” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Prosecutors Broke Law With Secret Plea Deal for Pedophile Epstein

/0 Comments/in , /by

A federal judge ruled Thursday that a team of federal prosecutors that included Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta broke federal law when they brokered a plea deal with child molester and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, The Miami Herald reported.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra reviewed Epstein’s case and concluded that the team of prosecutors violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act by keeping secret the terms of the plea agreement from Epstein’s victims until after a judge had signed off on the deal. Otherwise, the victims could have chosen to veto to the deal.

“Epstein used paid employees to find and bring minor girls to him,” Marra wrote, according to The Miami Herald. “Epstein worked in concert with others to obtain minors not only for his own sexual gratification, but also for the sexual gratification of others.”

“Particularly problematic was the Government’s decision to conceal the existence of the [agreement] and mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility,” Marra continued. “When the Government gives information to victims, it cannot be misleading. While the Government spent untold hours negotiating the terms and implications of the [agreement] with Epstein’s attorneys, scant information was shared with victims.”

As part of the plea deal, Epstein pleaded guilty to two counts of soliciting prostitution from minors and served 13 months in a county jail. (Read more from “Prosecutors Broke Law With Secret Plea Deal for Pedophile Epstein” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Judge Sets Jussie Smollett’s Bail

/0 Comments/in , /by

“Empire” star Jussie Smollett is now in police custody after admitting to filing a false police report. He faced his court hearing Thursday afternoon, where the judge put his bail at $100,000 and said the actor must surrender his passport.

Outside the Chicago courthouse, Prosecutor Risa Lanier offered more information about the hoax hate crime Smollett staged. The actor paid two Nigerian brothers $3,500 to pretend to attack him and reportedly told them to mention “MAGA” in the attack to make it seem as though two President Trump supporters ambushed him. On 12:49 a.m. on the morning of the alleged attack, Smollett spoke with the brothers on the phone to discuss the timing of the assault.

The actor claimed to have received a letter at “Empire’s” Fox studios that contained written threats and a white powdery substance. Lanier confirmed that Smollett wrote the letter himself and that forensic experts discovered the mysterious powder was crushed ibuprofen tablets.

(Read more from “Judge Sets Jussie Smollett’s Bail” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Wow: Kamala Harris’s Father Was Livid Over Her Marijuana Joke…and Issued This Statement About It

/0 Comments/in , /by

While Sen. Kamala Harris may have scored a few political points among progressives for joking about her marijuana use during her younger years, linking it to her Jamaican heritage, there was one person who did not find her comments amusing: her father.

Donald J. Harris, emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, sent an unsolicited statement to Jamaica Global Online denouncing his daughter’s remarks.

“My dear departed grandmothers … as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he said. “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”

Harris was responding to comments his daughter made on nationally syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club” earlier this month during a discussion about marijuana legalization at the federal level.

The California Democrat talked about her use of marijuana in her younger years, saying she “inhaled.” (Read more from “Wow: Kamala Harris’s Father Was Livid Over Her Marijuana Joke…and Issued This Statement About It” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

The Media Willfully Ignores the Connection Between Killer Drugs and Illegal Immigration

/0 Comments/in , /by

Organized crime cannot exist without political protection. That is an old law enforcement adage you can take to the bank when studying the nexus of illegal immigration and drug trafficking. Both are among the highest-profile, most visible, and most preventable forms of crime — if our politicians actually wanted them stopped. Meanwhile, the media is continuing to distract people by debating how much of the actual drug product comes in between points of entry, as opposed to at points of entry, rather than focusing on the people who actually organize, produce, and traffic the drugs and the politicians who protect them.

Our country is no longer facing a simple drug crisis, it is facing a chemical warfare crisis from Mexican cartels and the illegal aliens who peddle the drugs, usually coming in between points of entry. First it was the fentanyl-laced heroin, then it was the bizarre mix of meth or cocaine with fentanyl (an opioid with a psychostimulant); now they are marketing fake blue “Mexican oxy” pills that kids take for a “buzz” but all too often are found dead because they are really mixed with fentanyl to varying degrees.

Over the weekend, the AP reported on the surge of fentanyl deaths in Arizona and how young kids are now dying from these Mexican oxy pills that are laced with fentanyl and produced by the Sinaloa cartel. I confirmed with the Phoenix DEA office that the main hubs for trafficking these drugs into the country are in Tucson and Phoenix, where high-level “wholesale” cartel officials are operating and shipping to distributors in the Great Plains, the Midwest, and the East Coast after the drugs are brought across the border. According to the Arizona DEA, in fiscal year 2017, they seized 45,940 pills. That number shot up to 379,557 in FY 2018 and stood at 123,000 just for the first three months of FY 2019. It’s all coming from the Sinaloa cartel and is brought in mainly in the Nogales area and sent to the vast network of cartel officials in the major Arizona cities. They also confirmed that the increase is driven by fake Xanax pills as well as fake oxy.

What the media and most in Congress have missed about this poly-drug crisis (not opioid crisis) for the past few years is that it’s not being fueled by chronic pain patients on painkillers. It’s the worsening of the culture among our youth who are seeking a buzz or an out from their mental and emotional problems. That cultural demand is being met by the deadliest drugs we’ve ever been confronted with. This is why as synthetical opioids have surged, Arizona state and federal officials have seized 124 percent more meth in FY 2018 than in the previous year. Meth has the opposite effect of opioids and would certainly not be sought out by pain patients.

This is why there are major problems with drugs in schools in San Luis, a border town in Yuma County. The Yuma Police Department put out a warning this month about “recent overdose incidents in San Luis, Arizona” from ingested pills that look like oxys but contain fentanyl. We can intimidate doctors into never prescribing pain medication and we could harm post-operation and cancer patients from now until the end of time, but it will do nothing to protect our youth who get ensnared into the culture of drugs so long as the cartels are able to operate with impunity and make the price of these drugs cheap and therefore accessible to kids.

But the problem is not just in border counties and states. That is the wholesale point for the cartels, and funnily, they try to keep the violence to a minimum so as not to disrupt their operation. It’s more at the destination and distribution level on the East Coast where the violence of transnational gangs mixes with drug distribution for the cartels.

This is where we see that cartels not only have control of our border, but operate with latitude on our shores and have endless illegal alien and transnational criminal networks working for them in all our major cities and even mid-sized cities on the East Coast. This is the key to understanding how illegal immigration is driving the drug crisis.

A network of six drug traffickers in the Carolinas working for Cartel Jalisco New Generation, one of the rivals of the Sinaloa cartel, was recently broken up by federal authorities. They were moving large amounts of meth and cocaine for this brutal cartel, and all of them were illegal aliens. Central North Carolina is now dealing with cartel violence.

So why do liberals continue to deny that illegal immigration is driving the crisis?

To begin with, as we’ve pointed out before, the entire notion that drugs only come in at points of entry is laughable. Tell that to the ranchers who deal with the drug trafficking every day. Obviously, we don’t have hard statistics because we catch almost none of those drugs, given that the cartels purposely use illegal immigrants to tie down the border agents while they strategically bring in the drugs and the criminals who cook, distribute, and collect profits from them. As Mark Morgan, Border Patrol chief during the Obama administration, told CR, “There is no way with any degree of certainty to know the quantity of drugs entering our country because at least 50 percent of the southwest border is wide open.” He explained how “we know the cartels exploit this vulnerability every day while using illegal immigration as a diversion.”

“Additionally, the irony with this false narrative is the same people who acknowledge massive amounts of drugs are seized at the POEs to debunk the need for a physical barrier are the same individuals who deny there is a crisis.”

Robert Murphy, special agent in charge of Atlanta’s DEA office, told CR in an exclusive interview last week, “We are arguing about the wrong thing here. It’s not the product that matters. The product doesn’t sell itself or produce itself. It’s the people who make the cartel run, collect the cash, do the distribution, engage in violence, and run operations for the cartel.” And while a lot of the drugs come in at points of entry, “the people coming across the border to make and distribute the drugs are coming here illegally.” As Murphy warned, “The people who are here operating the networks are all illegal immigrants” and “are not coming in at checkpoints.”

Illegal immigration fuels the cartels in multiple ways. The magnets that attract illegal immigration give the cartels billions in revenue to produce and grow their drug trafficking. The cartels orchestrate strategic diversions of illegal immigrants engaging Border Patrol agents. Also, teenagers often serve as drug mules because the cartels know we won’t prosecute them. Even the more innocent illegal immigrants are often forced to report to stash houses on our side of the border after being released by agents pursuant to court orders in order to pay off their debt.

It’s really simple. If we pursued interior enforcement, banned sanctuary cities, and ended catch-and-release at our border, which enables the cartel smuggling, they wouldn’t have a profitable drug network that could operate in this country. It’s not about the product; it’s about the people doing it, and the people doing it always have political protection in the illegal immigration issue.

Immigration and drug officials in New England have told me they could clean up the drug problem there in no time if they had the license to actually follow immigration law and simply remove all those aliens engaging in drug trafficking in Lawrence, Massachusetts, many of whom have family or organizational ties.

Why don’t we do it? Because illegal immigrants and drug traffickers have political protection. The whole reason the war on drugs has been unsuccessful is because the combined elements of law enforcement have not been focused on the human chain between the border and point of ingestion of the illegal drugs.

Look no further than the local politics of the Rio Grande Valley, which has been the hot spot of illegal immigration for years. How can human and drug smuggling continue to thrive out in the open? The New York Times summed it up this week in lessons learned from the El Chapo trial:

El Gallo — Tomas Reyes Gonzalez, a drug trafficker now in federal prison — supplied the cash to the former Hidalgo County sheriff, Guadalupe Trevino, for his re-election campaign. Another former Hidalgo County sheriff took bribes to allow a convicted drug dealer to have conjugal visits at the county jail, including in the jail library and in the sheriff’s private office. Yet another former sheriff in neighboring Cameron County protected and assisted cocaine dealers, and is now Federal Inmate No. 51689-179.

The corruption that took down those three border sheriffs in 1994, 2005 and 2014 continues today. Next month, the former police chief in the town of La Joya is scheduled to go on trial, after he was indicted on drug charges and accused by federal authorities of helping a drug-trafficking organization transport narcotics while working as a police sergeant in Progreso, Tex.

Now, keep in mind that the liberal Rio Grande Valley is the only region where the budget bill allows Trump to build fencing, yet local officials are purposely given veto power. Jaeson Jones, a retired captain for the Texas Department of Public Safety who directed counter-narcotics and counter-smuggling operations for years, told me that local officials in these counties wouldn’t even allow them to cut down the tall grass around the Rio Grande River where the cartel operatives would hide out.

In other words, the lesson of drugs and migrants is that the flow can only continue if the political powers both in Washington and around our border want it to. And they do.

What would you call this statement made by Elizabeth Warren?

With the incontrovertible data that prescriptions have plummeted and that most overdose deaths are due to illicit drugs trafficked by illegal alien networks, for a politician to say we need to stop focusing on Mexican cartels and start focusing even more on cutting off pain medication to those in need is the ultimate political corruption.

Until we address the systemic upstream political corruption, the drug issue will only intensify along with the illegal immigration crisis. (For more from the author of “The Media Willfully Ignores the Connection Between Killer Drugs and Illegal Immigration” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

The WV Teacher Strike Wasn’t About Students and Teachers. It Was About Protecting Unions

/0 Comments/in , /by

School choice is dead in the state of West Virginia, at least for now. That’s the main takeaway after state lawmakers in the Republican-controlled legislature buckled to demands from teachers’ unions after two days of striking earlier this week.

It’s not surprising that teachers’ unions banded together to kill a school choice proposal. What is surprising is how much West Virginia teachers were willing to sacrifice to keep even the smallest market-oriented innovations out of the state’s education system.

The massive education reform bill contained a five percent teacher pay raise, on top of the pay raise that the state’s educators got out of last year’s teacher strike. It also included a $2,000 bonus for certified math teachers, a $250 tax credit for school supply purchases, and around $145 million in total investment in the state’s public education system.

A summary of the final amendments made to the bill can be found here, while full text of the tabled version can be found here.

So what did the pro-government monopoly crowd take issue with? The bill also provided for the creation of seven (as in fewer than 10) public charter schools statewide and the creation of 1,000 Educational Savings Accounts (ESAs) for children with special needs or who had undergone documented cases of bullying.

Yes. That’s all. That’s why one union boss claimed that West Virginia educators were “left no other choice” but to strike. It’s why schools across the state closed down for two straight days. That’s what was worth passing up a pay raise, bonuses, and all the other investments that lawmakers were willing to put into the state’s public schools.

Seven Charter schools and 1,000 ESAs. That’s what made it a “dangerous education privatization bill” that had to be defeated at the cost of public education investment. But hey, any market-oriented innovations mean competition, and the best way to protect a monopoly racket is to make sure competition never makes it to market.

“The defenders of the status quo, the enemies of progress, won, and the losers were the teachers, students, parents in West Virginia,” Republican West Virginia Senate President Mitch Carmichael told Blaze Media just hours after the bill was scuttled on Tuesday, “by not accepting the reforms and the massive investment in public education in West Virginia.”

“It makes no sense,” Carmichael said when asked why public teachers’ unions would be opposed to that kind of investment. “It’s not a logical analysis of the provisions of the bill. It’s more a fearmongering by the union bosses.”

“This is a way to flex political muscle,” explains Garrett Ballengee, executive director of the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, a think tank that supported the reforms.

The point school choice opponents made, he says, was that “to some extent, at least as it relates to education policy, that education unions will dictate what kind of education policy that we have,” despite the Republican control of West Virginia’s House, Senate, and governorship.

“Extortion is a strong word,” he added, “but if the definition fits, I think that’s exactly what we saw here.”

According to national school choice organization EdChoice, West Virginia is one of a remaining handful of states in the U.S. that doesn’t have a single educational choice program of any kind. Meanwhile, the state’s public education numbers were near the bottom for 2018.

“We want to do what other states have done to implement positive change,” Carmichael told me, noting the success of the charter school movement in other states. If a football team were coming in last in its conference every year, “you’d change something,” he continued. “And yet we tolerate a last-place finish in our education system.” (For more from the author of “The WV Teacher Strike Wasn’t About Students and Teachers. It Was About Protecting Unions” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Jussie Smollett Releases a Scathing Statement — and He’s Attacking Someone New

/0 Comments/in , /by

According to a new statement from Empire star Jussie Smollett released Thursday, he is blaming a mayoral race in Chicago for the unfair treatment he says he is receiving from the Chicago police and law enforcement officials. . .

“The presumption of innocence, a bedrock in the search for justice, was trampled upon at the expense of Mr. Smollett and notably, on the eve of a Mayoral election,” the statement continued.

“Mr. Smollett is a young man of impeccable character and integrity who fiercely and solemnly maintains his innocence and feels betrayed by a system that apparently wants to skip due process and proceed directly to sentencing,” it concluded.

Smollett appeared in court Thursday on felony charges that he filed a false police report in a case that has been debated nationwide for weeks. He has denied accusations that he was involved in orchestrating the attack he reported since the beginning.

(Read more from “Jussie Smollett Releases a Scathing Statement — and He’s Attacking Someone New” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Here’s How Democrats Plan to End Trump’s National Emergency Declaration

/0 Comments/in , , /by

By The Blaze. Democrats reportedly plan to introduce a privileged resolution in Congress in to terminate the declaration of a national emergency at the border by President Donald Trump.

The plan was reported by NBC News Capitol Hill producer Alex Moe on Wednesday.

The resolution would end the declaration by Friday, if it is passed. Moe reported that the effort is led by Rep. Joaquin Castro (R-Texas) and has more than 90 co-sponsors. . .

If the resolution passes the House of Representatives, it would need to be approved by the Republican-controlled Senate. The president has already indicated that he would veto any resolution that came to his desk. The Congress could then override his veto, but only with an unlikely two-thirds majority in both houses.

(Read more from “Here’s How Democrats Plan to End Trump’s National Emergency Declaration” HERE)

___________________________________________

Texas GOP Rep Opposes Trump’s Use of National Emergency to Get Border Wall

By The Hill. Republican Rep. Roger Williams (Texas) said this week that he opposes the national emergency declared by President Trump to build a border wall.

Williams, asked about Trump’s national emergency declaration by a constituent at a town hall event Tuesday, gave a clear “no” to supporting it, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

“The reason that I have not been supportive of the declaration is because Congress has done a really poor job, we … Congress, both sides of the aisle, put the president in this situation, OK, but I don’t support it from a selfish standpoint,” Williams said at the event, according to the Statesman.

He then reportedly went on to explain that the emergency declared by Trump could take border wall funding that currently goes towards military bases, specifically noting Fort Hood, and saying he’d “hate to see a lot of those dollars diverted from that.”

Williams’s district, which he is in his fourth term representing, includes a majority of Fort Hood and is not on or near the border. (Read more from “Texas GOP Rep Opposes Trump’s Use of National Emergency to Get Border Wall” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE