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Donald Trump Picks Tom Homan To Oversee Border Security, Deportations

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Border hawk Thomas Homan is getting a prize border security job in the new administration, incoming President Donald Trump said in a message via his Truth Social media network.

Homan is an experienced border officer who served as acting chief of the vital Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in 2017 and 2018. The agency is responsible for finding, arresting, and deporting illegal migrants. Homan strongly supported Trump during the 2024 election.

However, the statement did not say Homan would be nominated to run the Department of Homeland Security or the ICE agency. If nominated and confirmed by the Senate for either job, he would have the funding, personnel, and legal authority to deport many illegal migrants.

Instead, the statement suggests he will serve as a “Border Czar,” and will play an advocacy and coordinating role within the White House staff:

[Homan] will be joining the Trump Administration, in charge of our Nation’s Borders (“The Border Czar”), including, but not limited to, the Southern Border, the Northern Border, all Maritime, and Aviation Security. I’ve known Tom for a long time, and there is nobody better at policing and controlling our Borders. Likewise, Tom Homan will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.

(Read more from “Donald Trump Picks Tom Homan To Oversee Border Security, Deportations” HERE)

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

3 Palestinian Terror Suspects Caught After Crossing Border Illegally as Overwhelmed Agents Warn: ‘I Probably Let Terrorists In’

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Border agents detained three Palestinian migrants who illegally crossed the southern border after they were found to have possible ties to terrorist organizations earlier this month, according to sources.

One of the migrants had “salacious photos” on their phone — including a picture of a masked man holding an AK-47 rifle, federal law enforcement sources said.

In addition to the three Palestinians, federal authorities caught one migrant from Turkey who was also suspected of having ties to terror groups.

The migrants were among groups of dozens of migrants who turned themselves in to border agents at the San Diego sector, said sources.

An investigation into the migrants is ongoing, sources said. The group was transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating their cases. (Read more from “3 Palestinian Terror Suspects Caught After Crossing Border Illegally as Overwhelmed Agents Warn: ‘I Probably Let Terrorists In’” HERE)

Photo credit: Flickr

Federal Judge Temporarily Halts Biden’s Attempt to Terminate Title 42

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A federal district court judge in Louisiana has granted the Republican attorneys general of more than one dozen states a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the Biden administration, requiring — for now at least — the administration to keep Title 42 in place.

As Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich noted in the successful motion for a TRO — joined by the attorneys general of Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming:

…the Defendant Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) and its Defendant subagencies are partially implementing the Termination Order already. Yesterday, a major media outlet reported that “Border Patrol is not using the Title 42 public health order to remove many migrants from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, more than a month before the Biden administration lifts the order altogether,” according to “multiple Border Patrol sources.” DHS seems to admit it partially ended Title 42, on the basis that return flights to “certain non-contiguous countries” take too long to schedule. But DHS previously returned aliens to Mexico when flights were limited, and such action is the only one that aligns with public health harms detailed in the Title 42 Order, which is still in place. Thus, while Title 42 may be “technically still in place,” the reality on the ground is that DHS “has largely stopped using Title 42 to remove migrants from Northern Triangle countries, and is instead processing them via Title 8 and expedited removal.”

“This Court should issue a TRO immediately and require DHS to explain its actions so that the States and this Court can take appropriate actions in response to what may (or may not) be some highly inappropriate actions by DHS that directly undermine this Court’s authority to remedy the harms that the challenged agency action would occasion,” the AG’s motion requested. (Read more from “Federal Judge Temporarily Halts Biden’s Attempt to Terminate Title 42” HERE)

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Bordering on Chaos: Striking New Photos Reveal Crowded Migrant Conditions; Senator Shares Footage of Biden Staffer Blocking Him From Recording in Migrant Facility

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By New York Post New photos that reveal startlingly overcrowded conditions at border facilities were released by a Democratic congressman Sunday.

The shots show dozens of children packed into glass-walled rooms, lying shoulder-to-shoulder on thin mattresses, many covered with foil blankets amid the escalating crisis.

Others showed hundreds of girls packed together, with Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) saying they have been held for “far longer” than the legal 72-hour limit. . .

Cuellar said 500 girls were moved from the Border Patrol facility to a Health and Human Services facility in San Diego, but the other 200 are among over 5,000 individuals, 65 percent of whom are unaccompanied children, waiting to be processed at the border. (Read more from “Bordering on Chaos: Striking New Photos Reveal Crowded Migrant Conditions” HERE)

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Senator Shares Footage of Biden Staffer Blocking Him From Recording in Migrant Facility

By Washington Examiner. Sen. Ted Cruz shared video footage of a reported Biden staffer blocking him from recording in a migrant facility in his home state of Texas.

“Please give dignity to the people. Please give dignity to the people. … Please respect the people, the rules,” the staffer told Cruz while standing directly in front of his camera.

The footage was shown exclusively on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News show, Sunday Morning Futures.

“So you work for the commissioner, you’re a senior adviser, you were hired two weeks ago, and you’re instructed to ask us to not have any pictures taken here because the political leadership at DHS does not want the American people to know it,” Cruz said to her. . .

“Your policies are unfortunately trying to hide them. I understand that you were instructed,” Cruz said. “I respect them, and I want to fix this situation, and the administration that you work for is responsible for these conditions.”

(Read more from “Senator Shares Footage of Biden Staffer Blocking Him From Recording in Migrant Facility” HERE)

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Air Travel From Europe to U.S. to Shut Down Over Coronavirus. but What About Our Southern Border?

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Our entire nation dodged a bullet late yesterday when the Supreme Court stayed a Ninth Circuit injunction that would have caused a mass rush of caravans at our border. But had SCOTUS declined to intervene, would our government really have opened our borders during an official global pandemic just because of an illegal lower court opinion?

Here’s a rule of thumb: If the fallout from a court ruling requires the president to send troops to an international border to stem the tide of foreign nationals rushing in, that is clearly an issue over which the court has no jurisdiction.

Last Friday, following the Ninth Circuit’s announced injunction on the DHS’ “remain in Mexico” policy, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced the deployment of 160 troops to the border. According to the press release, CBP would deploy 80 active-duty troops to San Diego’s San Ysidro border crossing and 80 to El Paso’s Paso del Norte bridge to assist agents with repelling a potential rush at the border. Warning of the “amassment of large groups in Mexico with the potential to forcibly enter the United States,” the statement said the troops would provide “military police support, engineer, and aviation support” to the customs agents manning those two ports.

According to local news in Texas, the troops have already arrived in El Paso.

This is all because of one circuit court that believes judges, not the political branches, get to decide who comes into the country, contrary to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Hawaii. The court would have re-implemented its injunction on Wednesday if not for the intervention of the Supreme Court hours before the injunction was to take effect.

It’s self-evident that there is an eager crowd of illegal aliens waiting to rush the border in anticipation of these court rulings. It’s likely why, for the first time in 10 months, border apprehensions rose slightly in February. The numbers from Tucson are already rising as the Ninth Circuit ruled that the “remain in Mexico” policy be halted for those who will now purposely come to Arizona or California. Will this administration really allow the Ninth Circuit to restart the border crisis? Remember, the open-borders groups have many more lawsuits in the pipeline. Are we really required to open our borders until the Supreme Court steps in at each stage of this game of lawsuit whack-a-mole?

And what about the coronavirus? At a time when we are shutting off legal travel from many places, are we really going to bring in thousands from Central America and even other countries through our land border and expose our border officials to a pandemic? Is there no limit to judicial power whatsoever?

Breitbart reported in February that 1,155 Chinese nationals were caught entering illegally at our border during the first four months of the fiscal year. While CBP does follow protocols to screen them, CBP declined to answer whether these aliens are held for the duration of the incubation period to rule out that they are carrying coronavirus.

“Consistent with these existing procedures to prevent the spread of communicable disease, individuals identified with symptoms of illness are referred to CDC or local health officials for additional health screening,” said a CBP official in a statement to CR on February 26. “Border Patrol agents are reminded of proper precautionary measures to protect against communicable diseases as recommended by the CDC.”

Thus, CBP was able to confirm that these immigrants are being screened at the border, but has not answered my follow-up as to whether they are being held for the 14-day incubation period before being released with a notice to appear in court.

As Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies reports, unlike with the Central Americans, extra-continental migrants are waived into the country pending adjudication of their asylum claims. In light of Trump’s shutoff of air travel from Europe, this might change, but clearly, weeks into this epidemic, the land border was not closed to immigration requests, even from Chinese nationals.

Chinese nationals coming to our border pose numerous potential security threats. As one border agent told me last year, he never saw a Chinese national at the border who did not run from him, but upon apprehension, they almost always claim asylum. Clearly, security and espionage concerns do not trump open-borders policies, but one would think a health epidemic coming from China itself would. One would hope that, by now, these people are being turned away from entering the same way Europeans are barred from traveling here.

Aside from the concern of losing the ground Trump took in deterring Central American families, the border data shows that there is already in increase in single adult Mexicans and Central American teens traveling alone, known as Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs). These were two loopholes that were not closed under the new policies, because UACs are still waived in and Mexican nationals are obviously not a part of Mexico’s agreement to hold asylum seekers from other countries. But Trump’s complete power to shut down immigration applies to them as well. Aside from the security problems we have with UACs joining gangs, it is sheer lunacy to invite cross-border migration when our economy is melting down over coronavirus.

The amalgamation of all these factors makes this the most auspicious time for Trump to publicly and categorically vouch for his inherent authority to shut off immigration and to do so completely at the southern border. He should deploy even more soldiers and state unambiguously that no court can compel such a suicidal outcome, even if the courts had jurisdiction and were right on the merits. New caravans are already forming.

Trump is rightly shutting off travel to U.S. airports from Europe. Shouldn’t it be a no-brainer that all illegal immigration, even dressed up as asylum and “unaccompanied minors,” will be suspended at our land border as well? (For more from the author of “Air Travel From Europe to U.S. to Shut Down Over Coronavirus. but What About Our Southern Border?” please click HERE)

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The Magic Power of Enforcement? Texas Border Crossings Cut in Half

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Something funny begins to happen when our government finally enforces some of our laws and sovereignty. According to weekly data from Texas’ Department of Public Safety used internally by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and obtained by CR, 9,407 illegal aliens were apprehended during the first week of August in Texas, a 54 percent decline since the highest weekly rate of May and June. Even more enforcement would likely result in an even sharper decline.

Where the numbers stand today

According to the data, which was given to CR by a Border Patrol agent who must remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak to the press, the Texas numbers averaged around 18,000-20,000 per week in May and early June. Then when the president began beefing up the “remain in Mexico” policy, the weekly numbers declined to about 13,000-14,000 during late June and throughout July. Then, just from the final week in July to the first week in August, after the president announced the “safe third country” asylum deal with Guatemala, the numbers dropped 27 percent to under 10,000 for the first time since early in the year.

Although these numbers are only from Texas, the Lone Star State has absorbed about 70 percent of the border flow, and the June numbers from CBP show that apprehensions in Arizona and California have declined even more dramatically. The Rio Grande Valley is still, by far, the worst area of the border, but those numbers are also declining.

Three factors – the “remain in Mexico” policy (expanded to RGV sector July 19), denying asylum to anyone who could have declared asylum in Mexico (announced July 15), and the agreement with Guatemala to serve as a safe third country (announced July 26) – have collectively sent the message to migrants that the days of de facto open borders might be over. Before those elements were in place, the decline resulting from Mexico’s enforcement actions was not that significant.

The important lesson here is for the president to double down on what’s working and turn back everyone at the border rather than just relying on the hype of what he might do. As Rep. Chip Roy reported:

The key word is “hype.” When our open border was being hyped to the world since spring of 2018 and following several California judicial rulings, the world began to migrate to the border. Now the hype is reversing. This time, the president would be wise to learn from the past.

Putting the numbers in context

A flow of 9,400 per week for Texas is still high. That’s almost a half a million people per year just for Texas, well above the levels during most of Obama’s presidency. For example, in December 2016, the final full month of Obama’s presidency, the numbers were averaging under 30,000 per month in Texas. Today, even with an endless, brutal heat wave at the border and in Mexico, we are still averaging about 40,000 per month.

Trump promised to do better than Obama on illegal immigration and begin to reform even legal immigration and other bad policies, such as unqualified birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens. For the beginning months of his presidency, the hype that he would lock down the border had its effect on the perception of potential illegal immigrants. Just 11,000 people were apprehended at the entire border during April 2017, the low point of the “Trump hype” during the early part of his presidency.

However, as we all remember, the hype started to wear off after people realized that it was just that: only hype. Then, once the courts got involved and the administration refused to issue a shutoff at our border, the wave rose for nearly two years, cresting over this past spring and early summer. Thus, there is still a lot of work to do just to get back what the levels were when the entire MAGA movement began.

The good news is that, of all sources, the Ninth Circuit just handed the president a tremendous opportunity. For unknown reasons, this administration continues to decline a categorical 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) shutoff of all requests at the border. However, it recently declared that all asylum requests of anyone who could have declared asylum in Mexico will be denied. Well, that should apply to pretty much everyone at the border, except for Mexicans. While a California judge lawlessly issued a nationwide injunction on the policy late last week, the Ninth Circuit finally came to terms with the fact that it lacks jurisdiction over New Mexico (Tenth Circuit) and Texas (Fifth Circuit).

The DHS needs to take yes for an answer and begin turning back every single individual in those two states. It should not process anyone except those who are to be charged with crimes. That would take the hype to the next level of reality. In July, 82 percent of overall apprehensions and 90 percent of family unit apprehensions were in those states outside the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, mainly in Texas.

Moreover, there are several other ideas left on the list from my “Deter, Defend, Demagnetize” plan for this administration to implement. The most important additional element is to designate the cartels as terrorists and more aggressively use the military to counter them. It’s been over a week since assailants shot over 50 rounds into our patrol boats in what should have been regarded as an act of war. Yet there is no response from our government.

It’s frustrating that it has taken this long for the administration to take these steps. The good news is that it’s better late than never, and the trajectory is headed in a better direction. The president selected two strong leaders in Mark Morgan (CBP) and Ken Cuccinelli (USCIS) to head two of the most important agencies charged with managing the border. It would be great if he could take this to the next step and replace Kevin McAleenan as head of the DHS.

As the summer turns into fall and the temperatures begin to drop and become more comfortable for mass migration, Trump must double down on sovereignty and turn up the heat if he hopes to keep his campaign promises alive. (For more from the author of “The Magic Power of Enforcement? Texas Border Crossings Cut in Half” please click HERE)

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Children of Overwhelmed Border Agents Bullied in Schools, Taunted over Their Parents’ Job

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Here is your job description:

You must patrol a rugged frontier where everything stings and bites. In 105-degree weather.

You must confront and interdict hundreds of desperate illegal aliens alone in remote brush and ensure that no dangerous people or drugs get in. But you must also treat them all with the utmost care.

You must confront the most violent and deadly terrorist groups in combat mode, but you can’t be in combat mode.

Your job is to protect Americans, but unofficially your job has become protecting those invading who are strategically sent here by rival groups beheading each other.

You must grope around in the dark through overgrown sugar cane at night with cartels monitoring your every move, where you can be ambushed at any moment without backup.

You are an American hero, right? Nope. You are called a Nazi and a concentration camp guard by the elite members of the political and media class.

You are a modern Border Patrol agent.

Sergio Tinoco had an impoverished childhood in south Texas, as his mother remained in Mexico, and he labored on a farm to support himself. He pulled himself up by the bootstraps, served in the military for 10 years, and then became a Border Patrol agent protecting the land in which he grew up in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV). The last thing this son of Mexican immigrants expected was to be compared to a Nazi by America’s elites for serving his nation and protecting our dangerous border, but it’s more personal than just general criticisms leveled in the media.

“Our agents are just completely overwhelmed; they are exhausted,” said the exasperated Border Patrol supervisor on my podcast yesterday. “Not only are they exhausted out in the field, exhausted inside the stations processing, they are exhausted with all the rhetoric that’s coming down through the media and Congress. Our own congressional leaders are vilifying our agents. These are the people holding America’s front line. It hurts us all. The most evil statement ever made – that Border Patrol is running concentration camps – let me tell you, I have kids, all of us have kids, we are regular people. We’re regular Joes and Jameses. We have kids and spouses who also hear these comments. Our kids’ friends hear these comments. And they get bullied in school, they get bullied at the playground, they get bullied at parties. Our spouses have to hear it at their own workspaces. It’s just a sad scene for my wife to go into the work office and the very first question, instead of saying good morning, is it true that your husband is gassing these immigrants or killing these immigrants or raping them? I mean how do you even start your day off like that?”

Sergio, who patrols one of the hardest-hit regions, told me that the public has no clue how the emotional abuse from political leaders exacerbates their nearly impossible physical job.

“I’m supposed to come home at the end of my shift, a ten-hour shift mind you, of dealing with hundreds and hundreds of bodies every single day. I’m exhausted physically, I’m exhausted mentally, I’m exhausted emotionally. I want to come home and this is supposed to be my shelter, right? My fortress of solitude where I can relax and unwind? No, I can’t do that any more. Because now I have to come home and hear what my kids were told by their friends. … And now we have to correct that. So, at what point does the agent truly relax and unwind? Congress has truly taken that away from us and placed us in a very, very dark spot.”

And our agents now are not even able to perform their first job of protecting Americans. All border agents do now is care for these people as if they are the slaves of foreign nationals rather than protectors of the American citizen. They are falling on their swords for illegal aliens at the expense of protecting the American people, yet they still get accused of running concentration camps.

“Our agents are the most compassionate agents out there,” Tinoco said. “We give up our water, we give up our food. We care for these kids, we care for the moms. I mean, just place yourself in a room overcrowded with kids crying; moms and dads pleading, ‘I am hurting, I need to go to the doctor.’ ‘Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am,’” we say. “‘We’re about to take you to the hospital.’ Mind you, these are things that we are not designed for, but because of our compassion, our human nature, of course, we deal with it. … That’s part of the emotional exhaustion that we experienced daily, you know, and then to hear all these evil things being said about us, it just undermines our mission, it undermines the work we’re doing, it undermines the challenges that we face.”

One other border agent in the Rio Grande Valley who must remain anonymous because he’s not authorized to speak to the media told me that this is a broader problem with the culture in the RGV. “People from outside the area don’t realize that a lot of the culture among the power players and even among some of the people in south Texas are very favorable towards the cartels and illegal aliens. To paint a target on the backs of Border Patrol when they have families going to the schools in the region is unfathomable. Just a few weeks ago, my seven-year-old was cornered by a group of kids who were brainwashed against Border Patrol. They also give children of ICE and DEA agents a hard time.”

It would be one thing if Border Patrol officially just became babysitters and hospital transporters in a safe environment. But they face unimaginable danger in the field when they patrol. Not only are they in danger while dealing with the cartels and the criminal elements of the migrants, but even dealing with the family units is volatile.

Tinoco explained how he has been in situations where he is alone in a remote area and as many as 54 individuals show up. Even if they are just run-of-the-mill migrant families without any gang or criminal record (which are extremely common), Sergio painted a picture for my listeners of how nerve-racking such confrontations can be.

“These people lost everything. They either owe money to the cartel or they owe money to a coyote. God only knows what has happened to their daughters on the trip to the border. And now all of a sudden, they have just one man or woman in a green uniform and that is the last person they have to go through, in their minds, to reach freedom. That’s a very dangerous predicament for us to be in. They are pinned up against a wall and in the last moment of frustration, anything can happen.”

One man among 54.

“We go into any sort of area knowing in the back of our minds that sooner or later, our backup is going to arrive, hopefully sooner rather than later.”

Will the backup from the American people and their political leaders ever arrive? (For more from the author of “Children of Overwhelmed Border Agents Bullied in Schools, Taunted over Their Parents’ Job” please click HERE)

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Border Apprehensions Drop to Lowest Level in Months

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Apprehensions by Border Patrol agents of migrants who illegally cross the U.S. border with Mexico dropped nearly 29 percent in June, reaching the lowest level since March. The decrease follows seasonal patterns and increased immigration enforcement in Mexico following President Donald Trump’s threat of tariffs.

“Since the administration reached a new agreement with Mexico,” Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kevin K. McAleenan said in a written statement, “we’ve seen a substantial increase in the number of interdictions on the Mexican southern border.

The apprehension of migrants illegally crossing the U.S. border from Mexico dropped from 132,880 in May to 94,897 in June. This represents a decrease of 28.6 percent, according to the Southwest Border Migration Report released on Wednesday afternoon by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The biggest drop in apprehensions came in the categories of family units and unaccompanied minors. The apprehension of these two categories fell from 95,890 in May to 64,767 in June — a 32.5 percent drop. Single adults also dropped from 36,900 to 30,130 — an 18.3 percent drop. . .

“This year’s decline in apprehensions from May to June outpaces last year’s decline by 11 percent,” the acting DHS secretary explained. “The reduction in apprehensions accounts for decreases across all demographics, including unaccompanied minors, family units and single adults, as well as decreases in migrants from all Northern Triangle countries, particularly those coming from Guatemala.” (Read more from “Border Apprehensions Drop to Lowest Level in Months” HERE)

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Dishonest Dems Use Obama-Era Photo to Launch Investigation into Border Cages

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On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee will “hold a hearing examining how the Trump Administration’s deterrence policies are creating a humanitarian crisis and jeopardizing the health and safety of the migrant children and families.” The hearing, called “Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border” will start at 2:30 p.m on Wednesday, July 10th.

The hearing was announced on Twitter on Tuesday, and there was something very interesting about the graphic they used to promote it:

. . .

After the GOP Oversight Committee pointed out that House Democrats had used an Obama/Biden era photo in their graphic, the tweet was deleted. Talk about an embarrassing mistake. House Democrats essentially said they were launching an investigation into abuses that occurred while frontrunner Joe Biden was vice president. Unfortunately, it’s clear that Democrats are less concerned about the treatment of immigrant children and families than they are about trying to score political points during a presidential campaign. If they really cared about immigrant children, they would have been outraged when Obama built the cages for immigrant children, separated families at the border, used tear gas on immigrants, let immigrant children into the hands of human traffickers, and kept kids in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. (Read more from “Dishonest Dems Use Obama-Era Photo to Launch Investigation into Border Cages” HERE)

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Congress Won’t Fund the One Thing We Need to Enforce CURRENT Law

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We don’t need more “border funding” to fix a policy problem at our border, one which could be solved with the military and proper use of current law. However, we do need more funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to compensate for years of not enforcing existing law, which has created a backlog of illegal aliens, often dangerous ones, in our country with no ability to deport them. Yet, that is the one funding request Republicans refuse to push.

The border problem itself is very simple. The two problems are district court lawfare inviting millions of people to our border and the refusal of our government to treat the cartels as a national defense issue and deploy the military to hold the line at the border the way we secure parameters of other countries’ borders. None of these require funding, but policy changes. We already spend $716 billion on the military every year, much of it to secure other countries. There’s no reason we can’t secure our own border with that type of exorbitant budget.

The issue, then, is lack of interior enforcement. Thanks to endless lawfare and lack of resources, illegal aliens, including other countries’ most violent criminals and drug traffickers, remain here indefinitely. Congress addressed the lawfare in 1996 by unanimously passing a bill that ensured that any illegal immigrant caught within two years of coming here is deported immediately under “expedited removal” without any review by an immigration judge, much less a federal judge. Yet, because every administration has refused to implement that law, illegal aliens have been allowed to stay indefinitely and go through the endless lawfare system, creating a resource problem that our laws were designed to prevent.

Still, there are over 1 million illegal aliens who have already received final deportation orders, with another 1.5 million having already received deportation orders but are in the process of seeking an appeal the 1996 law was designed to foreclose.

If we can’t remove even those at this stage, then our laws are a joke. Unfortunately, there are only roughly 6,000 ICE agents available to do the removals and they are averaging just 7,000 interior deportations a month so far this year. And thanks to the border surge itself, ICE resources are being diverted to serve as babysitters at the border along with Border Patrol. Bryan Wilcox, acting director of ICE’s Seattle field office, said on my show Thursday that “better than 10% of my officers are currently on detail either to the border or to other parts of the country in support of the border.” He noted that “if we really want to make a dent on this problem, we need significantly more resources.”

Even if we focused solely on the bad guys, we lack the resources to make a dent. Think about it: as early as 2013, DHS estimated, based on ICE programs in local jails, that there were 1.9 million criminal aliens in this country and that 900,000 aliens were arrested every year. Chillingly, the report noted that “550,000 criminal aliens convicted of crimes exit law enforcement custody every year” and that “this population of criminal aliens poses a major threat to public safety.”

That was before the entire wave of Central Americans and the massive influx of gangs it has brought in. This is a prima facie public safety threat, yet it is so redressable because, unlike with American criminals, they can all be removed from society so that we don’t have to deal with their almost certain recidivism. But thanks to years of disregarding the law, there are too many of them in the country for the resources we have to deport them.

Yet, deportations are the only thing Congress will not fund amidst the bipartisan effort to fund legal aid and more amnesty programs for illegals. They will not provide the funding to enforce the laws passed by people like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn, Dianne Feinstein, and Joe Biden in 1996.

It’s truly hard to understate the importance of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Most other law enforcement only have authority to apprehend. The rest is out of their hands. The prosecutor must then land a conviction, and in our weak-on-crime system, most violent criminals are back on the streets within short order. With ICE, you get the best bang for your buck because these foreign criminals are removed from the country given that they have no affirmative right to be here.

Unfortunately, more than half of ICE’s human resources are drawn off for Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which often does good work, but often gets distracted. When the investigators from the old U.S. Customs Service merged with INS deportation officers under the newly created Department of Homeland Security, many of its leaders made it clear they wanted nothing to do with immigration work. Thus, they were given a fiefdom to “conduct investigation.” Often, they have nothing to do with the homeland or immigration or overlap with DEA and FBI. Recently, they celebrated an investigation combating trademark theft in NBA memorabilia.

With the entire agency smaller than the NYPD to begin with, why is more than half diverted away from what is the ultimate resource problem and the ultimate success for public safety? ERO officers are often regarded as low-level work by the HSI leaders who seem to influence much of ICE’s broad vision. That’s why we are left with about as many removal officers as the size of Houston’s police department and less than half the size of Chicago’s police department.

If we would only have more ERO agents and give them the necessary resources to enforce CURRENT law, so much of the human and drug trafficking would not exist and there would be no need for much of the HSI investigations. This is not to say there aren’t some really dedicated and talented HSI agents who are working some worthy investigations. It’s just that the balance of resources, focus, and esteem must be recalibrated more in favor of ERO than it is today because they have the tools to protect Americans from so much harm by simply removing the threat without any lawfare. The rest of HSI should be focused more on multiplying deportations of gangs and criminal networks.

Rather than the politicians and the media scoffing at President Trump’s attempt to enforce our laws by noting how we lack the resources to fully implement it, they should be outraged that those resources have never been allocated. (For more from the author of “Congress Won’t Fund the One Thing We Need to Enforce CURRENT Law” please click HERE)

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