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DOJ Files Petition That Could Strip Federal Immigration Judges’ Union of Bargaining Power

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The Department of Justice is asking for a determination on whether or not federal immigration judges can legally be part of a union in a petition filed to a federal employment board on Friday.

Under federal law, federal employees can form and join bargaining units — i.e., unions — but not if they are “management officials” who are by definition “employed by an agency in a position the duties and responsibilities of which require or authorize the individual to formulate, determine, or influence the policies of the agency,” a DOJ fact sheet says.

A DOJ spokesman told Blaze Media Friday afternoon that the department is asking the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) whether the bargaining certification for the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) “as the exclusive representative for the bargaining unit of immigration judges, should be revoked because the bargaining unit members are management officials under the statutory definition.”

U.S. immigration courts and judges are under the authority of the Department of Justice, rather than the judicial branch, through the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR). NAIJ is the union that represents 420 of America’s federal immigration judges.

Previously, the NAIJ has pushed back on a 2018 plan to impose quotas and deadlines on judges in response to the courts’ case backlog amid a massive backlog of immigration cases. More recently, the union has lobbied Congress to break its members away from the DOJ oversight.

The DOJ says that the move was to ensure that the department’s employment practices are in line with federal law

“The role and importance of immigration judges in meeting the Department’s mission and determining or influencing its immigration policies have greatly evolved over the past several years,” the DOJ spokesman told Blaze Media via email. “In recognition of that evolution, including changes in the law, the Department of Justice believes appropriate action is necessary to update EOIR’s workforce relations in conformity with the law and to continue to further the Department’s mission.”

From here, the FRLA is expected to open an investigation into the matter with input from both parties, the spokesman added.

This news follows months after the Department of Justice issued a different regulation aimed at streamlining the immigration courts. The rule cemented and codified the attorney general’s power to make binding rulings on immigration cases, in order to make the courts “as efficient or as effective through the process as possible,” a DOJ official said in July. (For more from the author of “DOJ Files Petition That Could Strip Federal Immigration Judges’ Union of Bargaining Power” please click HERE)

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‘Largest Single-State Worksite Enforcement Action’ in U.S. History Yields Almost 700 Immigration Arrests

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Federal authorities detained almost 700 illegal aliens after execution of a massive worksite immigration enforcement operation at seven different locations in Mississippi on Wednesday.

Reports from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security said that the worksite enforcement operation, which took place at multiple food processing locations, netted 680 arrests in what the DOJ described as the “largest single-state worksite enforcement action” in U.S. history. A report at Fox News details that around 600 ICE agents raided the various food processing plants as part of the operation.

“While we are a nation of immigrants,” U.S. attorney Mike Hurst said at a press conference about the raids, “more than that, we are first and foremost a nation of laws. And the rule of law is the bedrock, the very foundation of our great country.”

A statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi, says that those detained were “being interviewed, fingerprinted and photographed by ICE agents, processed for removal from the United States, and transported to an ICE facility in Jena, Louisiana.” A separate ICE statement says that those in the group who already have received final removal orders are now being processed for removal from the country.

But what about the employers who hired illegal labor? ICE’s statement also says that federal law enforcement officials seized business records “pertaining to the ongoing federal criminal investigation.” At Wednesday’s press conference, Hurst said that he couldn’t comment on an ongoing matter when asked by a reporter whether or not those who knowingly employed the illegal aliens would face consequences.

The worksite enforcement is reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration, which regularly conducted large worksite enforcement raids. Some of the more famous examples were those at Pilgrim’s Pride facilities in 2008 and a massive raid at a kosher meat plant in the same year. Obama “avoided” such actions, the Associated Press explains, “limiting workplace immigration efforts to low-profile audits.” (For more from the author of “‘Largest Single-State Worksite Enforcement Action’ in U.S. History Yields Almost 700 Immigration Arrests” please click HERE)

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This Criminal Alien Is Accused of Smothering 19 Elderly Victims to Death. He Should Have Been Deported Long Ago

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Nobody in the GOP Senate or the White House is taking notice of what might be the worst and most heinous criminal alien crime committed in American history. We must discuss closing the multiple criminal alien loopholes that violate laws duly passed Congress.

At least 19 Texans were allegedly killed by someone who should never have been in the country, who had been in jail for other crimes and should have been deported. What if I told you that if we merely enforced and tightened existing laws, unvetted foreign nationals like this would never be able to commit subsequent crimes? “Do something!!,” you would say, right?

Well, not a single major elected official is even talking about this case, much less calling for emergency congressional action to deal with the loopholes. And unlike with El Paso, this crime was actually 100 percent avoidable through public policy, and the course of action would not implicate a fundamental right. After all, there is no right to immigrate, as there is a right for Americans to bear arms.

This man should never have been here

Billy Chemirmir, like many people who gamed out our immigration system, came to the United States on a tourist visa in 2003, only to indefinitely overstay his visa, according to Breitbart.com’s John Binder. That should have rendered him an illegal alien, and had our government fulfilled its promise in 1996 to construct a visa tracking exit-entry system, as later recommended by the 9/11 Commission, he would have been out of the country. Not only was he not deported, he wound up using a loophole to get a green card in 2007 by marrying an American citizen, according to Binder’s sources. He then racked up a significant criminal history, including two DWIs in 2011 and an assault on a girlfriend resulting in bodily injury in 2012.

Yet this criminal from another country, whose presence here was originally illegal and who should have been deported, continued to remain in the country.

That brings us to the present. Chemirmir is now charged with the murder of 12 senior citizens whom he is alleged to have killed by smothering them with pillows over the course of three years – 2016-2018 – long after he should have been deported.

Thanks to his attempted murder of others who survived to tell the horror tale, Chemirmir was finally arrested on March 20, 2018, and charged with the murder of 81-year-old Lu Thi Harris that day. According to a timeline of events by the Dallas Morning News, the day before that arrest, Chemirmir allegedly smothered a 91-year-old Plano resident, but she survived and was able to help identify the suspect. However, it wasn’t until this May that police brought forward the murders of other seniors, now possibly totaling 19. He was charged with the murder of another 11 in May for smothering his victims with a pillow and has recently been linked to the murders in seven other civil lawsuits of plaintiffs against the Tradition-Prestonwood senior living facility.

The alleged murders took place between May 2016 and March 2018 in Dallas and Collin Counties. He is accused of pretending to be a maintenance worker and gaining entry into several nursing home facilities as well as private homes in retirement communities, with the intent of murdering the helpless victims and stealing jewelry. Nine of the victims are alleged to have been residents of Tradition-Prestonwood.

Chemirmir is currently being held in the Dallas County jail on $11.6 million bond while authorities investigate 750 other deaths in the area to see if the same M.O. was present in any other cases where there is suspicion about the cause of death. Some of the bodies of those previously thought to have died of natural causes had to be exhumed during the investigation.

ICE initially placed a detainer on him when he was arrested in March 2018. But it was too little, too late. Thanks to the endless lack of enforcement of our foundational sovereignty laws, this man was allowed to remain in the country after multiple opportunities to remove him.

Why was this man able to remain in the country without raising questions?

“Obviously Chemirmir should never have received a visitor visa to begin with, and he was able to take advantage of the near complete lack of enforcement and near complete lack of deterrents to overstaying,” said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, who used to vet visa applicants as a foreign service officer with the State Department. “It’s not clear how he was able to secure employment for the four years that he was in the country illegally, and this should be investigated.”

While the main focus of local media is on malfeasance at the senior facilities, this is a much bigger national public policy issue, according to Vaughan. “Not only should authorities investigate suspicious deaths where he worked, but ICE should be looking at all of his employers and subject them to audits to see if they have knowingly engaged in illegal hiring or at least be required to clean up their hiring so as to avoid hiring illegal workers in the future.”

We are collectively wringing our hands as a nation trying to figure out how to prevent very tough cases of first-time mass shooters. But why is there no soul-searching about an alleged mass murderer, a criminal alien, on the multiple levels of breakdown in law enforcement? Where are the hearings, DHS investigations, and media inquiries into why he was given a green card, why he was given work before the green card, why he wasn’t on anyone’s radar after he committed more crimes, and whether Dallas’s lax immigration enforcement policies had anything to do with it?

Among the many foundational immigration laws that have been gutted by lawless executive action is section 212(a)(9)(b) of the INA, which bars anyone who “has been unlawfully present in the United States for one year or more” from returning to the country for 10 years. Rather than being offered a spousal visa in 2007, Chemirmir should have been removed and barred from entry for 10 years because he was in the country illegally for four years. Yet the executive branch has erroneously exempted visa overstays (as opposed to border-crossers) from the bar, even thought the law is clear that it applies to them: “An alien is deemed to be unlawfully present in the United States if the alien is present in the United States after the expiration of the period of stay authorized by the Attorney General or is present in the United States without being admitted or paroled.” There is discretionary waiver authority for “hardship,” but it has been abused by past administrations.

Why isn’t the Trump administration calling on DHS to change the regulation to comport with the 1996 law, which passed the Senate unanimously and was designed to completely end illegal immigration as we know it?

Then there is the next part of the criminal alien loophole. Even after he was given a green card, Chemirmir was allowed to remain in the country despite serving two prison sentences in Texas. He was first arrested in 2011 for two separate DWIs, then arrested for assault in 2012, then arrested for obstructing the police and criminal trespassing on June 18, 2016. The trespassing charge was when he was caught breaking into the Edgemere senior living facility. That was after two of the Edgemere victims were already allegedly killed by him – Phyllis Payne on May 14 and Phoebe Perry on June 5. Had he been flagged by DHS at this point, the murder of the others could have been avoided.

At this point on June 28, 2016, he pleaded no contest to the assault charge and was sentenced to 70 days, but only served about three weeks, according to Dallas County court records. That alone should have gotten him deported under the law. In addition, even though DWIs are not stand-alone deportable offenses for those with green cards, the DWIs when paired with the assault could constitute “two or more crimes involving moral turpitude,” making him deportable under 8 U.S Code § 1227(a)(2)(A)(ii). But he was let out, and according to the civil lawsuit, he is accused of murdering Joyce Abramowitz at the Tradition-Prestonwood facility just a week after he was released in July.

“It’s disturbing to see Chemirmir’s long rap sheet, including multiple DWIs with jail sentences and violent assault charges, and hard to understand why he was not a candidate for deportation, despite having a green card,” said Jessica Vaughan. “The charges appear to have been frequent enough and serious enough that he could potentially have forfeited his green card. But did any immigration official even try? Certainly, ICE would have received alerts on his arrests, but this type of case was not a priority for any DHS agency at the time. That has to change. We need to adjust our laws and policies so that this kind of behavior is unequivocally disqualifying and so there are systems in place to make sure that it happens. Clearly ICE already has the ability to learn of these arrests, but should be empowered to take action.”

Indeed, under existing law, an assault is a deportable offense. As Vaughan noted, why don’t we have DHS officials monitoring every arrest of a foreign national? For foreign criminals, we have the ultimate ability to “do something” and remove them from the country, thereby precluding their criminal repeats. Unfortunately, DWIs alone are not deportable offenses for those with green cards, but all too often the worst of the worst, without green cards, could have been removed based on DWIs, not to mention the fact that the DWIs themselves are extremely dangerous. Why is there no clamor from the media, Congress, and the president to pass the Scott Gardner Act, mandating deportation of repeat drunk driving offenders?

All of his previous crime occurred before most of the 19 known murders began in 2016. That makes these murders 100 percent avoidable if we had simply enforced our sovereignty. Where are the two Texas senators or the governor calling for action, and why haven’t they been doing so since this story first came out in May?

In June, a Ukrainian national who had prior driving offenses and larceny convictions, killed seven bikers, including five former Marines, in New Hampshire in a car wreck induced by his intoxication on drugs and possibly alcohol.

There was no mention of that case, just like this Texas case, among any Republicans, nor was there any impetus to close the criminal alien loopholes.

“We have no shortage of good people who want to become immigrants,” said Vaughan. “There is no reason for us to let down our standards to accommodate people like Chemirmir. As a general rule, we should not reward illegal aliens with green cards, and we should reserve the right to remove anyone who has received a green card if they do not maintain our standards of good moral character. This monster has taught us a lesson, and now Congress needs to learn it and tighten our laws.” (For more from the author of “This Criminal Alien Is Accused of Smothering 19 Elderly Victims to Death. He Should Have Been Deported Long Ago” please click HERE)

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Congress Authorized Overtime for Agents on ‘Diaper Patrol,’ but Not for Agents at the Border

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The message being conveyed to Border Patrol agents is that their most important job is to care for lawbreakers and smugglers, not to patrol against the cartels and previously deported criminal aliens. The job of “diaper patrol” is being prioritized over the job of protecting Americans from national security concerns. Nowhere is this more evident than in the pay incentives given to agents.

Due to complaints of abuse in the overtime pay system among some agents, Congress passed the Border Patrol Agent Pay Reform Act (BPAPRA) in 2014. The law abolished standard overtime pay for Border Patrol, and in its place, agents were given three options for their 5-day work days. They could work standard 8-hour shifts and receive base pay only or they could work 9-hour shifts and receive 12.5 percent over base pay, or 25 percent over base pay if they opt for 10-hour shifts. Any time an agent works outside the scheduled shift, i.e. 10 hours, they are not paid for the work, but are given “comp time” instead.

Given the crisis of hundreds of thousands of migrants surrendering at the border while thousands of “runners” get away from them, there is a need for all hands-on deck. Yet, thanks to the supplemental bill passed by Congress in June, agents only receive overtime for working at the processing centers babysitting the illegal aliens, but not for actually patrolling the line.

“As it stands now, we are averaging between 9-15 agents actually on the line … less than 30 percent of our station,” said one line agent in the Rio Grande Valley who spoke with CR on background because he is not authorized to speak to the media. “Because of the recent influx, overtime has been authorized to address the problem. What problem? Oh, the ‘humanitarian challenge,’ not the open border problem. Each week, each shift at the station is given a certain amount of hours. The hours ‘first come, first serve’ and also based on seniority (Union). We can choose to work 2 hours of overtime per day or come in on our day off and work a full shift. The only stipulation is IT HAS TO BE FOR THE HUMANITARIAN CRISIS. i.e processing, record checks, sally port security, file creation, transportation, etc. IT CAN’T BE FOR BORDER SECURITY.”

How does this play out in the field?

“Say for example at the end of a shift you are involved in a “bailout” and illegals are running everywhere in the neighborhood … since this is your case you have to catch the illegals, get the vehicle towed to the station, do a vehicle packet, generate paperwork for the bailout, create a “case” for prosecution, etc. the list goes on. Well, by this time it is two hours after your shift ended and you finally get finished … guess what? you don’t qualify for overtime … you get comp time.

What’s the problem with comp time?

According to the agent I spoke to, “this comp time has to be prescheduled with the supervisors and in only extreme cases the agent is justified in unscheduled comp time. This hinders the work and leave a massive gap during shift change if agents are late to replace them or if they are working ‘traffic.’ If agents are incentivized to stay longer until they are relieved by the next shift, it will close the gaps. But without overtime, if they make a spontaneous decision to stay an extra hour until the next shift comes, they will not get comp time either. This is why most of them just leave and the cartels smugglers know this, which is why there are so many bad guys getting in between shift changes.”

On the other hand, thanks to the supplemental funding bill, agents who work an extra two hours at the processing center or who come in on their day off are paid overtime

What sort of message does this send about the priorities of the agency?

Another longer-serving veteran agent in the RGV told me that if overtime were approved for line work, agents would jump at the opportunity to do their core jobs. “Agents are dying to get out of those facilities and actually do what they were trained to do. Offering agents overtime only for humanitarian work but not for security work sends the wrong message to agents and makes it clear that Congress does not prioritize our key mission nor do members understand how many security problems are emanating from the border and the need for more manpower.”

I asked a CBP press official if he was concerned about the dichotomy between the humanitarian and security work in terms of overtime pay. He declined to go on the record, but noted that Congress only approved the funding for humanitarian work and that none of this was the decision of DHS. They simply utilized the funds that were given to them in the way they were earmarked. He also suggested that by putting in more hours at the processing center, it could potentially free up other agents to go to the line.

Both line agents I spoke to vigorously disputed that premise. “That’s complete BS, it never relieves another guy to hit the field,” bemoaned the more senior of the two Texas agents I spoke with. “Assignments are done ahead of time and are not spontaneous. If I send three agents out to do border security due to having three overtime processors, it doesn’t serve the purpose of overtime which is to handle the high volume of processing. Thus, all the extra work goes into the humanitarian work, not on the line. We must add or multiply our number of agents processing, not swap them out. If anything, the supplemental – by funding more humanitarian work and not border security – has placed even more mandates on agents to divert more manpower away from the line.”

The other agent who often does night shifts noted that he has not seen “any difference in terms of the number of agents in the field since passage of the supplemental. The entire purpose of that bill was for diaper patrol, not for Border Patrol.”

There is another budget bill that will pass Congress in September, but once thing is clear: If the border crisis does get addressed, it will all be about more funding for caring for illegal immigrants rather than for doing what the Border Patrol was created to do. (For more from the author of “Congress Authorized Overtime for Agents on ‘Diaper Patrol,’ but Not for Agents at the Border” please click HERE)

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The Illegal Alien Sex Crime Problem the Media Is Ignoring

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Democrats don’t want children to be separated from child molesters at the border.

The requirement of “good moral character” in order to be naturalized as a citizen is as old as our first naturalization laws in 1790 and colonial laws before the Founding. The understanding was that although we are stuck with a lot of terrible natural-born Americans among the many terrific citizens, we should never choose to add new citizens who do not possess good moral character, given that allowing immigration is optional. The country only wanted “reputable and worthy characters” who were “fit for the society into which they were blended,” in the words of Rep. Theodore Sedgwick during the crafting of the Naturalization Act of 1790.

Obviously, one of the most important areas where this applies is in keeping out criminals who prey on the most vulnerable: children. Yet not only are we refusing to turn back unvetted illegal immigrants, among whom we know there are many criminals who already have records, our government is incentivizing these very people to use young children as tickets into our country. It’s truly hard to comprehend keeping such an evil policy that disregards the safety of Americans as well as the safety of immigrant children, but it is sold as the height of compassion.

The reports from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and from ICE of arresting illegal aliens both at the border and all over our communities on child sex charges are not random happenstance. If I were to drop every other issue I focus on, I could spend every hour focusing on a new case and still not make a dent in the number of illegal alien child sex offense cases that are out there.

One report from only 30 percent of North Carolina counties found that in just the past 18 months, more than 331 illegal aliens have been charged with 1,172 child rapes and child sexual assaults. Just one year’s arrests by ICE’s small forces netted illegal aliens who were charged with a total of 6,888 “sex offenses,” 5,350 “sexual assaults,” and 1,739 “commercialized sexual assaults.”

Some of this is culturally cultivated, from areas where sex with teenagers is not viewed as something criminal or wrong, but is often the regular practice. According to data from Girls Not Brides, a global nonprofit against child marriage, the child marriage rates for girls in Latin American countries from which we are seeing an uptick in illegal immigration are particularly high:

Nicaragua – 41%

Honduras – 34%

Guatemala – 30%

El Salvador – 25%

But when you focus on the people who are actually coming to the border, the numbers are starker. The rates vary dramatically between the urban areas and the poor rural areas, especially in countries like Guatemala.

According to GirlsNotBrides, “Child marriage tends to happen more in rural areas than in urban areas,” and in Guatemala, “over half of rural girls (mostly from Mayan indigenous populations) are married before 18.” They also note that “poverty can also drive child marriage in the region” and therefore, “Indigenous girls living in impoverished areas can be especially vulnerable to the practice.”

The report further observes that “trends over the past 30 years have shown” that Latin America and the Caribbean “is the only region not to see a significant change in rates of child marriage.”

So, who is having sex with a 14- or 15-year-old girl? Is it a 15-year-old boy?

“In Central America, the average [age] difference is 5 to 7 years, a significant gap given the girls’ young ages and the power difference between teenagers and people in their twenties.”

This shows the culture of relatively older men having sex with young girls. Remember, government officials have already said that these migrants are coming from the poorest areas of rural Central America, without sanitary conditions and health care. What comes along with that demographic is child sex. Many of those coming to the border speak indigenous languages and don’t even understand Spanish. It’s certainly not the wealthy and educated who are coming north.

While we feel terrible for billions of people living in very primitive cultures and subpar conditions throughout the globe, we must not be naive about the problems of some of those cultures that run counter to the universal values of even this divided country. None of us want to bring child sex predators into the country.

Liberals will kick, scream, and name-call over making this commonsense observation, but in any context other than illegal immigration, nobody would have a problem pointing this out. When it comes to helping people in those countries, everyone will readily publicize all of the cultural, fiscal, health, and criminal problems endemic to the areas. Yet the minute the discussion turns to transplanting hundreds of thousands of them over a short period of time to our country, suddenly those problems are ignored, and one who points them out is called a racist.

Just last month, a Guatemalan who was released into the country three months ago was charged in Alabama for sexually assaulting a minor under the age of 12. Given the daily cases we see at the border and the interior, how many more will we see in the coming years as a result of this wave?

Our laws on the books since the 1880s were designed to keep out values not supported by the nation. Prostitutes were inadmissible, as well as polygamists, who are still barred from entry to this day (8 US Code 1182(a)(10)(A)). We really need to think twice about the tipping point were “compassion” is really cruelty. (For more from the author of “The Illegal Alien Sex Crime Problem the Media Is Ignoring” please click HERE)

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Lawless: Court Rules That Law Enforcement CANNOT Enforce Immigration Laws

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Our laws were written in the most emphatic terms to ensure that those who entered illegally cannot remain in this country undetected. The purpose of those laws was precisely to detect illegal aliens and ensure that they are promptly removed from the country. Yet lower court judges, violating foundational Supreme Court case law, are flipping those laws upside down and are now making it unlawful to detect and deport illegal aliens. The latest Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling is a great example of why no new laws will solve the problem if the executive branch will passively capitulate to lower courts subverting existing laws. The cycle will just continue.

On Wednesday, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that two Guatemalan illegal aliens could not be deported based on ICE finding out their unlawful status from a traffic stop initiated by a state trooper. In doing so, the judges not only created a Fourth Amendment right to privacy against detecting one’s illegal immigration status – contrary to years of case law – but also ruled that illegal aliens can’t be deported based on obtaining such information! In other words, when the laws say illegal aliens cannot be shielded from detection (8 U.S. Code §1324), they really mean they cannot be detected.

The two plaintiffs, Erick Geovany Yoc-Us and Luis Calel-Espantzay, are Guatemalan nationals who were sleeping in the back of a van when Pennsylvania state trooper Luke Macke pulled over the vehicle for speeding. There were six other people in the van who turned out to be citizens of Mexico, El Salvador, and Ecuador. Any commonsense police officer seeing that circumstance would have reasonable suspicion that they are in the country illegally.

The trooper smartly asked them for immigration papers or other forms of ID. The trooper called ICE, the people admitted to being here illegally, and they were placed in deportation proceedings. They were ordered deported by an immigration judge, and the ruling was upheld by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the appellate body of immigration court system.

Open and shut, right? Illegal aliens have no right to remain here and no right to remain undetected. As I’ve noted before, illegal aliens could have some constitutional rights if we want to permanently confine them, but if we merely want to remove them from the country, they have no Fourth Amendment rights against that. In fact, the laws are explicitly designed to ensure they are immediately detected.

Section 1324 prevents officials from shielding from detection, harboring, inducing, encouraging, or transporting illegal aliens and enabling them to remain in the country. The Alien Registration Act (8 U.S. Code §1253) downright requires them to register and carry papers on them.

As Dan Cadman, former ICE agent and fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told CR, “The federal alien smuggling-harboring-transporting statute, 8 U.S.C.1324, gives state and local police the authority to enforce its provisions. Using good police work, these officers developed probable cause to believe that one illegal alien was unlawfully transporting the others in violation of that statute. That ICE chose instead only to pursue civil deportation proceedings against all of them does not invalidate the lawful stop and investigatory actions of the Pennsylvania police and should not form a basis to suppress the evidence that flowed from their actions.”

But two of the illegal aliens appealed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals claiming that their Fourth Amendment rights were violated because, of course, the trooper asked for papers because of their appearance, in their view. Again, such a lawful stop wouldn’t violate the Fourth Amendment even if they turned out to be Americans, but in this case, they were indeed illegal aliens. As Chris Hajec, director of litigation for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, told CR, “This is a deeply absurd decision. Illegal aliens do not have the right to be in this country. So they do not have the right that citizens have to travel around it freely. No police officer is violating the Fourth Amendment by detaining an illegal alien for a reasonable time.”

The aliens claimed they were detained for too long, longer than a normal traffic stop, and had to sit there without air conditioning. But again, they weren’t detained for the purpose of imprisonment, they were detained for the purpose of handing them over to ICE, which is the purpose of our immigration laws. As the Supreme Court said in Turner v. Williams (1904), “detention or temporary confinement as part of the means necessary to give effect to the exclusion or expulsion was held valid.”

Yet Judge Midge Rendell, wife of former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, went a step further. Not only did she declare the police action a violation of the Fourth Amendment, but she also suggested that it might be subject to the “exclusionary rule,” meaning that evidence obtained through unconstitutional means must be tossed out. “Because petitioners have identified a possible egregious Fourth Amendment violation, we conclude that the [immigration judge] erred in not granting their motion for a hearing to provide them with an opportunity to put forth evidence in support of their claim,” wrote Rendell, joined by another Democrat and a Republican appointee.

To begin with, the exclusionary rule has grown beyond any constitutional parameters over the years. Already in 1980, President Reagan identified it as a lawless practice that needed to be changed. It’s been expanded exponentially since his time. But to apply it to illegal aliens in the context of deportation proceedings is insane. By definition, the laws were designed to ensure that illegal aliens cannot be shielded from detection. It’s not like an American who has the right to be here. Deportation is not criminal punishment and is not subject to those rules.

Incredibly, this same circuit court has now rejected all claims from American citizens in New Jersey being retroactively criminalized for possessing pistol magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, even though they were purchased lawfully. It violates the Second Amendment, the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, and the Art. I Sec. 10 rule barring states from enacting ex post facto laws. Yet Americans have no real rights while the courts create rights for illegal aliens to invade and remain in the country while they are suing law enforcement for enforcing the law.

If nothing is done about judicial supremacy, there won’t be a country left to fight for during the elections. Illegal aliens can sue our law enforcement, but we can’t sue them or protect our own legitimate rights in court. We are strangers in our own country. (For more from the author of “Lawless: Court Rules That Law Enforcement Cannot Enforce Immigration Laws” please click HERE)

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Give Americans the Right to Sue the Pants off Sanctuary Jurisdictions

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Why is it that every single law designed to keep out illegal aliens gets turned on its head and every legal loophole gets magnified and exploited? That is because illegal aliens have tens of thousands of pro bono lawyers to distort the law on their behalf, but the sovereign American citizen has no legal help to enforce the laws that are being ignored or violated. One game-changing idea would be to give certain Americans standing to sue when immigration law is violated.

The current border crisis has its origins in one source: the ability of illegal aliens to sue our state and federal governments for simply enforcing our sovereignty, despite centuries of case law stating they have no standing in our country. Yet whenever Americans harmed by illegal aliens try to get standing to sue against lawlessness that affects their security and the public welfare, they are denied standing. Criminal smugglers can sue our government, yet Kate Steinle’s parents can’t sue San Francisco for harboring the illegal alien who killed their daughter. It’s time to turn the tables.

If the open-borders lobby is going to strip sovereignty from the democratically elected representatives and “pass” its legislation in the courts, then it should die by the courts as well. Illegal aliens are more powerful in the legal world than Americans. But what if we changed that equation? What if we create pressure against local governments that will have to fear lawsuits for not enforcing immigration law and especially for outright thwarting it? What if the federal government could be sued for not enforcing any of the 8 U.S.C. 1182 inadmissibilitiy requirements and letting in health concerns, criminals, public charge risks, and labor-seekers into the country? What if states and localities could be sued for violating 1373 (blocking law enforcement from communicating with ICE) and 1324 (harboring, shielding, and inducing illegal immigration)?

The secret antidote to the open-borders problem is simply to enforce current law. But the only way to do that is to even up the litigation score in this litigious society. Why is it that we barely hear about the daily examples of Americans killed or harmed by illegal aliens? We never hear about the fiscal burden, criminal burden, cultural problems in schools and other community centers. That would all change if there were a private right of action for victims of illegal aliens and other Americans or public officials to sue under the right circumstances. It would create an entire market to seek out whether a specific crime or cost was caused by illegal immigration or a particular illegal immigrant. It would change the narrative back to where it needs to be: protecting the interests of Americans over the aspirations of illegal aliens.

Recently, Sen. Thom Tillis introduced a bill — S. 2059: Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act of 2019 — advertised as doing just that. Conversions might happen on the road to Damascus, but in politics, conversions tend to present themselves on the road to competitive Republican primaries. Tillis was never one to stand for sovereignty, but he now has a primary challenger who has the ability to self-fund, so he is naturally trying to get on the right side of immigration. Conservatives should welcome this change, if it is actually more than just a press release, and demand that Tillis use his prestige with GOP leadership to actually force a vote on this bill.

However, the bill does need some tweaking. As advertised, it offers a private right of action for victims of illegal aliens who were previously released by sanctuary cities to sue the sanctuary jurisdictions. It also withholds some funding from those same jurisdictions. However, there is a problem with the definition of a sanctuary. “A jurisdiction would not be deemed a ‘sanctuary jurisdiction’ based solely on policies where officials do not share information or comply with detainers for illegal immigrants who come forward as a victim or a witness to a criminal offense,” wrote Tillis in a press release.

This will essentially invite numerous cartel and gang members to invoke the victim or witness exception and have the locals cover for them. There is no reason to put this exception into the bill. By definition, anyone arrested and processed in a jail who is an illegal alien should be turned over to ICE. The entire notion that there is a concern of victims of crime not speaking out for fear of deportation is absurd, because we are not talking about local law enforcement informing on people in their houses and on the streets; we are talking about someone arrested for a crime.

If Tillis were committed to making this bill work beyond a campaign press release, he should reintroduce section 2203(C) of the “Goodlatte bill,” which creates this right to sue sanctuaries without this gaping loophole. Also, the Goodlatte bill authorizes the private cause of action if a jurisdiction releases an illegal alien, in violation of a detainer request, who was arrested for a crime. The Tillis bill limits it to those released after being convicted of a crime. So many criminals are never convicted of crimes but are dangerous nonetheless. Why should an illegal alien who is arrested for assault or robbery but never convicted be allowed to remain in this country? We shouldn’t have to land a conviction on an illegal alien in order to comply with immigration law.

Jessica Vaughan, who monitors sanctuary cities for the Center for Immigration Studies, believes that allowing victims of illegal aliens to sue jurisdictions will be a game-changer:

“I have heard over and over again from sheriffs in very different parts of the country that they want to cooperate with ICE and know that it’s the right thing to do,” said Vaughan, “but they are prevented from doing so by concern that taxpayers will have to foot the bill to fight predatory lawsuits from the ACLU and other anti-enforcement advocacy groups. Some sheriffs have told me that the only reason they don’t cooperate is because the county attorney told them that they were afraid of having to pay out sums of money to people who were mistakenly sought by ICE, or because of rulings by judges in other parts of the country (even if not binding on other regions). Yet these same county officials were not afraid of the public outrage at the release of deportable criminal aliens back to communities to re-offend.”

“Allowing families or individuals who are victimized because of sanctuary policies to sue would definitely change the calculation that some of these jurisdictions are making. They should be doing the right thing for the sake of public safety, but if they end up doing the right thing because of fear of lawsuits, that is a game-changer, because right now the legal deck is stacked in favor of the anti-enforcement side.”

Before American taxpayers are forced to pay for the rope to hang themselves, Republicans should stake this election out on the issue of giving American taxpayers and victims of crime as much standing in court as those invading our border. (For more from the author of “Give Americans the Right to Sue the Pants off Sanctuary Jurisdictions” please click HERE)

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Border Patrol Agents in One Sector Apprehended 225 Border-Crossers in a SINGLE MORNING

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Despite a reported drop in large groups of migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S. border, immigration authorities apprehended a group of over 200 attempted border-crossers in New Mexico earlier this week.

According to a press release from U.S. Border Patrol El Paso Sector, agents working around the Antelope Wells port of entry in new Mexico apprehend 225 illegal aliens “in the early morning hours of July 30.” The agency said that the those apprehended were mostly “Central American families and unaccompanied juveniles.”

The Border Patrol sector’s statement says that Border Patrol paramedics screened the group for medical conditions and, after determining that “no member of the group required additional attention,” sent everyone in the group to border stations to be processed. Pictures provided to Blaze Media along with the press release show the large group of border-crossers in Border Patrol custody, their faces blurred.

“Even as temperatures rise to dangerous levels, criminal organizations continue to exploit innocent human lives in order to enhance their illicit gains without regard to the risks associated with the hazardous practice,” the press release explains. “In most cases these smugglers never cross the border themselves in order to avoid apprehension.”

This week’s apprehensions come after acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan told Congress that attempted crossings by large groups were on the decline, saying that only four large groups had been apprehended since the Mexican government beefed up its own immigration enforcement earlier in the summer.

Later that month, McAleenan told Fox News: “In July, we have had groups in [the Rio Grand Valley Sector] have over 100, a few of them. But it’s a completely different scenario than May, when we had 28 large groups and up to 1,000 per group. It was a very different and challenging effort.” (For more from the author of “Border Patrol Agents in One Sector Apprehended 225 Border-Crossers in a Single Morning” please click HERE)

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What ‘Travel Ban’? Trump Admin Extends TPS Amnesty for Syrians in Another Missed Opportunity

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The more the rhetoric on immigration and sovereignty heats up on Twitter, the more things stay the same since Obama … or worse.

Following two decades of record immigration from the Middle East without any ability to vet loyalties to America, President Trump campaigned on a moratorium of immigration from countries with a large presence of terrorism. In the end, he only shut it off from Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Iran, and Sudan, and even then, thanks to the administration’s capitulation to the lower courts, it was watered down several times. Yet, the Left still accuses him of an across-the-board ban on Muslim immigration. Beto O’Rourke said as much last night during the Democrat debate.

In reality, not much has changed since Obama. Yesterday, I warned about the abuse of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and how it has turned into an indefinite amnesty program for people who abused our system, allowing criminals to remain in the country. Well, today, the Trump administration agreed to extend TPS for Syrians, not just for the standard six months, but for 18 months, according to the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff.

In other words, despite the promise to be the first president to finally make Temporary Protected Status, um, temporary, it will now likely remain forever like all the others. It’s already been in place for over seven years, and now that Trump has blinked once – and for such a long extension – it will never be revoked. He did the same with El Salvador, Haiti, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen.

Thus, out of the few remaining countries left from his original promise of a moratorium, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen all have the TPS loophole. What’s next? Is he going to grant TPS to Iran?

Ultimately, the DHS secretary is the one who signs off on this decision, and Kevin McAleenan is clearly not in line with Trump’s campaign promises.

Roughly 7,000 Syrians have been given TPS as of early this year. I’m sure we can rest easy that all of them have been properly vetted and that none of them are like Mustafa Mousab Alowemer, a Syrian refugee who was recently arrested by the FBI for attempting to bomb a church in Pittsburgh.

According to the Congressional Research Service, roughly 417,000 foreign nationals from 10 countries remain here with TPS status. Remember, the longer these people remain in the country under a program that was designed to run no longer than 18 months, the more opportunity they have to adjust their status to a green card. Also, either way, any child born to them is erroneously viewed as an American citizen. Temporary, indeed!

Although Syrian TPS was first offered on March 29, 2012, and should only have applied to those who happened to already be in the country at that date, DHS allowed people to come here all the way up to August 2016 – four years after the designation – to take advantage of it.

This comes as hundreds of thousands of patently illegal DACA amnesty work permits have been renewed under this administration. Even the crazy judge who interfered in the process made it clear that Trump could end it if he issued a proper regulatory change through the Administrative Procedure Act process.

Plus, the administration continues granting over 750,000 of work permits to nearly every illegal alien who comes to our border, even though this policy, much like TPS, is only discretionary even for legitimate asylum applicants.

And we are refusing to close the border to a single country, even to nationals of Ebola-ridden Congo, as a third world country like Rwanda is smart enough to do so.

As if that weren’t enough, Trump is signing what is at least the twelfth budget bill of his presidency that doesn’t have the promised border wall and ICE funding, but spends us into oblivion on everything Democrats want.

“Conservative” “figures,” as they remain obsessed with focusing on internal Democrat politics, are missing the point. The president has some good instincts and wants some of the changes he promised. But his administration is full of swamp creatures with the status quo mindset, and certainly nobody in congressional leadership will pull him to the Right. The gravitational pull in Washington is only to the Left. Absent a firestorm from the notorious conservatives on Fox or on radio, the president will inevitably, however reluctantly, maintain swamp creatures like Kevin McAleenan and sign off on the same liberal policies.

The swamp will not be drained on its own. As conservatives in public policy, we are our best advocates – we are our only advocates. The president will hear 101 absurd arguments from the lawyers at the DHS, the DOJ, and in the Office of Legal Counsel about how everything the Left wants is legal and everything we call for is unlawful or unfeasible. This happens every day. There are a few brave souls in the administration who try to push our agenda, but rather than getting air cover from outside “conservative movement” figures respected by the president, the guns lie silent and the swamp machine overwhelms their ragtag forces.

Thus, we do the president no favors by standing down precisely when we need to stand up and be counted. He will follow if conservatives lead, but he will not lead the fight if conservatives are focused on everything but what they can actually influence.

Conservative commentators are focused on the election, even though it’s still just the Democrat primary. But why do we care about elections? Well, presumably, we care because of the policy outcomes achieved by those elections. There is still another year and a half with Republican control of the entire executive branch, where these figures have the opportunity to influence numerous important decisions every day. Let’s live in the here and now.

Moreover, what of the next election and the subsequent four years? If we are now content with Republican presidents gratuitously continuing liberal policies that can be countermanded by simple administrative actions, then the Democrats have already won. There is no greater victory for them than having their policies secured, irrespective of the outcome at the ballot box in November. (For more from the author of “What ‘Travel Ban’? Trump Admin Extends TPS Amnesty for Syrians in Another Missed Opportunity” please click HERE)

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Illegal Alien, Wrongly Given Temporary Amnesty, Arrested for Molesting Minor

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Another child was allegedly sexually assaulted multiple times by a Central American illegal alien who should have been deported, had our laws been properly implemented.

Yesterday, Customs and Border Protection announced that the U.S. Marshals’ Fugitive Task Force, working with a local Border Patrol agent, arrested an illegal alien from El Salvador in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on three counts of first-degree rape against a child between 2014 and 2016.

While every illegal alien crime, by definition, is avoidable if we had the proper border and interior enforcement in place, this case has an extra wrinkle to it. Andres Fuentes-Castro, 44, according to CBP, was encountered by U.S. Border Patrol-New Orleans Sector agents in 2007 during a traffic stop in Baton Rouge. He would have been deported and this alleged sexual assault would never have occurred, but Border Patrol found he was given Temporary Protected Status (TPS) as a Salvadoran national under the El Salvador TPS program. His status later expired in 2010 and was not renewed, rendering him a fugitive alien for nine years for not departing the country.

If our laws were functioning the way Congress designed them, Fuentes-Castro would have been deported in 2007. TPS was not designed to be an amnesty program for illegal aliens; it was designed as a sixth-month temporary stay for those who are here legally but can’t return home because of an intervening natural disaster.

El Salvador was granted that status in 2001 because of an earthquake. That status, pursuant to law, should have been terminated within six months or at most after 18 months of extensions under “extraordinary circumstances” (clearly lacking here). It should have applied only to very few people who happened to be in the country traveling during the earthquake. But instead, it was handed out to over 200,000 Salvadorans, far more than any other TPS-designated country, and is still being used 18 years later!

Why? Because it has been handed out to illegal aliens in the country, a complete debasement of the 1990 law Congress passed. The reason why El Salvador has the most TPS recipients is not because there happened to be 200,000 Salvadorans traveling on tourist visas visiting Disney World on January 13, 2001, when the earthquake struck. It is because that is the TPS-designated country with the most illegal aliens.

In 2007, Fuentes-Castro should never have had this status as an illegal alien, certainly not six years after the earthquake. But a number of criminals and particularly MS-13 members (who largely come from El Salvador) have been allowed to remain in the country against statute and commit countless avoidable crimes. Previous administrations violated the plain letter of the law. President Trump vowed to change this, and indeed ended TPS for certain countries, but has continued it for El Salvador at the behest of an extraordinarily lawless court ruling that defies multiple statutes, including one stripping the courts of jurisdiction over the issue.

Rather than clamping down on TPS abuse, Republicans and Democrats in Congress as well as some in the administration are seeking to expand this policy to Venezuela at a time when illegal immigration is increasing from there.

Also in Louisiana, on the same day, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry announced that another illegal alien was arrested on child sex charges. ICE has placed a detainer on Tomas Gabriel Chox-Lopez, who was caught in a child porn sting by state and federal law enforcement and charged with seven counts of possessing pornography involving juveniles under the age of 13.

Earlier this year, Miguel Martinez, an illegal alien who had previously been deported in 2005, was arrested in Louisiana on 100 counts of possession of pornography involving juveniles under the age of 13 years old, one count of production under the age of 13, and one count of sexual battery of a juvenile under the age of 13.

Often, illegal aliens remain in this country and are not deported after their first interaction with law enforcement because of sanctuary cities. In the case of Andres Fuentes-Castro, it was because of lawless federal executive policies that are against statute. Enforcing existing laws would go a long way in preventing rampant horrible crimes like this. Is it too much to ask that we not import other countries’ child molesters? (For more from the author of “Illegal Alien, Wrongly Given Temporary Amnesty, Arrested for Molesting Minor” please click HERE)

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